The wind howled across the dead plains, sharp as broken glass, dragging with it the bitter stench of decay. Nikolai trudged forward through knee-high frost-laced grass and crumbling asphalt veins, the pale morning sun barely warming his torn coat. Each step sent a dull ache radiating through his limbs. His body was still fighting the remnants of the poison. His gut churned, not from hunger this time, but from the memory of what he'd swallowed.
He didn't look back.
The house was long gone now, hidden behind ruined hills and skeletal trees. A blot erased from the landscape, like a fever dream. But the woman's eyes lingered. Blank. Too blank.
He flexed his fingers, the sticky memory of her blood still clinging to the cracks in his skin. The knife had done its job. He was alive. That was all that mattered.
The Witch awaited.
The terrain began to shift beneath his feet, subtly at first. The trees grew thinner, stunted. The cold deepened. Snow flurries drifted on the wind like ash. In the distance, white-capped ridges rose like a jagged crown. The north. The Frozen River wasn't far now.
He'd heard stories—whispers in the dark when he'd hidden among scavenger camps or watched the flickering broadcasts in half-functioning City bars. No one crossed the Frozen River and returned unchanged. Some said it was cursed. Others claimed it wasn't a river at all, but a wound in the earth, a place where reality had cracked and bled into something else.
He didn't care.
The Witch was beyond it. That was the only truth that kept his feet moving.
His boots sank into the slush as he moved, feet numb. Hunger gnawed again, a faithful, miserable companion. His mind drifted—to the soup, the soft clink of metal spoon against ceramic. To the finger. To how easily he'd swallowed it, like instinct.
He wasn't shocked by it anymore. That scared him more than anything.
A sudden crunch beneath his foot made him flinch. Ice—thin and veined—had cracked beneath his weight. He backed away, scanning the ground ahead. Snow concealed danger here, just as it had concealed the warning signs of the woman's house. Trust nothing, not even the ground.
Later, he found a mound in the snow. A boot protruded from the drift—leather stiff with frost. He crouched, brushed the snow aside. Inside was a foot, still intact. No body. No pack. No trail. Just a boot and a leg and the suggestion of someone who'd tried—and failed—to cross.
Farther along, half-buried in a tree trunk, he saw scratched writing. The bark was warped, frostburned, but a few words remained visible:
"TURN BACK / WRONG WAY / SHE WAITS WITH TEETH."
Nikolai stared at it for a long moment. Then walked on.
The landscape began to change again. Strange ice formations emerged—tall, spiked ridges like frozen coral, shimmering faintly with colors that didn't belong. Some plants here grew in twisted spirals, brittle as glass, glowing faintly blue. One crumbled to dust when he brushed it.
The silence deepened. Not just absence of sound—an oppressive, swallowing stillness that pressed against his ears. His own breathing sounded foreign, intrusive.
Once, he thought he saw a pale shape moving between the spires. Humanoid. Crawling. Watching. But when he blinked, it was gone. He moved faster.
Water. He needed water. He broke off a chunk of ice, tried to suck on it, but it bit his tongue with cold. No melt. No relief. Even the ice here defied the rules.
Another night came. He built no fire. Fire was a beacon. Instead, he huddled in the hollow of a frost-split tree, knife in hand. Dreams came—visions of black water, and voices speaking in reverse.
He woke before dawn, skin numb, thoughts fraying.
On the third day, he saw the first real sign: a pair of broken signposts jutting from the ice like fractured ribs. Words were long worn away. Only the red symbols of the old warning systems remained. Radiation. Contamination. Collapse. One symbol—a red spiral—triggered something in his brain. A hallway. Alarms. Screaming. A woman pulling him by the hand.
He blinked. It was gone.
Nikolai smiled faintly. Finally.
By nightfall, he reached the edge.
The Frozen River stretched wide before him, a wasteland of cracked blue-white ice and black chasms, endless and quiet as the void. Somewhere on the far end—beyond the killing cold, the things beneath the ice, and whatever madness lived in the storm—was what he had come for.
The Witch.
He took a breath, adjusted his coat, and stepped onto the ice.
The wind stopped. Even the world seemed to hold its breath, as if awaiting his next step into the unknown.