The frost came without warning — in the height of summer, when peasants were harvesting rye. First came the smell of snow and rot, birds froze mid-flight, then the sky tore open with a crimson scar. Red riders burst from nothingness like blood seeping through a cut in the fabric of the world. Their skeletal steeds never touched the ground, leaving trails of frost and dead grass. A forward scout, armored in plates resembling flayed ribcages, raised his hand — and the first beam of cold turned a shepherd at the well into an ice statue, preserving forever his expression of bewilderment.

The village tried to resist. The blacksmith ran out with his hammer, a mother grabbed her daughter's hand — but the Hunt knew no mercy. Imlerith swung his mace, and the shockwave demolished three houses along with their inhabitants, turning flesh and wood into a single pulp of splinters and bone. Caranthir stood on the hill, spinning his staff with the glowing orb, opening portals from which the hounds poured forth — spectral beasts with burning eyes, whose howl ruptured eardrums. Children hid in barns, elders prayed — but prayers froze on their lips, turning into icicles. Eredin watched from his mount, the crown of spikes on his skull-helmet casting long shadows, and the King of the Wild Hunt merely nodded when the last house was consumed by flames that burned with cold rather than heat.

When the red trail vanished from the sky, only gnawed foundations and ice statues remained — a woman with a child in her arms, frozen mid-flight, the shepherd at the well, the blacksmith with raised hammer. No bodies for burial, no witnesses to tell the tale. Only the crows that arrived later found something edible in the ice. The Wild Hunt left no survivors not out of cruelty — cruelty requires feeling. They left emptiness, because the dead do not scream for vengeance, do not pass warnings, do not weep in dreams. And those few who saw the red trail and lived — they were no longer people, merely vessels filled with ice, in which the glowing eyes of the riders were reflected forever.