The concept of “first light” is a lie. A beautiful, poetic lie told by people who have never had to crawl out of a warm bedroll onto a cold stone floor before the sun has had the decency to show up for work. Kaelen, of course, was already up, moving with a quiet efficiency that was both impressive and deeply annoying. Argent, his warhorse, was a magnificent beast—a dapple charger with eyes that held more intelligence than some people I knew back home. He stood patiently as Kaelen checked his saddle, every inch the noble steed.

  Then there was my ride.

  Steve the wonder pony was, to put it kindly, an acquired taste. He was short, stocky, and had a coat the color of muddy dishwater. His primary motivations in life appeared to be finding inconveniently placed patches of weeds and passing gas at the most inopportune moments. As I approached, he turned his head, gave me a look of profound indifference, and went back to nibbling on the corner of his saddle blanket.

  “He has spirit,” Kaelen had said. I was beginning to think Steve’s ‘spirit’ was that of a grumpy old man who’d been reincarnated as an equine and was deeply unhappy about it.

  Bartholomew was perched regally on the front of Kaelen’s saddle, wrapped in a small oilskin cloth to protect him from the morning dew. He looked utterly disdainful of the entire situation.

  “Must we? The indignity of travel is matched only by its sheer tedium.”

  “We must,” Kaelen said, his voice a low rumble in the pre-dawn quiet. He swung himself onto Argent’s back with a fluid grace that I, in my stiff leather armor, could only dream of. I, on the other hand, managed to land on Steve’s back with all the elegance of a sack of potatoes. Steve let out a disgruntled sigh that fogged in the crisp air.

  We set off, leaving the relative safety of the small village behind. The road split around the inn. The main thoroughfare continued south, wide and well-trodden. Our path was little more than a goat track, snaking its way up the steep side of the valley. For the first few hours, the journey was almost pleasant. The air was cool, smelling of damp earth and pine, and the rising sun painted the sky in shades of bruised purple and soft orange.

  “I must confess,” Bartholomew stated, his voice carrying easily back to me, “this incessant jostling is doing little for my digestion. One would think a creature of Argent’s supposed breeding would possess a smoother gait.”

  “He is a warhorse, Bartholomew, not a pleasure barge,” Kaelen replied without turning.

  “A distinction without a difference when one’s breakfast is threatening a mutiny,” the cat grumbled.I patted Steve’s thick neck.

  “You hear that, buddy? You’re doing great. No mutinous breakfasts over here.” Steve responded with a twitch of his ear and a powerful, trumpeting fart that probably wasn’t just a fart. I didn’t bother to look.Bartholomew’s head snapped around, his green eyes wide with offense.

  “Good heavens! Was that strictly necessary?”

  “He’s expressing himself, Bartholomew,” I said sweetly. “It’s a communications thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  As we climbed, the world began to change. The lush, vibrant green of the lowlands faded, replaced by hardy scrub brush and rock. The trees became stunted, gnarled pines that clung to the mountainside like desperate old men. The path grew even narrower, and Steve took to periodically trying to scrape my leg against the rock face, a game I was not enjoying. The air grew thinner, colder. I could see my breath now, a constant plume in front of my face.

  “So, these amenable woods we’re heading for,” I called out to Kaelen, my voice a little breathless from the altitude. “What kind of allies are we talking about? Fuzzy, Ewok-type creatures? Wise old tree-people?”

  “The Sylvan are an ancient race,” Kaelen explained, his eyes scanning the terrain ahead. “They value balance above all else.”

  “A delightful oversimplification,” Bartholomew sniffed. “He makes them sound like benevolent gardeners. The Sylvan are fickle, territorial, and possess a form of magic so alien it would curdle your already simplistic understanding of reality. They might aid us, or they might decide we are a blight and turn our bones into fertilizer for a particularly stubborn patch of moss. It is, as you humans say, a coin toss.”

  “Great. Wonderful. So our best-case scenario is avoiding things that want to eat us on the road, only to be mulched by sentient plants. My five-year plan is really coming together,” I muttered.

  The first snowflake landed on my glove. I stared at it, a perfect, tiny crystal that melted almost instantly. Then another landed on Steve’s mane. And another on my nose. Within minutes, a gentle flurry had transformed into a driving curtain of white.

  “Snow?” I shouted over the rising wind. “It’s late spring!”

  “The mountains do not heed the calendars of men, Paige!” Kaelen called back, his voice strained. The wind was a physical force now, howling down the pass and trying to tear the cloak from my shoulders. It carried the snow sideways, stinging my exposed cheeks.

  The path, already treacherous, became a nightmare. The snow covered loose rocks and hid patches of ice. Steve, for all his faults, was sure-footed, his pony-sized hooves finding purchase where Argent’s larger ones sometimes slipped. We slowed to a crawl, a miserable, frozen procession against a world that had turned entirely to white and gray. My confidence, already a flimsy construct, evaporated. This was a survival exercise I hadn’t studied for.

  I couldn’t feel my toes. My hands, clenched on the reins, were numb claws. The world had shrunk to the sight of Argent’s gray tail swishing in the blizzard ahead of me and the sound of my own chattering teeth. This was it. Getting frozen solid on the side of a mountain before ever even seeing a swamp monster. It felt like a cosmic ripoff.

  Just as I was composing a truly scathing mental complaint to the universe, Kaelen’s voice cut through the gale.

  “Here! An overhang! We can take shelter!”

  He guided Argent off the path toward a dark slash in the rock face I hadn’t even seen. I urged Steve to follow, the pony’s weary steps crunching in the rapidly deepening snow. The shelter was a shallow cave, more of a deep scoop out of the mountain, but it was enough to break the wind. The sudden silence, after the constant roar, was almost deafening.

  Kaelen dismounted, his movements stiff with cold, and immediately set to work, pulling blankets from our packs. Bartholomew leaped from the saddle and began shaking himself vigorously, sending a spray of melted snow in every direction.

  “Utterly barbaric,” he declared, his fur puffed out to twice its normal size. “My coat may not recover from this meteorological effrontery.”

  I slid off Steve, my legs buckling as they hit the ground. I stumbled against the cold rock wall, every muscle screaming in protest. Kaelen was there in an instant, wrapping a thick wool blanket around my shoulders. The rough fabric was the most wonderful thing I had ever felt.

  “We’ll make a fire,” he said, his expression grim as he peered out at the swirling white vortex. “We’ll wait it out here.”

  I huddled into the blanket, watching as he began to search for dry tinder in the sheltered corners of the cave. My previous bravado felt a thousand miles away. All I had left was the cold, the exhaustion, and a bone-deep sense of being utterly, hopelessly out of place.

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  “You know,” I said, my voice hoarse, “for a main event, this blizzard is a little lacking in giant, slavering jaws.”Kaelen paused, looking over his shoulder at me. A faint, tired smile touched his lips, gone almost as soon as it appeared.

  “Patience, Paige,” he said, his voice a low counterpoint to the howling wind. “The night in these mountains is long, and we are not the only ones seeking shelter.”

  His words hung in the air, colder than the wind snatching at the cave’s entrance. I watched him, his profile stark and serious in the growing dusk. He wasn’t trying to be dramatic; it was a simple statement of fact, as casual as a weather forecast predicting a chance of death. He knelt, his movements economical and precise, coaxing a tiny ember to life from a piece of flint and steel I hadn’t even known he was carrying. With a few slivers of dry bark and a bit of carefully guarded moss, a fragile flame flickered, casting our shadows long and dancing against the stone.

  The fire grew with a greedy crackle, a defiant orange heart against the oppressive gray of our shelter. The warmth that began to seep into my bones was so profound, so utterly welcome, it felt like a physical presence. I edged closer, holding my hands out to the flames as if in prayer.

  Bartholomew, having finally groomed his damp fur to a state of fluffy indignation, padded over and settled himself on a spare blanket near the fire, a prim sphere of gray fluff.

  “An adequate, if rustic, solution,” he conceded, tucking his paws beneath him. “Though the smoke does threaten to compromise the subtle highlights of my coat. One must suffer for survival, I suppose.”I managed a weak smile.

  “Tough life, Bart.”

  We ate in near silence, chewing on dried meat that tasted like salted leather and hard biscuits that could have been used as paving stones. But with the fire, it was a feast. The wind still screamed outside, a tormented beast trying to claw its way in, but its power felt diminished, held at bay by our small circle of light and warmth. As the last of the light failed, the world beyond our cave became a formless, roaring darkness.

  It was then I heard it. A high, mournful cry that wove itself into the gale’s symphony. It was long and drawn out, a thread of sound so lonely it made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  “What was that?” I whispered, my eyes darting toward the darkness.

  Kaelen didn’t look up from sharpening his blade by the firelight, the rhythmic shing-shing-shing of stone on steel a strangely comforting sound.

  “Wolves,” he said simply. “They’re hunting. The storm makes the deer careless.”

  “Right. Wolves. Of course. Because why settle for a simple blizzard when you can have a deluxe blizzard package with bonus predators?” My attempt at sarcasm fell flat, my voice tight with a fear that was anything but funny.

  “They won’t bother us,” Kaelen stated, his confidence a shield I desperately wanted to hide behind. “The fire will keep them away. They fear it more than they hunger.”

  He made it sound so simple. I huddled deeper into my blanket, pulling my knees to my chest. The firelight threw Kaelen’s shadow onto the rock wall behind him, turning him into a giant, a legendary guardian from the fantasy novels I used to read in my climate-controlled apartment. Here, he was just a man. A very capable, very serious man who was the only thing standing between me and a very medieval death. Exhaustion finally began to win its long war against my adrenaline, and my eyelids grew heavy. The howling of the wolves and the roar of the wind blurred into a single, droning lullaby, and I slept.

  I woke to a different sound. A frantic stamping and a low, nervous whicker from the back of the cave where we’d tethered Argent and Steve. The fire had burned down to a bed of glowing, pulsing embers, casting a faint red light over the scene. I blinked, my mind still thick with sleep, and opened my mouth to ask Kaelen what was wrong.

  Before a single sound could escape, a hand clamped over my mouth. It was swift, firm, and utterly silent. My heart leaped into my throat with a panicked jolt. I thrashed for a second before I saw Kaelen’s eyes, wide and urgent in the dim light, inches from my own. He had his sword in his other hand, the polished steel gathering the faint glow of the coals. He put a finger to his lips, then slowly, deliberately, removed his hand from my mouth. He pointed toward the cave entrance.

  I held my breath, straining my ears. Over the sound of my own blood pounding in my head, I heard a new noise. A heavy, shuffling step just outside. A deep, guttural snuffling. And a smell. A thick, musky odor of damp fur, wet earth, and old meat.

  A shadow fell over the entrance, so vast it blocked out the swirling snow, plunging our shelter into near-total darkness. A massive shape, blacker than the night, filled the opening. It paused there, a silhouette of immense power. A huge, shaggy head lifted, and a wet nose twitched, testing the air. A bear. Not a cute, cartoonish bear from a national park PSA, but a creature of primal force, a walking mountain of muscle and claw. It was so close I could hear the wet rasp of its breath.

  Every survival instinct I didn’t know I had screamed at me to run, to scream, to do something. But Kaelen’s presence beside me, as still and solid as the mountain itself, kept me frozen. He was a statue carved from tension, his knuckles white on the hilt of his sword, but he made no move to attack. We were intruders in its world, and any sudden movement would be a challenge. Steve let out another terrified snort, and the great head turned slightly. For a heart-stopping eternity, I was sure it would come in, that this cramped space would become a tomb.

  “This is our home tonight, brother bear,” Kaelen said calmly, as though claiming a table in a pub.

  Then, with another low grunt, the shadow shifted. The bear ambled past the entrance, its claws scraping audibly on the rock outside. The hulking shape disappeared, and the swirling snow was once again visible. We waited, listening to the heavy footsteps fade into the storm until there was nothing but the wind again.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. It came out as a ragged, shaking sob. Kaelen’s hand rested on my shoulder for a moment, a brief, grounding touch. “It’s gone,” he murmured, his voice barely a whisper. “Just seeking shelter, like us.”

  I nodded, unable to speak. Sleep seemed impossible now, but my body betrayed me. The sheer, overwhelming terror had been as draining as a full day’s trek, and I slumped back against the rock, falling into a fitful, dreamless doze.

  When I woke again, it was to silence. Not the brief lull between gusts, but a deep, profound quiet that felt like the world was holding its breath. The fire was dead, a pile of gray ash. A soft, blue-white light filtered into the cave, beautiful and ethereal.

  “Morning,” Kaelen said. He was already awake, packing a saddlebag.

  “The storm’s over?” I sat up, my entire body a symphony of aches.

  “It is.”Bartholomew stretched with a groan that was far too human for a cat.

  “Ah, the blessed stillness. It appears we have survived the meteorological tantrum. I, for one, demand a celebratory breakfast of smoked salmon.”

  I pushed myself to my feet and stumbled toward the entrance, eager for a lungful of fresh air. I stopped short. Where the maelstrom had been, there was now a solid, seamless wall of white. The snow had drifted up, sealing the mouth of the cave completely. The blue light I’d seen was the sun filtering through several feet of packed snow. Bartholomew padded up beside me, peered at the snow wall, and let out a sigh of pure, theatrical despair.

  “A tomb,” he declared. “A frigid, alabaster sepulcher. To be felled not by dragon nor dark sorcery, but by an excess of precipitation. The indignity is unbearable.”

  We weren’t sheltered anymore. We were buried.

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I breathed. “And I have really got to pee.”Kaelen gestured to a secluded corner of the cave without speaking and continued readying the horses. At least his way would be warmer.

  When I returned, I stared at the wall of snow again, unsure what to do. Kaelen just walked past me, picking up the shallow metal plates we used for eating. He handed me one.

  “No point complaining,” he said, his expression as determined as ever as he faced the wall of snow. “We’ll just have to dig.”