The Winter Wanderer

The snow in Anádyr never fell clean. It came down gray, stained by the soot from the small thermal station that powered the port.

Before the skies opened in 2016, Svetlana was simply the doctor’s daughter. She was sixteen, rode a bicycle with a rusted chain that always slipped when she crossed the wooden bridge, and had the strange habit of collecting glass jars to keep the polished stones she found along the Bering Sea.

To her, the outside world was a distant abstraction that only existed in the radio programs her father listened to at night. Anádyr was freezing, small, and isolated, but it had a warm routine. And at the center of that routine was Matt.

They had met three years earlier, when Matt moved in with his aunt and uncle after his parents died. Svetlana saw him for the first time sitting at the edge of the pier, staring at the frozen water without saying a word, wearing a coat two sizes too big that hung loose on his shoulders. That first day she didn’t say anything grand or poetic. She simply walked up to him, held out half a hard sweet roll, and sat beside him in silence until the sun disappeared behind the hills.

From that moment on, they became inseparable. Svetlana was the noise and the movement; Matt was the anchor and the calm.

When Svetlana first tried to use the old iron stove in her house, the soup she made was so salty her father had to spit it out discreetly. Matt, on the other hand, ate the entire bowl without changing his expression, just so she wouldn’t cry. When the bicycle chain slipped in the middle of a blizzard, it was Matt who took off his gloves and ended up with black, frozen fingers fixing the links with a notched kitchen knife he carried everywhere as a multipurpose tool.

“One day we’re going to leave this place,” Svetlana told him one autumn afternoon while polishing a piece of clear quartz on her lap. “My uncle Boris sent a letter from France. He says the cities there are enormous, that the trees lose their leaves in autumn and the ground turns golden. When we’re older, we’re going to go there by train.”

“The train doesn’t cross the ocean, Svetlana,” Matt answered, sitting on the wooden floor while trying to sharpen the blade of his knife with a river stone.

“Then we’ll take a boat. Or build a raft. I don’t care.” She smiled, putting the stone away in her jar. “But we’re not going to stay here freezing forever.”

That was Svetlana’s world: glass jars, bicycle chains, promises of golden summers in France, and Matt’s quiet presence by her side. They didn’t know what the Will was. They didn’t know that humanity was inside a brutal incubator managed from a floating island by a being called Bastian.

Until the afternoon of November 14, 2016.

The sky didn’t darken from storm clouds. It turned a dense, metallic violet when the Empire’s transports cut through the sky. The city’s alarms didn’t sound for more than ten seconds before the communication antennas were destroyed from orbit.

The Empire hadn’t come to occupy the city. It hadn’t come to install a government or collect taxes. They didn’t need Anádyr’s mineral resources and had no interest in its port. Baron Valentin—at that time an impeccable Illuminated with a military tunic and white gloves—stepped down from the main ship with the simple order to meet a quota of despair in Sector 1.

Svetlana remembered the smell of burning. She remembered how the door of her house was blown to pieces by the shockwave of a high-pressure shot. Her father tried to cover her with his body, but an Awakened soldier came through the entrance with the coldness of someone clearing a pest, shoving the doctor aside with a rifle butt that broke his neck on the spot.

Svetlana ran. She didn’t know where. Instinct took her toward the only path she knew: the side streets that led to the public parking lot near the pier, where Matt usually waited for her after helping his aunt and uncle.

The snow in the parking lot was no longer gray. It was stained a dense, steaming red. People ran in every direction, but no one fought. No one knew how to fight. They were ordinary civilians facing men in tactical armor with weapons that cut through concrete like paper.

In the middle of the chaos, among overturned vehicles and the smoke of burning tires, Svetlana saw Matt.

He was running toward her, his face covered in soot, the notched knife clenched in his right hand.

“Svetlana!” he shouted. It was the last time she would hear his voice sound like a child’s.

Svetlana reached out her hand. She was only three meters away. She could see the torn texture of his coat, his ragged breath in the freezing air, the pure desperation in his eyes.

Then the air around her simply froze.

An elegant step echoed on the hard snow. Baron Valentin walked slowly between the flames of the parking lot, brushing the lapel of his uniform with surgical calm. He didn’t even look at the children as human beings. To him they were simple variables in a performance report.

“Too slow,” Valentin murmured.

With the indifference of someone brushing a dry branch from the path, Valentin drew a stiletto imbued with Will. There was no fight. There was no dramatic dialogue.

The movement was an almost invisible flash. Valentin’s blade pierced Svetlana’s chest before she could finish taking the step.

The impact didn’t bring immediate pain, only a cold emptiness that shut down her legs. The Will of an Illuminated lodged in the cut began destroying her tissues in a second. The glass jar with the polished stones she carried in her pocket shattered against the ground, scattering the pieces across the snow.

Svetlana fell to her knees. The last thing she saw before the world went black was Matt lunging forward, screaming something the wind swallowed, the small notched knife raised as he charged the giant in the white uniform.

She saw Matt’s knife tear the Baron’s cheek. She saw the drop of red blood well up on the noble’s face. And she saw Valentin’s boot kick Matt’s body into the snow, leaving him still a few meters from her.

Svetlana closed her eyes thinking Matt had died beside her in that frozen parking lot. She never knew that the boy in the oversized coat survived, that the spark ignited by that scratch was a grayish fire, and that over the next five years that same boy would cross a frozen continent to fulfill the promise of the train they never got to take.