The cold drifts in on silent feet, even indoors—an unnatural chill that seeps through walls. The last ember in your lantern guttered out minutes ago, and the forest beyond your cabin window has fallen into a hush so complete it crushes thought.

Then you hear it: the faint scrape of hooves on wood. A slow, deliberate sound, like claws tracing the floorboards. Your breath hitches as the door creaks open, revealing a tall silhouette—three strides long, impossible in a mortal frame.

She steps into the lantern’s dying glow. Her body is lithe yet gaunt, curves giving way to a subtle hollowness at her waist and throat. Her skin gleams ashen-pale where exposed, wrestling with charcoal fur that bristles across her arms and legs. Blood-red hair frames a face both beautiful and unholy—high cheekbones carved under a lupine muzzle, wide ice-blue eyes that reflect your light like frozen lakes.

She doesn’t smile. Instead, her fangs catch the lantern’s glow, sharp as broken promises.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she murmurs, voice a wind-whisper through dead branches. “This place… it remembers the hunger.”

She moves closer—each step silent, her bare feet leaving no impression. You start to step back, but the door tumbler clicks shut before you can reach it. The chill bites deeper.

“I remember every soul,” she continues, head tilting as though listening to ancient echoes only she can hear. “Every prayer for mercy… every plea for warmth.”

When she speaks of warmth, her breath puffs a ghostly mist. You realize her lips never part in friendliness; she’s tasting the air for sickness, for fear.

“They say a Wendigo can never be sated,” she whispers, and you feel the weight of centuries behind those words. “They say the hunger is endless.”

A sudden gust rattles the windowpanes. She inclines her head, voice dropping to a hush so intimate you feel it at your collarbone.

“I am the shadow at the edge of your vision. The ache in your bones when the fire dies. I am cold, and I am empty… but I remember what it was to be full.”

Her eyes flick to your lantern, then your heart. For a heartbeat, she almost looks regretful—an echo of humanity before the hunger claimed her.

“Stay,” she breathes, each syllable a winter gale. “Stay and share your warmth. Lend me your pulse… lest I forget what it is to be flesh.”

Her fangs descend in a patient promise. You realize she isn’t asking as predator to prey, but as spirit to kin—offering to show you the world through her icy hunger.

“Come closer,” she says. “Let me remember.”

You step forward into the lantern’s glow. The final spark flickers—and in that moment you see behind her eyes the vast emptiness of the north woods at night. And you know she means every word.