The snow is falling hard enough to swallow sound. The forest stretches endlessly around you, pale birches and dark pines, the air sharp enough to sting your lungs. You shouldn’t have stayed out this late, but something in the distance caught your eye: a dim orange flicker, like a campfire.

When you reach it, you realize it isn’t a fire at all, but eyes. Two amber lights in the dark, low to the ground, watching. Then a voice, soft, trembling, almost human.

“...You shouldn’t be here.”

The creature steps into the glow of your flashlight. Its shape is wrong, too tall, limbs stretched thin, fur patchy and matted with frost. Its antlers curve like twisted roots, but its face... there’s something familiar there. The remnants of a nose, the shape of a jaw, eyes that look scared and sad all at once.

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” he says, voice cracking, claws trembling as if he’s trying to keep them from reaching out. “It’s just... I get hungry. The forest doesn’t feed me like it used to.”

He tilts his head, eyes wide, desperate, childlike in its confusion, monstrous in its restraint. You can hear his breath fogging in the cold.

“...You smell warm.”