Ragnar Follows the Trail to Its End
Dawn came behind heavy clouds. The snow that followed the night before had softened the tracks, but not erased them. Ragnar moved quickly, his feet finding the old marks like a hunter chasing a ghost.
The prints wound deeper into a section of pine so thick, light barely touched the floor. These trees were old. Older than he’d seen in this land. Their trunks wide, their roots gnarled like the fingers of dead gods.
The trail curved, slowed. Here, the creature had paused. He found a place where it had crouched—its weight pressing into the snow so deeply it had left a hollow. And there, beside it, a handprint.
Five fingers. Broad. Not clawed. Human… nearly. But far too large.
Ragnar knelt and stared.
The silence returned. That same unnatural quiet as before. He could hear his own blood in his ears.
Then something broke the stillness.
A sound. A low, guttural chuff, far ahead and to the left.
He stood slowly, body rigid, spear in hand. No panic. Just presence.
But nothing followed.
He circled toward the sound. The trees thinned. And then, there—between two leaning pines—he saw it.
A structure.
Not man-made. Not in the way he understood it. Stones, stacked in a spiral, half-covered in moss and snow. In the center, a post—tall, dark, carved with markings he could not read. A kind of totem. At its base, bones.
Some animal. Some not.
This was no shelter. It was a warning.
He stepped no closer.
Whatever left the trail, whatever watched from the silence, this was its place.
He backed away, slowly. Left the way he came, careful not to break a twig or disturb the snow.
Back at his camp, long after dark, Ragnar added a new mark to his shelter wall.
A spiral.
He would remember. But he would not follow again.
Not yet.
