Outside, Winters stood on top of the igloo and looked at the Wendigo and the Wendigo looked at Winters.
"Stay inside," he said, at a volume that carried through the igloo walls without being a shout. "All of you."
A pause. Then Kylie's voice: "Winters—"
"I know what it is. Stay inside."
Then Kiyandra: "Don't die."
"I'll try," said Winters, which for him was as close to a promise as it came.
The Wendigo moved.
It crossed the distance faster than something that large should have been able to — a blur of pale and dark that resolved into claws at close range, aimed at his chest with the force of something that had killed things bigger than him without difficulty.
Winters raised one hand.
The snowflake shield bloomed from his palm — not a wall but a disc of compressed ice in the specific crystalline pattern that was his and only his, the geometric complexity of it carrying a density that belied its apparent delicacy. The claws hit it and the sound it made was not the sound of impact but the sound of one cold thing meeting another cold thing and neither giving immediately.
The Wendigo pulled back. Reassessed.
Winters stepped off the igloo.
He landed in the snow and pressed one foot down and felt the cold run up through his boot and into his leg and spread, and the familiar deepening began — the ice magic finding more material to work with, the cold that the Wendigo had brought feeding him rather than threatening him. He almost appreciated the irony.
"Wolves," he said quietly, to the snow.
They rose from the ground in a line — six of them, shaped from compressed ice and the specific will of someone who had grown up in this environment and understood its architecture from the inside. Not decorative. Functional — the mass distribution of actual wolves, the weight correct, the movement as they oriented toward the Wendigo carrying the quality of things built to hunt.
He sent them forward.
The Wendigo was fast. The first two wolves went down before they'd covered half the distance, shattered by strikes that carried the Wendigo's cold-force. The third and fourth drew it left, occupying its attention for the seconds the fifth and sixth needed to reach it from the right. Claws found pale flesh. The Wendigo made a sound that was less a sound than a pressure change, and backed off.
Winters watched it bleed.
Then he reached into the darkness beside him.
The axe came out of it the way it always came out of it — not conjured, not created, but retrieved, the specific act of taking something from a place where it had been waiting. The haft was dark in a way that wasn't the colour of the material but something underneath the colour. The head was ice, but ice formed at a depth and pressure that ordinary ice didn't reach — dense and blue-black and carrying an edge that had never needed sharpening because it had been formed already sharp. It settled into his hand with the weight of something that belonged there.
He threw it.
One hand. The axe spun — not tumbling but rotating precisely, the geometry of its flight deliberate — and crossed the distance to the Wendigo and slashed it across the torso in a single swift arc. The Wendigo stumbled. The axe completed its arc and came back, and Winters caught it without looking.
The Wendigo looked at its own blood in the snow. Something changed in it — the ancient hunting patience broke, and the frantic quality that replaced it was in some ways more dangerous and in some ways less. It vanished into the blizzard.
Winters watched it go without surprise.
✦ ✦ ✦
Inside the igloos, the Wendigo's voices began.
—
Levi heard Melissa first.
Not her voice exactly — or rather, her voice exactly, with the specific quality of it that he heard in memory: the warmth of it, the particular cadence of someone who had always known how to say his name. It came from outside, from the direction of the blizzard, and it said: Lee.
He was moving before he'd decided to move.
The cold hit him the moment he stepped outside but he was barely registering it because Melissa's voice was saying his name again from somewhere in the white, and underneath the training and the grief and the forward momentum he'd been running on since Olympus fell, something that had never been properly addressed rose up and simply believed.
Then Sylvia's voice, from a different direction: Levi. Over here.
He went toward it.
The blizzard closed around him. The igloo village disappeared. He kept walking because Melissa was ahead and Sylvia was to his left and both of them were saying his name, and he hadn't heard Melissa's voice since the last time he'd heard it, and some part of him had apparently been waiting, this whole time, to hear it again.
He didn't question it.
He didn't question it, which later, when he could think about it clearly, would tell him something about himself that he hadn't fully known.
—
Priscilla was in the hallucination for approximately four seconds before she recognised it for what it was.
The recognition wasn't immediate because the content was accurate — the apartment, the specific quality of evening light through the window she had looked out of every day for eleven years, the sound of her parents' voices through the wall. The Wendigo had found the right material.
But the feeling was wrong.
The memory had always carried a specific gravity — the weight of something that had happened and couldn't be undone. This version was too immediate, too present, the edges too sharp. A memory being performed rather than remembered. And underneath the performance she could feel something cold and hungry pressing against barriers she'd built, and finding them solid.
She had built those barriers over years. Not deliberately, not as a defensive strategy — as a response, the way you built walls when you'd seen what happened without them. Her spatial awareness, always running, always aware of everything in range — it had an inside as well as an outside. The inside was hers. The Wendigo had pressed against it and found walls it hadn't expected, and in the agitation of the hallucination those walls had thickened rather than thinned.
She opened her eyes.
The hallucination dissolved.
She was standing outside her igloo in the snow, not remembering walking out, and approximately two metres in front of her was nothing — but the spatial awareness told her it was nothing the way a recently vacated space was nothing. Something had been there. Something had looked at her walls and decided against it.
She raised her spear.
"You can try," she said, to the nothing.
The nothing stayed nothing.
She turned and looked for Levi.
—
Kylie and Kiyandra stepped out of their igloo together and saw nothing.
The Wendigo's presence should have been visible — it was large, pale, it left marks in the snow. There was nothing. Just the blizzard and the igloos and the dark beyond both.
"Where is it?" Kylie said.
Kiyandra turned to look at her, and for a moment Kylie saw something in her twin's eyes that wasn't Kiyandra. Something flat and wrong, an overlay on the familiar face that made the familiar face strange.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Kiyandra said.
"I'm not looking at you like anything," Kylie said.
"You are. You've been looking at me like that since we left Frostilia." Kiyandra's voice had a quality it didn't usually have — something underneath the usual directness that was closer to accusation. "Like you're waiting for me to fail."
Kylie stared at her. "What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about."
The cold pressed in from every direction. The blizzard moved across the tops of the igloos with a sound like breathing. Kylie looked at her twin — the person she had trained alongside since they could walk, the person she had sat in liquid Ultimatium with and broken free with through sheer shared will — and felt something she had never felt when looking at Kiyandra.
Unease.
"Something's wrong," Kylie said. "This isn't—"
"Don't do that," Kiyandra said. "Don't make it about the myth. This is about you and me."
"Kiya—"
"You've always thought you were better than me." The words came out with the specific precision of something that had been waiting to be said — and that was the tell. Kiyandra didn't store things up. Kiyandra said things immediately and without architecture. These words were too ready. "Since we were children. You think the Azure Dragon is more impressive than anything I've developed."
Kylie felt something hot rise in her chest. Her chi shifted without her directing it.
"That's not—"
"Isn't it?"
The chi discharged — not at Kiyandra, just outward, the instinctive expression of someone whose ability had been triggered by emotion without their full consent. The snow crystallised in the radius of it, the chi pressure making the air briefly visible.
And in that visibility, for just a moment, they both saw the shape moving at the edge of the blizzard.
The Wendigo's instincts were old and very good. They told it clearly that approaching two chi users who had just been reminded of each other was not a calculation in its favour. The chi pressure alone was enough to arrest the approach — the specific resonance of two people whose ability operated at a frequency that made the Wendigo's hunger less certain of itself.
It vanished again.
The paranoia left with it, like a smell clearing from a room.
Kylie and Kiyandra stood in the snow and looked at each other.
"That wasn't us," Kiyandra said.
"No," said Kylie. "It wasn't."
A pause.
"I don't actually think the Azure Dragon is more impressive," Kylie said.
"I know," said Kiyandra. "I don't actually think you're waiting for me to fail."
"I know."
They looked at the darkness where the Wendigo had been.
"Priscilla and Levi," Kylie said.
They moved.
✦ ✦ ✦
He was deep in the blizzard by the time the fangs found him.
The hallucination had been so complete — Melissa's voice, Sylvia's voice, both of them saying his name with the warmth of them in the white cold — that he had followed it without question for longer than he should have. The part of him that knew better had been trying to surface, distantly, and he had kept moving toward the voices because the voices were there and they were real to him in a way the cold and the distance weren't.
Then the fangs drove into his left shoulder.
The pain arrived like a switch being thrown — total, immediate, the specific bright agony of something with teeth finding muscle and not letting go. The hallucination shattered. The voices disappeared. There was just the blizzard and the blood running hot down his arm and the Wendigo's weight behind him, enormous and cold and real.
Levi reacted before thought caught up.
"Electrocution," he said.
The spell discharged through every contact point — not directed, not aimed, the full immediate output of his ability expressed through every surface the Wendigo was touching. The creature didn't scream. It simply burst — not into pieces, but into lightning, the specific dissolution of something that had taken a direct current through its entire body and not survived the first second of it. The fangs left his shoulder. The weight left his back.
The Wendigo was not gone. It was stunned — scattered, momentarily unresolved, not a threat but potential, dispersed through the blizzard around him for one second of reassembly.
From somewhere above and behind, a dark shape crossed the white.
The axe moved with the precision of something thrown by a person who didn't miss. It found the Wendigo's neck in the moment of its reassembly and the skull came free, and Winters was simply there — the specific arrival of someone who had known where to be before anyone else had processed what was happening — his hand closing around the haft as the axe completed its arc, and his arm coming down in the finishing blow with the full weight of his ice magic behind it.
The body hit the snow.
The cold the Wendigo had brought with it lifted — not all at once, but in increments, like a pressure releasing. The wilderness returned to its ordinary temperature, which was still very cold but was no longer actively hostile in the specific way the Wendigo had made it.
Winters stood over the body. He looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at Levi.
"Your shoulder," he said.
"I know," said Levi. He pressed his right hand over the wound. Significant but manageable, the adrenaline still doing its work on his perception of it. "I'll need it looked at."
"Zoe can consult remotely when we make contact tomorrow." Winters looked at the axe in his hand, then at the body. "Can you walk?"
"Yes," said Levi.
"Then let's go back," said Winters.
He turned and walked toward the igloo village as if he'd stepped out for a moment and was returning from something routine. Levi watched him for a second.
Then he followed.
✦ ✦ ✦
The twins found them at the edge of the village. Priscilla was already there, her spear at rest, her expression carrying the quality of someone who had been through something and was processing it with characteristic efficiency.
They stood in the snow outside the igloos and nobody spoke for a moment.
"The voices," Kylie said. Not a question.
"Yes," said Levi.
A pause.
"Melissa?" Priscilla said. Quietly. Just to him. Just that.
He looked at her. She looked back with the complete attention she gave to things she wanted to understand completely, and didn't say anything else, because she didn't need to.
"Yes," said Levi.
Nobody pressed it further.
Winters looked at all of them in turn — the quick comprehensive inventory of someone checking that everything was accounted for. Then he looked at the Wendigo's body.
"Inside," he said. "All of you. We still have four hours before first light."
He reached into his pack, retrieved a Frappuccino — still cold, which in Blizzaria's wilderness was less of an achievement than it might have been elsewhere — and took a long unhurried sip.
Then he went inside his igloo and the door closed behind him.
The twins looked at the closed door. Then at each other.
"He just—" Kylie started.
"Yes," said Kiyandra.
"After all that—"
"Yes."
A pause.
"I genuinely cannot tell if that's impressive or deeply concerning," said Kylie.
"Both," said Kiyandra, and went inside.