The northern wasteland has drowned in white silence. Winter this year is merciless: for weeks, the temperature has not risen above minus forty degrees, turning breath into icy dust and any exposed metal into a trap for bare skin. But more terrifying than the frost is what arrived with the lingering blizzards.

​The usual seasonal losses on isolated farms have turned into a veritable slaughter. Every night, livestock vanishes without a trace from tightly locked pens. By morning, only uprooted doors and carcasses frozen solid as stone are found. The innards are hollowed out with chilling surgical precision, blood solidifies into bizarre crimson stalagmites on the straw, and guard dogs make no sound—hiding in their kennels, whimpering in primal terror.

​Local hunters try to blame it all on packs of starving mutant wolves. But wolves do not leave giant webbed tracks around the barns. Wolves do not slice through deep snowdrifts as if it were dark ocean water, from which a tall, smooth dorsal fin gracefully rises. And no beast in the taiga emits bone-chilling, vibrating clicks in the dead of night that make windowpanes rattle.

​Something ancient and massive patrols the snow-covered fields, hiding in the epicenter of the storm.

Cow meat is no longer enough for it, and the circles around residential houses tighten with every passing night. The blizzard howls with renewed vigor, sweeping over a fresh trench left by a heavy keel leading toward the dark forest. The beast is hungry. The tracks have not yet gone cold. It is time to take the rifle off the wall and step into the icy gloom—or passively wait until a shattered door lets cold death into the house. The hunt begins.