Darkest Days (The Wild Hunt) - 4. Remembering the Light

Elias’s outstretched hand trembled, hanging in the empty space between him and Adrien. His lover, his Adrien, stood before him, so close and yet so impossibly far, and now Elias was paralyzed by a command that left the night impossibly still. The voice lingered in his mind, its ancient authority pressing down heavy and immutable. He faltered, his hand withdrawing inch by inch. His lips parted, a question forming, but the voice spoke again before any sound escaped him.

“Do not touch him.”

Elias stumbled back a step, his breath ragged and warm against the oppressive cold. His frantic gaze darted through the shadowed clearing, searching for the speaker. “Who’s there?” he rasped, his voice hoarse, his throat raw. His words fell into a deep silence, carried away by their own echoes. The forest around Adrien’s grave, though still, felt alive in an unnatural, observing way—its darkness sentient, the void between the trees charged with a presence Elias could not see but only sense.

Then it appeared. At first, not one figure, but many, fleeting and contradictory, presented themselves to him from beneath the boughs of the skeletal pines. Shifting shapes, moving shadows of something greater. His eyes couldn’t settle on one form, his mind recoiling from the effort to hold on to any single image.

There was a figure shrouded in smoke and shadow, skeletal and far taller than any man, its eyes burning coals set into an empty, grinning skull. Then it was a hunter cloaked in jagged pelts, his face obscured but for the glint of pale, flickering eyes beneath a helm adorned with the curling antlers of a stag. He bore a spear across his back, and antlered hounds weaved at his feet like liquid shadows. A heartbeat later, the image broke again, and he became a rider crowned with a golden helm, his pale, gleaming horse radiating an aura of frost so intense that even this wintry air seemed tame by comparison.

The figure kept shifting, his many forms dizzying, as if Elias were beholding all the stories, all the imagery passed down through the endless ages of human fear—every tale spun to warn, every account reimagined to terrify. Elias’s mind screamed at him to look away, to save his sanity. But he couldn’t. The thing that stood before him, shifting yet eternal, demanded his eyes, demanded his soul.

“Who are you?” Elias could barely force the words from his lips. The frostbitten air pushed them back into his lungs, each sound fragile and pathetic next to the silence that followed.

The shadow-form finally stilled—or, at least, it seemed to. But the stillness brought no peace—only dread. The voice came again, echoing inside Elias’s head, its resonance pinning him where he stood. “Who am I? Who do you believe I am, mortal?”

The words seared through the vaults of his mind, and though there was no mockery in the tone, something in them felt probing, challenging—as though the being required something of him other than fear. Elias inhaled sharply, struggling to hold on to sanity. The light in Adrien’s dead eyes—those fleeting glimpses of a man he had once called his world—subdued his spiraling thoughts, keeping him just barely rooted in place.

He thought of Adrien in life. Of the nights beneath this same dark sky, where their only light came from the stars above and the fire they built together. He thought of Adrien’s stories—tales of the Hunt passed down in low whispers, spoken as warnings between the two of them when the wind howled too sharply around the cabin.

And then he thought of how Adrien had laughed and always said Elias would forget the details of a story, even one told only moments before. Adrien’s broken laugh would call him out, teasing him for jumping to conclusions, for neglecting the heart of things, yet he would tell the tale again as patiently as before.

“No,” Elias muttered to himself, his tongue licking at frostbitten lips. His eyes flicked to Adrien’s, still questioning, almost pleading, and something in Elias resolved. “I… I didn’t forget.”

“I just liked to listen to your voice, see the reflections of the tales and worlds you created for me in your eyes.”

The midnight forest seemed to lean closer, the air tightening around him. The presence of the figure—of all the figures, the shifting lord of this infernal cavalcade—hung heavily over him. Elias understood the question now, deeply, coldly, as if it had been drawn from the marrow of his bones. It wasn’t an answer the being desired—no, it was a reflection of his belief.

Elias swallowed audibly. His lips formed a name, a word he could barely whisper over the storm of terror whirling in his chest, but he said it nonetheless.

“Woden,” he breathed. “Adrien would… He told me that’s who you are. You are Woden. The All-Father. The One-Eyed Hunter. The Wanderer. The storm-bringer of the world’s end… that’s you, the Lord of the Wild Hunt.”

The words faded into the silence, and the shifting forms stopped their flickering. Slowly, a myriad, nightmarish shapes knitted together into one.

Before Elias now stood a single, stable form: a man. But what a man he was.

The figure towered over him, clad in a patchwork of frost-rimed furs and dull armor that looked beaten and ancient, yet indestructible. The helm he wore was gone, revealing a stern, weathered face half-shrouded in a scraggly beard streaked with white. His left eye, deep blue, like crevasses in a glacier, burned with the heat of a star, cold and pitiless in the blackest of nights. His right eye was sealed shut beneath a deep scar that ran jagged across the socket. Ravens perched on his broad shoulders, their spectral wings folding and unfolding as they each whispered maddening secrets that Elias swore he could almost hear.

Elias staggered back, his heart pounding with awe and horror. This was no mortal king, no leader bound to earthly laws. This presence before him—this dark majesty—was not merely the Woden of Adrien’s stories. It was something older than the Hunt itself. Something infinite. Something uncaring.

The figure studied him for a moment, that single eye peering into every shadow Elias had ever carried in his heart. When he finally spoke again, it was not in challenge, but in grim acknowledgment.

“So you name me,” the voice rumbled, frost-rimed and final. “And so I stand before you.”

Elias stared over at Adrien—his Adrien—as though his world hung upon the moment, his trembling hand still stretched out, the distance between them feeling at once like an eternity and a mere breath. Adrien remained still, his head tilted ever so slightly, his face caught in that strange mixture of longing and recognition, but his body refused to move closer or further away. His frostbitten beauty seemed suspended in time, so achingly familiar yet irrevocably altered. Every corner of Elias’s mind screamed to cross the impossible boundary between them. To close the space. To touch him.

It was the voice that broke the spell, Woden’s voice—a resonance more ancient than the land itself, filled with unassailable authority. “You must not touch him.”

Elias’s hand wavered where it hovered in the freezing air. “I—why?” he stammered, his throat dry, his words desperate. “Why can’t I—he’s here. I—don’t you understand? I have to. I have to—”

“Embrace him now, as he is, and you embrace death.” The voice thundered again, cutting through Elias’s pleas like steel. “To touch him would seal your and his doom. To claim him in this state would be to unmake him, to condemn his soul to ruin. And then he and you would truly be lost.”

Elias froze, his heart lurching painfully in his chest. “What are you saying?” he whispered. “Why are you here? Why is he… with you? Why is he riding with the Hunt? Did you claim him?”

The shadow of Woden loomed larger, filled with a presence that seemed almost to blot out the stars above. “Your Adrien—the hero, the good man—joined the Hunt willingly,” the leader rumbled. “He joined to save you.”

Elias blinked, the words barely registering. His thoughts reeled. “To save me? How? That doesn’t—no, that doesn’t make sense. He’s dead. You have him. I—” His body shuddered as desperation crept over him in waves. His voice trembled. “If he’s saving me, why can’t he tell me himself? Why does he just stand there?”

Woden’s single, searing eye bore into him. “Because he cannot. He is dead, Elias. Forever severed from flesh, his voice silenced by the grave. He cannot speak to you. He cannot guide you in words.” Woden’s voice surged with something deep, forbidding. “We are here because of you. Your soul is lost and you are almost completely dead inside… almost.”

“But, mortal, his love ran deep, and his life was filled with meaning. You already carry what you need to save yourself and him—the message he left for you, woven into the thread of your time together. Do not insult his sacrifice by letting the memory die.”

Elias’s breath hitched. He looked back at Adrien, standing there so quietly beneath the pines, his ghostly form glowing faintly, his frozen beauty sorrowful but steady. Silent. Unreachable. He fought the urge to blame him, to hate all of this, but in that stillness, in that gaze, he saw something he had long since buried: the memories of what Adrien had been in life. His steadiness. His laughter. His boundless love.

And he remembered the stories. The words Adrien had shared by the fire, long before death had come between them.

Elias’s voice cracked as he whispered, “But I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what he would want me to—how am I supposed to know?”

The raven on Woden’s shoulder shifted, its icy wings spreading faintly. The old voice spoke again, but softer this time—a riddle, a demand for understanding. “You already know what he would tell you.”

Elias fell silent. His eyes turned inward, desperate now not to escape but to remember. A trembling breath passed from his lips as Woden’s presence loomed closer, unyielding but patient. And then Elias lowered his arm and closed his eyes, thinking not of ghosts or gods, hunts or fates, but only of Adrien.

How he was, when he was alive. All the things he shared with him.

Adrien.

Slowly, Elias began to understand.

He remembered Adrien.

He remembered how he was—full of life, vibrant, his smile like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.

“He…” Elias swallowed, his voice unsteady but growing stronger. “He would tell me to live. He always did. He’d... He’d tell me that he’s alive in every memory I have of him, in every lesson he taught me, in every strange new thought I had because of something he said. He’d say that love isn’t a prison. It’s not something you lock away. It’s not something jealous or grasping—it’s too big for that.” He opened his eyes, tears welling in their corners as his gaze found Adrien’s face again. The frost in his heart cracked, little by little.

“He would tell me that love doesn’t die—ever,” Elias continued, his voice trembling. The words began spilling out now, unfurling like a ribbon woven from memory and pain and hope. “It grows. The more you share it, the more you feel it, the more you live it. He’d say love is life, and he’d want me to live for the both of us. To carry him with me in every breath, into every adventure, into every moment, whether I’m celebrating or mourning or finding love in places he never saw.” His voice cracked, but he pressed on. “Because if I keep him alive like that—in my choices, in my joy—then he’s not really gone. He’s just… there. Like he always was.”

“He’ll wait for me, waiting for all the new tales I will tell him and all the love I’ll bring back to him. Shared eternally.”

Something in Elias broke then, finally cracking beneath the weight of suppressed grief. A single, hot tear spilled over and began trailing down the frozen planes of his face—the first tear he had shed since the night Adrien died.

Adrien’s form shifted as though recognizing the moment, his gaze softening. His spectral hand lifted slowly—not to touch him, but the tear alone. And when that lone droplet of grief and hope finally met Adrien’s fingertip, something changed.

The frost that encased Adrien began to melt. Slowly at first, starting from his fingertips, droplets of water slipped from his hair and his hands, and then all at once, like sunlight spilling into a frozen clearing. The cold dissolved, the bluish shimmer of spectral light replaced by a warm, golden glow that poured over him like an embrace. For the first time in a year, Elias saw Adrien as he was—the broad shoulders, the lively eyes, the boyish grin barely hidden by his stubble. Not a ghost. Not a memory. Just Adrien. Whole.

Adrien turned his face toward him with a look that held a thousand words he could never say and a fierce, unspoken love. For just a moment, Elias reached, hoping against hope to close the impossible space. But Adrien smiled—a sad, understanding smile—before the light wrapped around his form like a collapsing star, drawing him upward, outward, into the infinite. For a second, Elias thought he saw a large open field, sunlit and fertile.

Elias staggered forward, his trembling hands finding nothing but empty air. The frost-filled night was silent now, the Wild Hunt dissolved into the cold winds of eternity. Only Woden remained at the edge of the clearing, his lone eye blazing beneath a crown of frost-encrusted antlers. He lingered in the stillness, his towering form unmoving, that searing eye fixed on Elias as though parsing the depths of his soul’s weight.

“You have understood,” Woden said at last, his voice softer now, almost reverent.

Elias exhaled sharply, his breath frosting the air. His words came unbidden, as raw as the wound lingering deep in his chest. “I have—” He faltered, struggling against his doubt. “I have understood, but… what good has it done me? Adrien is gone. The village—they won’t welcome me. I don’t belong. Not now, after all I’ve seen…”

The corners of Woden’s lips curled faintly, an expression untethered from mockery or pity—a glimmer of something ancient, and knowing, and strangely gentle. “Do you not?” His voice rumbled low, quiet, like a distant roll of thunder through frostbitten hills. “Their place is yours, as it always has been. You stand now where Adrien once stood: bearer of love, keeper of life and memory. Carry it into the world, Elias, and you will belong. Leave no kindness undone, no gift withheld. By your hands, they will know you.”

Elias’s throat tightened, the memory of Adrien’s touch—his warmth, his relentless faith in the worth of all things—flaring painfully, beautifully in his heart. “But my truth—what I saw, what you showed me—I can’t tell them. They would never believe me.”

“Then do not tell them,” Woden replied. His single blazing eye met Elias’s gaze, and in that moment it seemed as though the weight of stars swirled in the dark hollow of its frost-lit flame. “The divine is not bound to their words, nor yours, nor mine. It is not in what you speak, but in what you live. The divine is in life itself—in how you give of yourself. Love freely. Shape the world not with words, but with your actions, and you shall see the light of eternity reflected in the eyes of all who look upon you.”

Elias opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. There was nothing more to say. His trembling hands fell to his sides, and as he finally bowed his head, the icy winds around him shifted, softened. When he looked up again, Woden had already begun to fade, his countless shadows unraveling into frost and windswept ash. It took only a moment for him to disappear entirely. Only the glowing embers of his gaze lingered, burning faintly in the air, like firelight swallowed by dusk.

“You have understood,” Woden said once more, and then he was gone.

Elias stood alone in the clearing. The wind was soft now, the air no longer sharp with the echoes of the Hunt. His chest ached, but not with the hollowed-out grief that had plagued him for so long. His cheeks were damp with tears, tears that didn’t seem to stop. But for the first time since that terrible day, the tears didn’t feel like an ending. Instead, they felt like a thaw—a breaking of the ice that had encased his heart.

He stood there for a long time, crying and laughing softly through the pain, looking up at the stars as they began to emerge from behind the clouds. The world stretched vast and wide before him, and though the burden of loneliness remained, so too did hope.

Elias placed a hand over his heart, breathing deeply to steady himself. “I’ll live,” he whispered, his voice carried away by the soft breeze. “For you, Adrien. For us both.”

And with that, Elias turned toward his cabin and the future. Spring was still some time away, but his heart was not longer frozen as he stepped through the snow.