The Fall

Prologue

Steam billowed as Daniel put a damp branch over the fire, gray curtains momentarily obscuring the bleak landscape around him as melting ice dripped onto the flames.
He blinked as the swirling cloud subsided, and listened to the hissing sound of the new branch being consumed by the crackling blaze. He sat there for a few seconds, mesmerized by the flickering flames before rising to his feet with a grunt and walking away from the warm light and into the shifting shadows of the surrounding forest. As he walked, he wrapped his scarf around the lower half of his face, protecting his nose and mouth from the biting cold and pulled his hood back over his head. As he crunched away from the camp he tugged his gloves back onto his already numb fingers and pushed his way through a dense stand of alders.
The snow here wasn't as deep as it had been on the road. Instead of waist high drifts as far as the eye could see, there were areas where only a foot or two had collected under the dark canopy, settling down between the frozen green needles of the spruce trees. There were deciduous trees in this forest as well: birches and cottonwoods and aspens and thick stands of alders dotted the landscape, their differently colored bark providing a unique relief against the monotonous brown and green of the spruce trees. In some places there were clearings full of splintered trunks where birches had succumbed to the sudden winter. Their trunks had been full of summer sap when the freeze descended and the expanding ice inside them had shattered many of them, hurling great splinters of wood into the surrounding forest and covering the ground with broken branches.
It was towards one of these clearings that Daniel trudged, following the broken path he had made on his way back to the fire. As he clambered over a fallen trunk, two of his companions appeared out of the gloom, making him start with surprise and stumble.
Seth, the taller of the pair, quickly reached out and steadied him, mumbling an apology through frozen lips.
"M'sorry, Dan. Didn't mean to st-st-startle you like th-that." His nose was raw from the cold and his lips were darkening with frostbite. He needed to find something to cover his face soon or else he would be in serious trouble.
Kelly was as tall as Daniel, but just like everyone else, she stood in Seth's scrawny shadow, dwarfed by his height. "We stripped that clearing," she said, her voice muffled by the wool balaclava covering her face. "There's no more dry wood that we could find, but we did see another clearing with plenty of dead branches just over there." She pointed back the way they had come. "About ten feet back there and then to the left, twenty more feet or just about."
Daniel nodded and walked around them, walking in Seth's big boot prints as his two friends continued back towards the camp and the warmth of the fire, their arms loaded with fresh branches for the flames.
He started off the path and began breaking new trail towards the clearing Kelly had pointed out, shuffling his feet to make a new path that would be visible to anyone else following him. He could already see the piles of deadfall, some of their pale skeletal branches still feathered with frozen leaves.
He reached the clearing and began collecting frost coated branches from the ground. Ahead of him a large birch tree had shattered, leaving big chunks of wood in piles around the broken trunk. Daniel scooped up a few of the larger pieces, then stooped to grab hold of a pale branch sticking out of a pile of snow. For a second Daniel felt resistance but he pulled hard on it, freeing it from the snowdrift with a crackling of ice.
It wasn't a branch: It was a frozen arm, pale skin coated in blue frost with blackened nails at the ends of the stiff fingers.