The Clearing

Dawn crept up the eastern sky, painting the clouds with streaks of orange and pale gold. Frost sparkled across the birch branches like tiny shards of glass, catching the first rays of sun. The air tasted sharp and cold, carrying the faint promise of a harder day. A thin mist hung low among the trees, leaving a faint smell of moss and earth.

In the clearing, a herd of reindeer grazed quietly. Steam rose from their nostrils as they moved across the frozen moss. A bull lifted its head, antlers heavy with velvet, then resumed chewing.

From the shadows, a red dot flickered across the bull’s flank. It twitched.

A soft hiss broke the morning stillness. The bull dropped, legs folding beneath it. Blood pooled over the frost. The herd bolted—then more soft cracks, barely louder than footsteps in snow. One by one, bodies fell.

Men stepped from the trees, scarves pulled high, rifles lowered. They worked fast. Knives flicked. Throats opened, bellies split. Entrails steamed in the cold.

“We need to move,” one said. “Too open.”

“We overdid it,” another muttered, eyeing the bodies. “They won’t all fit.”

“Leave what we have to.” The first man wiped his blade clean. “Just move.”

They heaved carcasses into the wagon, working in silence now. A few reindeer lay untouched. Their eyes stared glassy into the sky.

One hunter paused. Tilted his head.

“What?”

A beat passed. “Nothing.”

“Then let’s go.”

They slipped into the trees, their footsteps muffled in snowmelt and moss. The clearing fell still again.

A long moment passed. Then a large bear stepped from the treeline. Its paws sank into stained moss. It moved slowly, deliberately. Its fur was thick and matted from winter sleep. A pale streak ran across its chest, like an old scar or something burned in.

Its eyes were clouded. Still, they tracked across the scene—each body, each wound—as if it remembered something.

The bear stopped beside the fallen bull. It lowered its head and sniffed. Breath rose from its muzzle in slow white gusts. Then it looked up, toward the trees where the hunters had gone.

Behind it, a soft crack echoed through the clearing.

One of the dead reindeer twitched. A hind leg jerked, then another. Its head turned with a slow, dragging motion. The neck bent wrong. Something shifted beneath the skin, bones creaking as they slid back into place. Entrails slithered across the moss as it pulled itself upright.

The bull exhaled a rasping breath, half-steam, half-sound.

Others began to stir. Movements slow and stiff. Heads lifting. Eyes empty. A fawn dragged itself forward on bent legs, its stomach torn but moving.

They gathered. Some walked. Some crawled. Not like animals anymore—more like sleepwalkers.

The bear did not move. Its white eyes stayed on the trail. Watching.

Then it turned. Its shape seemed to ripple—just slightly, like heat off a stove. The outline shifted, something heavier settling into its bones.

It stepped back into the trees without sound.

The bull moved first. Its legs staggered beneath it, the front left dragging with a subtle scrape across frozen moss. Each step pulled more entrails loose, but the body did not falter. Behind it, others began to fall in line—some limping, others moving with an unnatural stiffness, joints popping faintly as they adjusted to the task.

The fawn came last, ribs exposed and breathless, one eye missing. It tilted its head as if listening.

Steam still rose from their backs, but not with the softness of life—more like heat leaking from a cooling forge. They left red smears behind them, quiet and wet, staining the moss in a long, uneven trail.

They passed the edge of the clearing without pause, slipping into the trees in the direction the men had gone. There was no sound but the crackle of frost beneath hooves and the faint rustling of brush as they pushed through.

No urgency. No confusion.

Just movement.

A fox watched from beneath a low branch, crouched flat and still. When the last of the herd passed, it turned and vanished into the underbrush, tail low.

Up on the ridge, the bear stood again. Taller now. Shoulders broader, the shape more uncertain in the mist. Its pale eyes followed the line of broken brush and bloody snow where the trail wound out of sight.

It did not follow.

It only watched.

Then it turned and slipped downslope, disappearing into a stand of spruce.

The forest had grown too quiet.

Too aware.

Something was following.

Something that knew how to carry what it took.

They picked up their pace, not speaking, not daring to look back. The trees seemed denser now, their trunks thicker, leaning in. Mist curled along the ground like it was watching.

The sound came again—antlers clicking, breath dragging. But now it was joined by another sound. A voice.

Low. Croaking. Familiar.

"Did we... unload it?"

One of the hunters stumbled. That was his voice. But he hadn’t spoken.

Then another voice—“Keep moving.”

Also his.

The echo of their words looped back to them, not through trees, but as if repeated by something with a mouth that almost remembered how to speak.

Ahead, the trail forked.

“We didn’t come this way,” someone muttered.

“Yes, we did,” said the leader, but there was hesitation now.

Between the pines, the trail flickered—as if changing. In one direction, deep drag marks appeared in the frost. Not blood. Not soil. Just long, furrowed gouges, as if something with hooves and antlers had been pulled backward through the woods.

Then the trees shook.

No wind. No cause.

One man turned.

And screamed.

But it cut off—wet and sharp. A shape surged forward from the trees, towering and fast, and the scream was swallowed by the mist.

The others ran. Branches whipped their faces. The fog was thicker, stickier—tasting like copper and old fur.

Above them, something howled. Not a wolf. Not a bear.

A sound like lungs forcing old breath through broken vocal cords.

One hunter slipped. Hands groped for moss, for snow—but found neither. His fingers sank into something soft. Hair. Not fur. Human hair, thick and matted.

He jerked his hand back and saw a face in the roots.

His own.

Mouth open. Eyes glassy.

He ran again.

Behind them, hooves pounded the earth. Not in a gallop. In time. In rhythm. Like a drumbeat for a procession.

Voices rose again in the fog—calling, pleading, shouting warnings they'd never spoken.

Not mimicry.

Memory.

The forest remembering their trespass.

And playing it back.

Wrong.

Ahead, the trail narrowed. A clearing.

But not the same one.

This one had no trees around it. Just stumps—jagged and blackened, as if struck by lightning long ago. At the center stood the wagon.

Still empty.

And something waited beside it.

Antlers. Bent. Dripping.

A jaw hung open, slack and too wide. And behind it, something too large to be a man, but too upright to be a beast, unfurled its limbs from shadow.

The hunters did not scream this time.

Only the clearing did.

And the frost did not melt—it split.

Like a wound.

Come thaw, the trees at the edge of the forest grew twisted.

Children said they could hear voices in the wind. That the stumps blinked when no one watched.

And at the heart of the wood, moss grew over a shape.

Too big for a deer. Too still for a man.

A warning, breathing slow beneath the soil.

Some say the moss rises and falls, like breath.