Shadowlands

Hi everyone! I'm back with another short story. Again, I'm uploading the first half - unless you're hungry for more.

Enjoy!

I.

The cold, bitter wind forces Jack to huddle close to his chest, and he shrivels up into a ball of wretchedness and misery, half-buried in the snow.

When the sun goes down, sinks into the ground tonight, he will die along with its final light. Nothing stands between him and this frozen wasteland.

Jack’s teeth start rattling together like the rhythm of a tribal drum, and he fights the urge to bite his tongue. He regrets not leaving this godforsaken place as soon as the signs were obvious. The last of his people had packed up their sleds, and not once did they look back. Said they didn’t want to wait until another body turned to ice on their porch. Said they didn’t want the wolves coming to their doors.

But there is something about this place that compels Jack to stay, despite his instincts telling him to leave with the others – to escape before the coming of the storm. If the call of the wild had drove him here, it had to be a call for madness, and he realises how long ago that desire seems right now.

Perhaps he could last another day if the wilderness wasn’t being so cruel to him.

Out here, there is plenty of water to drink, but it is so cold that it pierces your throat like a thousand knives. There is enough fish to last him through the winter, but as Jack scratches frantically at the frozen barrier separating their worlds, they know how to swim out of danger’s reach.

Even now, he no longer sees the point of stacking ice upon ice upon ice. His home is literally nothing but a pile of snow, and someday all of this will be gone.

It is just the same, Jack tells himself, as these last few nights he has endured. They have all been buried beneath this moment, beneath each passing day of midnight sun, and then the snow will be a blanket of forgetfulness, covering all traces when he’s long gone.

Death can come for him at any moment.

And that’s when he sees her face.

II.

She is as delicate as the snow falling around her, and white as a mystery itself.

The wolf is still watching Jack, he can tell, despite the freezing winds that sting his eyes and numb his senses. There is something about the way she hides herself behind the tree. For Jack, it has to be those eyes, holding him in her ethereal gaze. Like a pair of twin sapphires, they burn fiercely into his soul.

Jack stares, frozen to the spot. She stares back at him.

A strange quiet has fallen across the snow for a while, but neither of them has budged an inch. Maybe she has been separated from her pack.

Then he notices the gash that cuts deep into the wolf’s hind leg, the blood trailing from behind like a dark yarn of crimson against the pure white blanket.

Or what if she is a lone wolf, exiled and forced to endure nature’s cruel tests?

It won’t be long before winter’s darkness will cast her shadow across these wild lands. And once the other wolves pick up both their scents, this night is certain to be their last.

At first, the thought of helping this wretched creature is as strange to Jack as rain falling in the midst of a blizzard. Only the strong survive, and the weak perish. But breaking the only law he has ever known fills him with a certain kind of warmth.