VOWBOUND

“Ah, fuck!” Ryan choked out, his breath shuddering in the freezing mountain air.

“How are we supposed to find anything on this damned mountain?” he said, the frustration in his voice nearly lost beneath the wind.

“You know Eclipse wouldn’t send us out here if it wasn’t important,” Daniel replied.

“Yeah? Well, we aren’t even a rescue team. We’re just a ragtag bunch of scouts,” Ryan muttered.

Neil gave a short, bitter laugh. “The rescue team came back battered and bruised two days ago. No way the higher-ups are sending them back out now.”

“The least we can do is the bare minimum,” Daniel said.

Ryan muttered something under his breath and kept moving, his annoyance plain even through the scarf wrapped around his mouth and the thick layers on his body. None of them wanted to be here. The mountain ate sound, swallowed distance, and turned every shout into something small and pathetic.

They stayed close as they moved through the snow, calling out into the white.

“Hello!”

“Can you hear us?”

“Anyone there?”

Their voices vanished almost instantly.

Then the ground beneath Ryan gave way.

He dropped as if the mountain had opened its mouth and taken a bite out of the earth. Snow collapsed around him, dragging him down in a choking surge. He flailed, one boot vanishing, then the other, then his legs, the powder packing around his waist with terrible force.

“Ryan!” Daniel shouted.

Daniel and Neil threw themselves flat and caught his hands. They pulled with everything they had, grunting with the effort, their boots digging trenches into the snow.

Ryan screamed as his shoulders stretched under the strain.

“Pull!” Daniel yelled.

Ryan clawed at the edge of the hole, fingers scrabbling uselessly at the slick crust. His heart hammered against his ribs. The cold bit through every layer and sank into his bones.

Then a roar tore across the mountain.

It was not a sound meant for human ears. It rolled through the trees, deep and cavernous, a rupture in the silence so violent it seemed to shake the snow loose overhead. Daniel froze. Neil went pale.

The sound came again, louder, closer in feeling if not in distance, and something in both of them broke.

They let go.

Ryan’s hands slipped from theirs in a flash of numb skin and panic.

“No— wait!” he gasped.

But they were already scrambling backward, abandoning him with the blind, animal terror of men who had heard something they could not afford to see. Their feet slipped, they stumbled, then ran, vanishing between the trees without looking back.

Ryan stared after them in horror, his body half-buried, his breath coming in ragged bursts.

For a moment he could not move. Then survival took over.

He dug his fingers into the snow, clawing and wrenching with desperate force. Pain ripped through his arms. His lungs burned. At last he burst free, collapsing face-first onto the surface, gasping so hard it hurt.

When he lifted his head, the mountain was empty.

No Daniel. No Neil.

Only their tracks, torn across the snow in frantic lines, the marks already blurring at the edges where the wind had started to cover them.

Ryan pushed himself upright, shaking so badly he could barely stand. He followed the prints until they disappeared into the trees, as though the people making them had simply been lifted from the earth and carried away.

The silence after that was worse than the roar.

That was when he saw the dog.

It stood under the trees, nearly invisible against the snow except for the eyes — a pale amber, bright and unblinking. Its white fur blended with the mountain so completely it looked less like an animal and more like something the snow had grown by accident.

A dog meant warmth. Shelter. People.

Ryan swallowed hard. “Hey.”

The animal did not retreat. It only stared at him, head slightly tilted, then turned and walked into the woods, stopping once to make sure he was following.

Ryan hesitated only a second before going after it.

The forest changed around him as he walked.

Broken branches littered the ground. Claw marks gouged the tree trunks, deep enough to expose dark wood beneath. The farther he went, the more the air thickened, as if he were moving through something old and stale and unclean. No birds. No movement. No wind. Just that dead, watching silence.

Then the smell hit.

Iron.

Thick, wet, unmistakable.

Ryan slowed, dread crawling up his spine. The dog moved ahead without hesitation, calm as a guide leading him home. At last the woods opened into a clearing, and the animal slipped behind a boulder. Ryan followed and dropped beside it, peering around the stone.

His stomach turned so violently he nearly gagged.

Bodies hung from the trees.

Not just dead, but displayed. Limbs twisted at ugly angles. Faces split by frost and blood. Some of them had been there long enough for the skin to darken and stiffen. Others were fresher, still dripping in the cold, the blood black and shiny where it had frozen in streaks down their clothes.

In the center of the clearing burned a bonfire, flames licking greedily at a heap of wood blackened with soot and something darker.

Behind it yawned the cave.

Something moved in the dark.

At first Ryan only saw shape. A massive outline. Too tall. Too broad. Then it stepped into the firelight and the shape became a thing, and the thing became a nightmare.

An oni.

Ryan had heard the stories. Everyone had. Old warnings whispered by older people, tales meant to keep children close and travelers cautious. Red demons. Horned butchers. Monsters that stalked the mountains and left bodies hanging in the trees.

But no story had ever prepared him for this.

The oni was huge — nearly nine feet of muscle and raw violence, its skin a deep, wet red as if it had been flayed and left open to the cold. Horns curved from its skull like broken blades. Its face was broad and cruel, its eyes too large and too still, like something ancient had learned how to look human and hated the effort. Its mouth was packed with teeth so large and uneven they jutted past its lips, giving it the shape of a predator trying to wear a person’s face.

It did not stand in the clearing.

It belonged there.

The snow clung to its shoulders and melted in red-tinged rivulets where the heat from its body reached the air. The trees around it stood motionless, as if waiting for permission to move. Even the fire seemed to burn around it instead of in front of it. The mountain had not summoned the oni.

It had made room for it.

The dog beside Ryan did not whine. Did not bare its teeth. It watched the creature with quiet, untroubled recognition, as if it had found the place it was meant to bring him to.

The oni bent and lifted Daniel and Neil’s bodies with one enormous hand, bringing them close to its face. It inhaled slowly, deeply, with almost obscene satisfaction, as though the scent of blood and cold flesh pleased it more than the meat itself.

Then it made a low, guttural sound that might have been laughter.

The dog stepped out from behind the boulder.

“Wait!” Ryan whispered.

The animal trotted toward the oni with its tail up, loose and eager, and rubbed against its legs like a faithful hound returning to its master. The oni lowered its head a fraction, not in surprise, but in acknowledgment, as if the dog were part of the routine, part of the mountain, part of the hunt.

Then the dog looked back.

Its eyes fixed on Ryan.

Ryan had a single stupid second to understand.

Then the dog sprang.

Its teeth sank into his leg with a wet, tearing snap of pressure and pain. Ryan screamed as the animal yanked him out from behind the boulder and dragged him across the snow. The bite did not let go. Blood flooded hot against the cold, soaking into his pants and freezing almost instantly at the edges.

He clawed at the ground, fingernails ripping against ice. His other leg kicked wildly. Snow sprayed into his face. The dog hauled him forward with relentless strength, each jerk of its body sending fresh pain through his wounded leg.

The oni watched.

Not enraged. Not alarmed.

Interested.

Ryan’s eyes met its own, and every muscle in his body locked with a sickening jolt of certainty. The dog was still wagging its tail, still dragging him toward the monster as if it were proud of the gift it had brought home.

The oni reached down.

For a split second, a pale rectangular box flickered at the edge of Ryan’s vision.

“1.7 million survivors remaining.”

Then the oni’s hand closed around his throat.

The grip was massive, impossibly strong. Ryan felt his airway crush inward under the pressure. His hands flew up uselessly, fingers clawing at red skin slick with heat.

The world narrowed to crushing force and panic and the terrible calm in the oni’s face.

Then came the crack.

His neck snapped with awful finality.

Ryan’s body went slack at once, dead weight dragged through the snow like broken meat. The oni let him fall beside the hanging corpses, as if disposing of something no longer worth noticing.

The dog sat nearby, tail still wagging.

The mountain, the fire, the bodies, the forest — everything remained exactly as it was.

As if Ryan had never been there at all.