The biting wind, a familiar companion in Gainesville, still raked across the frozen fields, but it carried a different scent now. Not just the crisp promise of snow or the earthy musk of sheep, but something metallic, acrid, a phantom tang that clung to the air long after the fires had died. A year had spun its cycle since Fern Dazorn, a man carved from apathy and then reforged in ambition, had vanished into the unknown, chasing a whisper of immortality. The village remembered him, or rather, remembered the shell he had been, the shadow he had become.
Derrick Dazorn, his frame still formidable even as the years etched deeper lines onto his face, stood by the window of his modest home. His gaze, usually sharp and commanding, softened at the sight of the barren landscape. The sheep, their wool thick against the cold, huddled closer to the barn. He saw them, but his mind drifted. He saw a younger Fern, all gangly limbs and unburdened sighs, sprawled by the hearth, a half-eaten apple forgotten beside him. He saw the fire in his son's eyes, not the hearth's glow, but a nascent, terrifying inferno that had consumed him.
A knock, sharp and insistent, broke his reverie.
"Derrick? You in there?" Layla Frostbite's voice, clear as ice, cut through the quiet.
He turned, the familiar weight of worry settling on his shoulders. "Come in, Layla. Door's open."
She entered, her breath pluming white in the frigid air she brought with her. Her fur-lined cloak seemed to absorb the meager light, her eyes, usually a steely blue, held a flicker of unease. "The patrols are back. No sign. Again." She pulled her cloak tighter, the rustle of fabric the only sound for a moment.
Derrick merely grunted. He had expected nothing less. Weeks bled into months, months into a year. The trail had gone cold, then frozen solid. "He's gone, Layla. Long gone."
"Is he?" Her voice held a challenge. "You truly believe that? After all he became?" She stepped closer, her boots crunching softly on the wooden floor. "He wasn't just some lost shepherd, Derrick. He was… something else. Something powerful. And hungry."
"He was my son," Derrick rumbled, his voice low, a tremor beneath the surface. "And he chased a ghost. A fool's errand."
"A ghost that gave him the power to burn a mountain to ash, a ghost that twisted his mind until he saw enemies in every shadow," Layla countered, her hand instinctively going to the hilt of the small dagger she always carried. "He wasn't chasing a ghost, Derrick. He became one."
Derrick clenched his jaw. "What do you want me to say, Layla? That I believe he's out there, a monster, waiting to return? Or that I pray for his peaceful end?" He turned fully to her, his gaze intense. "The boy I knew is gone. The man he became… that thing… I don't know it."
"But you feel it, don't you?" Layla's eyes narrowed. "That gnawing unease. The way the sheep sometimes shy from nothing. The way the air tastes before a storm. He changed this place. He left a mark."
A long silence stretched between them, punctuated only by the crackle of the fire.
"I need to go," Layla finally said, her voice softer, almost a whisper. "I need to find out. I can't just… wait."
"Where will you go?" Derrick asked, his voice rough. "The world beyond Gainesville is vast, Layla. And dangerous. More dangerous now than ever, if what Fern sought is truly out there."
"I don't know," she admitted, a rare vulnerability in her tone. "But I have to try. For all of us. Before whatever he unleashed, whatever he became, comes back here."
Derrick looked at her, truly looked at her. Her resolve, her quiet strength, it reminded him of his own youth, a time before the burdens of fatherhood and the crushing weight of loss. He knew he couldn't stop her. "Be careful, girl."
"I always am." She nodded once, a curt, determined gesture, and then she was gone, swallowed by the swirling snow outside.
Weeks later, the snow began to melt, reluctantly yielding to the tentative warmth of spring. The village slowly exhaled, believing the worst was behind them. They were wrong.
It started subtly. A shepherd found his flock scattered, not by wolves, but by something… else. Tracks, too large for any known beast, too strange for any human. Then, the whispers. Strange lights in the distant peaks, a faint, acrid smell carried on the wind, just like the one Derrick had remembered.
Derrick felt it first, a prickling sensation on his skin, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. He was mending a fence, his calloused hands working the rough wood, when a shadow, too large, too swift, passed overhead. He looked up, his heart hammering against his ribs. Nothing. Only the vast, empty sky. But the feeling persisted.
That night, a bloodcurdling scream tore through the pre-dawn quiet. It wasn't human. It was a sound ripped from the very fabric of nightmare, a guttural roar mixed with a shriek of agony. Derrick snatched his axe, his senses screaming. He burst from his home, the cold air biting at his lungs, and ran towards the sound.
He found it near the edge of the forest, where the ancient pines stood like silent sentinels. A scene of utter devastation. Trees were splintered, earth gouged as if by colossal claws. And there, amidst the chaos, a creature.
It was immense, its form shifting and indistinct in the gloom, but he saw the raw power emanating from it, a malevolent aura that made the hairs on his arms stand on end. Its eyes, two burning embers in the shadowy mass, fixed on him.
"Fern?" Derrick's voice was a ragged whisper, the name tasting like ash in his mouth.
The creature let out a low, rumbling growl that vibrated through the ground. It shifted, its form coalescing, stretching, becoming something vaguely humanoid, but twisted, monstrous. Skin like hardened magma, eyes that burned with an internal fire, and limbs that seemed to crackle with raw energy.
"Father," the voice that emerged was a grotesque parody of Fern's, deep and resonant, yet laced with a chilling echo, as if many voices spoke at once. "You remember me?"