Drack Drakeshield – The Ghosts of Winter

The air outside the Eastward Estate is cool, but it is not his cold.

Drack has spent his life walking in true winter, where the ice does not melt, where the wind howls like a starving beast, where the bones of the foolish are buried beneath layers of frost and regret. The nights here are comfortable, almost warm. The kind of cold that only lingers at the edges, unable to truly take root.

It makes what he sees tonight all the more unnatural.

The Stranger in the Fog

It begins near midnight, when most of the camp has gone quiet. The Moving Mountain Clan still works under the pale torchlight, their low voices murmuring as they haul stone and timber. Drack should sleep. He does not.

Instead, he stands at the edge of the camp, staring out toward the distant tree line, where a low mist rolls in from the hills.

A figure stands there. Tall. Unmoving. Watching.

Drack does not reach for his weapon. Not yet. Something about the shape is wrong—familiar, but wrong.

He steps forward. The mist clings to his boots.

The figure does not move, not at first. Then, slowly, it tilts its head. Not a nod, not a gesture of recognition—just an unnatural shift, as if adjusting to get a better look at him.

Then it speaks.

"Winterheat."

A name from another life. His name.

Drack's muscles tense. His hand grips the haft of his axe. He steps forward again.

And the figure is gone.

Only mist remains. Only silence.

Drack exhales slowly, his breath curling in the cool air. His golden eyes scan the trees, searching for something—anything—that will tell him this was real. That this was not a ghost from his past, stepping forward to remind him of what he left behind.

But there is nothing.

Only the cold.