Winter Blunderland
Snow had begun falling in the last half hour, thick and heavy, dulling the sounds of the dead world. It swirled and sashayed, drifting to the earth in a delicate ballet meant only for her eyes, a secret that she shared with the sky. It was beautiful in a hypnotic way and she paused for a moment to stare in wonder. She didn’t stand still for long. The winter chill was biting. In spite of the nonexistent wind, the icy grasp of the season clutched at her, nipping at her nose, her ears, her fingers, hoping to seep into her core and rob her of warmth. Every breath she took was a ghost escaping her heart to flutter in the frigid world, crystallize, and scatter into oblivion.
She ached to be like her temporal breath.
Instead, she slogged through muted streets, past dead shells of ancient vehicles haphazardly parked along the crumbling, snow-dusted curbside. They looked pristine and new under the guise of fresh snow. She could hardly make out the gutted buildings that rose around her, channeling her down a narrow, lifeless valley in the heart of the abandoned city, lost in the hazy white that scrubbed the world clean. Each structure loomed like specters in the shadows, dreadful in their impenetrable mystery. The hour was late and the sun was sinking but it was already dark. With every step, the day’s light dimmed further.
She slowed to a stop beneath a diligent but pointless streetlight. For a brief moment, like a fleeting dream, she wondered what it would have been like to walk down this street, Before. What did masses of people, noisy traffic, and metropolises alight with electricity feel like? Did they imagine that their world would vanish in a cataclysm of magic with an invasion of divine conquerers? Could they ever have guessed what it would take to survive, After? With a weary sigh, she closed her eyes and eased back her head. She touched her left hand to her beanie and slipped it off, then raked her right hand through her hair, momentarily distracted by the rubber palms of her fingerless glove tugging greedily at her blonde roots.
A chill shivered down her spine, having nothing at all to do with the cold. Her eyes snapped open and she scanned the thick, speckled air, searching in vain for that which her senses alerted her. She could see nothing, though the soft crunch of snow whispered past her ear behind and to her left, sounding as if it came from across the street.
She whirled and stared, her lavender eyes powerless in the precipitous murk. Glimpsed through gentle flurries of white, she saw the snow-dusted, dwarfish shape of an old blue US mailbox, the prostrate husk of an extinct Goodwill behind that, and a flipped-over pickup truck with tires to the skies like a dead insect. In the darkening world, even these forsaken sights were hard to see. She cursed herself for not checking her elemental compass, but right now, to pull her eyes from her surroundings could prove a fatal mistake.
The crunching footsteps stopped. A deep whiffing noise, like enlarged nostrils sniffing at the ghost of a scent, murmured. She stood absolutely still and gazed around her, trying to determine from which direction the sound came. All she saw were her own lonely footprints. The snow was already beginning to erase this insubstantial sign of her existence.
A dark shape moved to her right, across the street, past the ancient Goodwill store and the overturned pickup. If she squinted, she could just make out an alleyway. She stared at that spot, where she’d seen the movement, but whatever it was had vanished as quickly as it had darted past her vision. The crunch of footprints resumed, more hesitantly than before, and this time she swore that it was drawing nearer. It was coming toward her.
Adrenaline surged to life, electrifying her body. She gulped, retreated backward, fists clenching, and glared. She should be afraid, she should run and hide, but all she wanted was to kill it.
A hulking grey shape lumbered into reality before her. Its body was immense, top heavy, with broad, rounded shoulders, and a shaggy head. Its arms swung like meaty pendulums around a narrow waist, and its legs were like small tree trunks. With every step that it took, snow puffed and crunched, and it uttered a soft grunt, almost like a growl, as if its own weight was too much to bear. It wobbled from side to side, a swagger less for attention than for a strange counterbalance to its enormous weight. White eyes materialized in its great, flat head, twin glowing orbs that locked on her with unwavering accuracy and didn’t even blink. It crunched to a stop about fifteen feet from her position. The two of them stared at each other.
She knew, at less than five and a half feet tall, that she had nothing on this colossal brute, who, by her rough estimation, capped out at a height of over ten feet. She had to crane her neck already to look into those alien eyes, and they were hardly standing in front of each other. If it came down to a duel, she did not stand a chance.
Still, she did not move. Wordlessly, she willed the monster to attack. Gritting her teeth, ignoring her erupting heartbeat, she slowly loosened her left fingers, extended her hand with palm up, her beanie draped and dangling from her hand, clamped in place by her thumb, and beckoned. With her free right hand, she reached around to the small of her back and tugged free her knuckle knife, blade down.
Either the beast did not understand or it chose to ignore her. It breathed deeply, its shoulders rose and fell, and then something else crunched through the snow behind it. The sound was less than a whisper; it was louder than thunder. A second brute, even larger than the first, wobbled into view. It stood at least half a foot taller than its companion and lumbered out from behind it to its right, her left, jerking her eyes from the first with a spike of fear. She blinked and realized that she truly was afraid, a fact that she had managed to overlook with the first brute. She gulped.
The second monster came fully into view and took another step closer. She was now facing two enormous, unidentified beasts, hulking grey shadows in the twilit murk of dense snowfall, locked in place by two pairs of frosty white orbs that pierced her like lances. She began to shiver, but not from the cold.
As she watched, paralyzed by fear and indecision, the one on her left, the bigger brute, began to crouch. It never took its glowing white eyes off her diminutive form. She couldn’t help the involuntary squeak that popped out of her mouth and inwardly berated herself for allowing her fear to show. Her mouth ran dry. A cold sweat broke out on her exposed brow. She flexed her fingers around the knuckle knife and spread her legs, bending at the knees, preparing herself for battle. Scarlet lines wormed their way across her skin, emitting pale streams of smoke. Heat built inside her. She clamped her mouth shut against the rising temperatures and felt her eyes burn. They glowed a brilliant, flickering orange.
She was afraid of what this beast might do next and doubted her ability to defeat it, but she would certainly deliver one of the most spectacular battles of her life. And if she was really lucky, this thing might actually kill her.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Luck understood this was Am Fear Liath Mòr, Big Grey Men, but she’d never encountered them before. Under normal circumstances, she avoided winter fairies, usually traveling south for the winter before they swooped from the north and took over in a wave of frost and ice. Now she had no choice. Trapped in their winter wonderland, she had to brave the elements and hope to survive one more day. In that respect, life hadn’t been totally disrupted by recent events.
The grey man roared, a sound like a strangled cow, and lunged forward with astonishing speed. It barreled through the snow, coming into sharper focus than before, and for the first time, Luck could discern thick silvery fur coating its enormous body. Wide hands with blunt fingers shot forward as if for an embrace, and its neanderthal face, a subdued ape-like nose and jagged yellow teeth protruding from its deeply under-bitten maw, yawned open. There was no smoke issued from its furious bellow. It was as cold as the world around them.
Luck had enough time to dive to the right, barely managed to duck beneath those thick, elongated arms, and then felt herself heaved skyward in a bone-crushing grip as the smaller grey man met her like a charging troll. The breath burst from her lungs in a puff of smoke, and the fairy thrust her up and over its shoulder with a triumphant roar. She arced over its broad back, her entire upper side flipping facedown into its musky fur. She wasted no time slamming her knuckle knife deep under the shoulder blade. Flesh hissed. She shrieked in rage. Fire surged from her mouth like a flamethrower to splash in a blinding orange cascade along the thing’s unprotected back. It howled, arched forward, and flung Luck away like a dangerous animal.
Her fiery assault ceased with a gasp. She felt the knife rip free and then she plummeted. She didn’t see the car shell coming until she plowed onto the roof with a hollow thud that knocked the wind from her lungs and sent a puff of white into the air. It sizzled and hissed wherever it made contact with her skin.
A whoosh sounded, followed by a sickening slurp, and one of the grey men screamed. The air vibrated from the sound, the snow swirling outward in a spherical ripple around the wounded fairy, and Luck cringed. She pressed her hands to her ears. Confused, she wondered what was happening.
Something big and fast swooped low overhead, snow spiraling madly away from the flapping wingtips. It was too dark to see what it was, but she felt the wind as it soared past, sending a whirling cloud of snow into her face. Luck rolled off the car, away from the melee, and dropped to the frozen earth onto her all-fours. The cracked pavement scraped her knees through the soft snow, and her bones jarred upon impact, stinging through her gloves. She grunted and craned her neck, scanning the heavens, but from her new angle, she could see nothing.
The grey men loosed matching incensed roars and the air gusted as the flying assailant doubled back. She heard another whoosh, like something slicing through the snow-filled heavens, and the second grey man bellowed in pain. The car behind which she crouched rocked violently as something heavy slammed into it. A mini avalanche of snow buried Luck before the car hopped the curb and rammed into her. Broadsided, she tumbled and scrambled to regain her footing, every inch of her body throbbing.
The big grey man slumped on the car, a shaft of wood longer than Luck’s leg poking from its back. Its glowing white eyes spotted her, they narrowed, and it roared again. The thing planted its broad hands on the car, the left one on the roof, the right one lower, on the trunk, and heaved itself up. It was so heavy that the dead vehicle creaked and the metal groaned. It shivered and the trunk actually crunched and popped open as it caved in around the grey man’s massive palm. Once it stood back up, the grey man reached its right hand over the top of the car, leaned over to hook its fingers through the missing windows, and levered the entire car up from beneath with its left hand. The dented trunk flapped open with the movement. The beast shrieked in outrage and whirled.
The car swept through air with a tremendous gust of wind that swirled through the falling snow. Luck threw an arm over her head in a futile attempt to protect herself and dropped flat, bombarded by violent wind as the car veered over her, and the big grey man loosed the automobile missile in an awkward hurtle across the street. Spinning in a tight axis and slinging whatever snow still remained on it in a disintegrating white spiral, the vehicle left earth’s embrace and rocketed toward the flying assailant.
Great, tapered wings whipped open, the dark, sleek body twisted, and it arced to its left, Luck’s right, away from the incoming missile. Clearing the car, the flying thing was safe—until the second big grey man shrieked from Luck’s left, leaped into the air, a single quivering shaft protruding from its left lower back, arms raised overhead in a double-fisted pound, and brought all of its momentous rage down onto the car with a deafening crunch of metal. The spinning car changed velocity, careened to the right, following the flying menace, and even though the vehicle had slowed down and was now flopping upside down instead of merely spinning around, trunk slinging open midair, the airborne attacker had no chance. The car collided with the winged beast, a twang and a whoosh sounded, and as it plunged to the earth with an ear-splitting scream to be crushed in a black splash beneath the falling car, the big grey man, still airborne itself, now coming in for a landing, lurched backward and crashed to its back with another shaft protruding from its throat. The first shaft spiked through its back to burst from its front with a dark spurt and shuddered like a freshly-hurled spear. The grey man flopped weakly but didn’t otherwise move.
Another thing swooped down from the sky to blur through the falling snow. The surviving grey man roared, doubled over in its wrath, mighty fists clenched, and lashed out after it, glaring in defiance at the new flying menace. It missed by yards. A third phantom swirled around behind the grey man. Attention divided, it whirled, leaped, tried again to swipe one from the air, and missed a second time.
Luck suddenly realized that this battle no longer concerned her. Even though her skin was fractured, glowed a molten crimson, and smoked into the frosty air, impossible to overlook in the darkness and the cold, she had to escape now while everything else was distracted.
She rolled to her feet, turned her back to the embattled Fey, and sprinted into the dark night. She jammed her beanie back in place, gritted her teeth, willed her flaming cracks to seal over again, and gripped her knuckle knife in a stranglehold. Huffing and running blindly, she darted to the right for a block, turned left down an alley for two more blocks, and then turned right and went straight until she couldn’t run anymore. The bellowing grey man’s voice carried for quite some time. It was putting on an epic fight, Luck guessed, and there was a part of her that wished she could have stayed to see it. She ran on.
