Darkest Days (The Wild Hunt) - 3. Hunters in the Dark

Elias sat hunched in his chair, eyes fixed on the mantelpiece where the wolf figurine stood like a sentinel, its carved body faintly luminous in the firelight. Cold sweat on his forehead reflected the stunted flames that crackled half-heartedly in the hearth, as though the cold were too vast, too consuming to fight. The chill crept into every crevice of the cabin, slithering under the door, seeping through the windows—not merely the winter’s frost, but the oppressive presence of something far older, far crueler.

Adrien had dreamt the wolf into being—a majestic, proud animal, its head tipped heavenward in a howl, its grandeur captured in every stroke of the blade. But when Adrien fell, the carving had been left incomplete. Elias had finished it now, his trembling fingers guiding the knife in a frenzy of grief-fueled determination. What had emerged from the wood at first was beautiful to behold, but now, the more he looked, it bore little resemblance to his lover’s vision. What had once been noble now seemed only monstrous. Lit by the fire’s sputtering glow, the wolf’s maw twisted unnaturally wide, its teeth sharp enough to rend flesh, its frozen howl sounding more like the birth of a curse than a message to the heavens.

Elias shivered and averted his eyes, but a sense of dread coiled in his chest. More than once tonight, he had glanced back at the carving, only to find it altered—or worse, alive, growing. Its shadow clawed across the cabin walls like the crawling specter of something waiting to pounce, and in the silence of the room, he swore he sensed a growl too deep to hear.

This was the last of the twelve nights—nights thick with legend, when the Wild Hunt tore through the land, hunting lost souls bound for damnation, or worse… bound to join forever. Elias turned his gaze to the frost-rimmed window. Outside, the snow-blotted pines were bone-white specters, their crooked limbs reaching into the night sky. The stars were hidden; the moon veiled by clouds as black and viscous as tar.

The wind sharpened, cutting through the silence with frightened whispers—no, not whispers, he thought, but the sound of lost souls fleeing in a panic.

The sound turned his stomach. He froze mid-motion, fingers tightening on the armrests of the chair. The cries were human, he realized—or something likened to human. Faint and far-off, but wavering with desperation. They rose and fell like echoes warped by the storm. As they grew louder, Elias struggled to keep his mind tethered to reason. The images that conjured themselves in his mind—the gaunt faces of the damned, staggering and crawling across the snow, their gaping mouths void of breath, empty of mercy—they pulled at his sanity, drawing him deeper into the same feverish delirium that had shadowed him since Adrien’s death.

And then, the sound of hoofbeats.

The cries were swallowed by it—a terrible thunder rolling through snow that barely muted the noise. The weight of the hoofbeats, this time, was not faint or distant. No, they struck with the force of cut down trees, drawing nearer with each pound of heart against ribcage, nearer until—

A crack.

Like the splitting of a tree trunk in a storm, the cabin seemed to shudder at its very core. The roof groaned, and the walls flickered as if caught between worlds, their solidity wavering like vapor on a frozen breath. Darkness boiled through the room; spectral riders erupted from the walls, their forms coalescing from shadow before plunging ahead, heedless of hearth or timber. The door buckled inward, a blizzard exploded into the room.

The Hunt tore through Elias’s refuge, a deathless cavalcade of ghostly riders and their nightmarish hounds. Like torn banners caught in a storm, their cloaks streamed behind them, tattered and steeped in shadow. Helms glinted with frost as old as the earth itself. Their faces—or the hollows where their faces might have been—were obscured by the black fog that clung to them and twisted in the air like unyielding smoke. The hounds that bounded alongside them were monstrous—creatures born of ice and fire, with eyes that burned like embers caught in snowdrifts and muzzles slick with gore. The windows shivered in their frames from their deafening howls.

But they were not alone.

Through the maelstrom oozed others—grotesque shapes that seemed to writhe and twist against the air itself, as though their very existence defied the natural order. Their faces were misshapen masks of horror, jagged and leering, with gaping mouths that yawned wider than should have been possible. Spikes and antlers, clawed and crooked, jutted from their heads, scraping against the shimmering threshold between this world and the next. Their forms bristled with coarse fur and frost-bitten sinew, but wherever they stepped, the snow and sky behind them boiled black with shadow. Their claws—long, grasping things—clutched at the air, reaching, always reaching, searching for something unseen.

And then came the cries. Loud wailing. Elias heard them even above the thunder of hooves, the tearing yelps of the hounds, and the uncanny bellows of the malformed things interwoven between the riders. They were not animal sounds; they were human—high-pitched wails and broken screams, voices split with terror and despair. The Hunt was driving them, like wild beasts, through the frozen expanse, tearing them loose from somewhere unseen and herding them forward with the relentless cries of their hunting horns. The noise burrowed into Elias’s skull, needles of sound that sent a splintering fire through his mind.

For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he saw them—figures writhing in the midst of the storm, spectral and pale, their arms cast wide in supplication or anguish. Ethereal forms, half-transparent but unmistakably human, stumbled ahead of the riders and their monstrous company, running, driven to exhaustion, their pleading cries swallowed by the unearthly cacophony. No-one escapes the inescapable. The Hunt’s hounds darted through them, their glowing eyes wild with triumph as their prey faltered and fell.

Elias cowered in his chair, wishing it would leave, as the Hunt surged through and past him, their howls and hoofbeats sinking into the marrow of his bones. It was a storm of death made flesh—a nightmare barreling through the thin boundary between this world and the next. Yet not a single rider turned toward him. Not a single hound bared its teeth at him. Across the room and through the hearth they raced, their presence at once undeniable and intangible. They passed as though Elias were no more than a shadow. Still, the frostbitten mist they left behind seemed to leech what little warmth remained in him, and the distant cries echoed in his ears long after the last shadow faded into the winter night.

He gasped for breath, shaking violently, the cold now bone-deep. The night around him was silent, except for—

A snap. A wrenching, growling sound.

Elias whirled, his eye catching on the torn line where he had hung the washing. Shit, everyone knows you mustn’t leave your washing hanging or the Wild Hunt could get caught up in it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The wind tore noiselessly through the tattered remnants of line and cloth, but tangled there, amidst the ruin, was a hound. Not one of flesh, but of the spectral kind that led the Hunt. Its body was monstrous—its shaggy fur the color of ash smeared with streaks of red, as though steeped in decades of blood. The wolf figurine, Elias thought wildly. It was the same, more the same with every breath he took. This was no mere beast; this was something far more ancient, far more malicious.

The hound growled low, its spectral eyes blazing as it twisted against the rope, snarling at its restraint. For a moment, it met Elias’s gaze, and the cabin dissolved around them. All that remained was the void of winter—a snowfield that stretched endlessly, and the stark, black silhouettes of trees.

Elias should have fled, but something otherworldly pulled at him. Slowly, his legs seemed to move of their own accord. He approached the beast, hands trembling as they reached for the entanglement. Frost rimed his fingertips the moment he touched the line, his breath fogging in the frigid air. The hound stilled—its blazing eyes fixed on him warily, almost knowingly. A moment stretched between hunter and prey, between captive and savior. Finally, the rope fell slack, and the hound wrenched free.

For a heartbeat, the beast lingered—its nose brushing Elias’s frostbit fingers. Then it turned and leapt straight through the solid wood of the door, its spectral form phasing out into the wintry night beyond.

The howl came moments later, deep and resonant, its echoes of the horn rippling down Elias’s spine. He turned, and through the hole the Hunt had left in his cabin wall, he saw it—standing atop a snowy rise beneath the blackened sky, glowing faintly, beckoning him forward. The icy wind whispered his name in Adrien’s voice, woven into the howl like a mourner’s dirge.

And something in him—something fragile and wounded and aching beyond words—began to break.

“Adrien,” he murmured into the shadows, his voice hoarse as frost coiled on his lips. The pull in his chest was undeniable now, as immutable as the tide. His choices had frozen over long ago, locked beneath layers of grief and frost.

The Hunt waited. The hound howled again.

And Elias, at last, stepped out into the night.

As Elias stepped outside, the cold hit him like a physical blow, sharp and punishing. His breath froze in his throat, erupting in useless plumes that faded into the vast, frozen void. The spectral hound was there, standing atop the rise just beyond the ruined cabin, its glowing form crackling faintly in the night like the afterimage of lightning burned into eyes. It met his gaze for the briefest of moments; then, without sound or warning, it turned and sprinted into the darkness, disappearing into the skeletal pines that lined the edge of the forest.

For a moment, Elias hesitated, the shattered remnants of the cabin groaning behind him as the icy wind played over what remained. He tried to call out—to demand answers from the thing that had disturbed his fragile solitude—but no sound came. The words dissolved on his tongue, swallowed by the immense weight of the Hunt that still churned around him, even now.

From the sky above, the ghostly riders tore through the night like a storm given shape. Their mounts, terrible things with hooves that sparked blue fire and fangs that dripped ichor, plunged through the air as if it were water. Hounds, monstrous and unbridled, bayed not with their throats but with the sound of rending ice. At times, the riders seemed solid and terrible, the shapes of their armor cutting sharp-edged wounds in the fabric of the night. But at other moments, they became fleeting wisps of shadow, their bodies unraveling like smoke.

And beneath it all—beneath the hoofbeats and the howls and the chorus of horns that rent the stillness above—was a sound that made Elias’s heart twist and falter: the screams of the lost. Cries filled with agony, desperation, a naked terror so profound it reduced them to little more than wails of wind. Now and then, he thought he saw them—half-formed figures clawing at the snow, their faces blurred by frost, their eyes nowhere yet everywhere.

The hound’s howl broke through the din, a sound both commanding and mournful, and Elias turned, his gaze catching the faint shimmer of its spectral form threading through the trees. It wanted him to follow.

With trembling legs that felt brittle as glass, Elias pursued, his boots crunching in the deep snow. His breath came in shallow heaves now, yet inside him, something burned hot despite the encroaching cold—a compulsion as primal as the guilt and longing that had stalked his every waking step for the past year. The hound moved just beyond sight, its faint glow flickering between trunks stripped bare by winter. It weaved through the pines, leading him downward into the shadows of the forest where moonlight dared not intrude.

The chaos of the Hunt followed him. High above, the riders surged from one pocket of sky to the next. Branches shook as unseen shapes tore through the canopy, and the infernal laughter of riders mingled with the ragged wails of the damned. On the ground, Elias heard the roar of something monstrous behind him, a deep, rumbling bellow that vibrated the air itself. He dared not turn to see what pursued; he could feel its malice like claws trailing over his back. Yet for all his terror, his steps never faltered, never slowed.

The ghostly hound led him deeper, until the trees thinned, their gnarled silhouettes giving way to a familiar hollow—a stretch of land beneath the pines that was starkly bare, cleared even of snow by some quiet reverence. The grave.

Elias froze as he crested the last rise. There, under the pines where Adrien had been buried, the winter moon cast its pale light upon an impossible sight. Adrien stood there—or something that wore his shape. His body was limned in an unearthly glow, not unlike the spectral light of the Hunt, and his frostbitten features were both vivid and distant, as if caught between the world of memories and dreams. His hair, so familiar even now, moved faintly in an absent wind. All was still.

Elias stumbled forward, his heart tearing itself apart in his chest. “Adrien!” he cried, and the name split the frozen air, ragged with a year of silence. All at once, the sounds of the Hunt grew distant, muted, as if to give his plea the stage.

Adrien turned towards him, slowly, almost dreamily, as if caught unaware. His glassy blue eyes scanned the clearing, narrowing slightly, then widened with something that might have been recognition—or the memory of it. He seemed confused, questioning, lost in a way that made Elias ache more than words could.

“Adrien!” Elias called again, stronger this time, as though sheer force of will could bridge the chasm between them. And when Adrien’s gaze found his, Elias’s desperation burst free, his grief crashing over him in waves that propelled him forward.

He staggered toward the spectral figure, heedless of the frost that bit deeper, of the tears freezing to his face, of the way his legs nearly buckled with every step. Adrien stood very still, his hands limp at his sides, his face caught between sorrow and something unreadable. And then, just as Elias reached out—just as his fingers almost brushed the edges of what he hoped might still feel warm—everything stopped.

The world froze—not in the creeping cold of winter or the pause of hesitation, but in an almighty stillness that went beyond natural law. The howls of the Hunt, the crack of branches, even the breath of the wind—all vanished in a single heartbeat, leaving only silence. Elias stood suspended, his hand hovering, his heart pounding in a suffocating void.

And then came the voice.

It was neither a whisper nor a roar, neither male nor female, but a resonance that settled into the marrow of Elias’s bones. It did not come from the trees or the earth or the sky—it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“Do not touch him.”