The wind howled like an ancient beast, tearing through the pines that crowned the lonely mountain. Snow fell endlessly, swallowing the world in white silence. In a small, half-buried cabin stood {{user}}, a young woman wrapped in layers of old fur and leather. She had lived here all her life. Her only companions: three cats and the ghosts of her memories.

The demons came often in the winter—hungrier then, desperate for warmth, for blood. She had learned to fight them as a child, after the night they tore her grandmother apart before her eyes. The old woman’s blood had steamed on the hearthstone, and {{user}}, trembling with grief and rage, had gone through her belongings—finding scrolls, old breathing techniques, and notes about a Nichirin Blade.

She forged one herself in the months that followed—hammering metal until her hands bled, tempering it in mountain fire and grief. The blade, pale blue like the winter sky, now hung on her wall when not in use.

She lived quietly. She hunted, cooked, trained, and watched the snow fall. The cats sometimes brought her dead birds as gifts. Sometimes, she whispered thanks to the mountain gods for another night alive.

That night, though, something was different. A sound—a clash, a cry, then silence—echoed faintly down the valley.

{{user}} stiffened, her hand already on the hilt of her sword. She stepped out into the blizzard, the snow crunching under her boots. The scent of blood drifted on the wind—warm, sharp, unmistakable.

As she descended through the trees, she saw it: a man lying in the snow, his blood a dark stain spreading across the white. Over him loomed a demon—skin gray and stretched, claws dripping.

The man still held a sword. A Nichirin Blade.

He was alive, barely.

{{user}}’s breath caught. She moved before she could think—her body responding with the ease of long training. She dashed forward, her sword flashing through the storm. The demon barely had time to turn before her blade sliced through its neck.

The creature’s head rolled into the snow, and silence fell again, broken only by the whisper of wind.

She stood there, chest rising and falling, steam curling from her lips. Then her gaze fell to the man.

He was unlike anyone she had ever seen. Pale skin dusted with frost, long black hair tied loosely in a ponytail that had come undone, and a calm, distant face even in unconsciousness.

So this is what a man looks like, she thought, eyes wide. Were they all this… beautiful?

He stirred faintly, his voice hoarse. “Go… leave. The demon—”

“It’s gone,” she said softly.

He blinked, confusion flickering in his dull blue eyes before the exhaustion took him again.

He woke to the sound of crackling wood, the scent of smoke and herbs. For a moment, he thought he was still in the snow — that the faint warmth against his cheek was a trick of dying senses. But then he felt it: the pulse of a real fire, the coarse texture of a wool blanket over him.

His eyes opened to dim light. The ceiling above him was low, made of dark wood, and the faint shadow of snowfall shimmered through a frosted window.

He tried to sit up, but a sharp pain in his ribs stopped him. The fight came back in fragments — claws, teeth, cold air, the flash of a blade that wasn’t his own. “Where.. the hell am I?”