The First Fall: When Winter Comes

By Daniel Willcocks

The sky is bleeding. The storm has come.

 

A crimson rift washes over the isolated Alaskan town of Denridge Hills, staining the Aurora Borealis the color of blood. To some, an unlikely occurrence. To those in the know, a sign of dark magic at play. When the storm has completed its devastation, who will be left standing?

A social media mogul holds the fate of her ex-lover in her hands. A high school student finds himself miles from home, his constitution and willpower put to the test. A researcher searches for his nephew, his knowledge of the town's local history the only lead toward ending the madness.

 

When the world shrinks around you, the monsters come, and all that's left is an unbending will to survive, who will emerge as the true heroes, and who will be marked as the villains?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Willcocks
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201531362

Book preview

Prologue

And so the sky bled.

Or, so it appeared. The shimmering, waving pulses of magnetism that birthed the Aurora Borealis lost their green hue as a rift broke across the night sky and turned the phenomenon crimson.

It began slowly. Even as his final breaths escaped through cracked, frostbitten lips, it turned. The eerie alien glow that captivated the hearts of millions across the globe receding as the vein was pricked and the red spilled over. Oh, it still danced in the sky, giving the people the show they paid for, performing its ancient ritualistic routine while the sun lapped the world and clawed for its dominance against the sickle moon. Only, this haunting shade of red brought with it much more than the world would ever know, a message and a beacon for darker times to come. Times that Chikuk knew only too well were a simple part of the cogs and gears of nature whirring. Times that Aklaq had birthed himself. A waxing and waning of the tides of life. For every hour of light that comes, darkness must soon have its turn.

She lugged the ancient chieftain now, her delicate frame only just strong enough to lay him on the sled that Aklaq had crafted when he was a much younger man. Stronger and virile. A chieftain of great stature, Aklaq had once been an imposing figure, standing well over six-feet tall with the broad girth that would put the trunks of the great jack pines to shame. An Inuit leader who had conquered some of his tribe’s greatest challenges, leading his Iñupiat subsect through the challenges of clinging on to their heritage, rituals, and values in an ever-modernizing world.

While many of the neighboring Inuit tribes had taken to integrating with the mainlanders, Aklaq had pacified the stubborn advances of this new breed of man and bargained to secure the Iñupiat peoples their own territories and borders along the Alaskan coast. His ancestors had fought for their traditions, and in that regard, the open wound of the sky was his fault, and his fault alone.

The last of a dying breed.

Chikuk snapped the reins, signaling for Kazu to begin his run. The pure white husky was almost invisible against the barren landscape around them, the edges of his fur blending into the snowy tundra. The only true sign of Kazu’s acknowledgment of Chikuk’s command were two dark eyes, ringed with amber as they cast their gaze back at her, and the sudden tension in the reins that jolted the sled into motion once those dark pinpricks faded.

Passage was slow. Chikuk knew that one dog would barely be enough for the journey, yet it wasn’t worth waking the rest of the tribe. Their bearing toward their resting place was located down a slight gradient which bore their advantage, but still, she only wished they could have moved faster. Soon the others would come and claim what was theirs, and when they did, she knew that her only chance of survival was to be absent from their sight. She had dreaded this day for years, ever since her life-partner’s body had shown its first sign of betrayal, evidence of the arthritic parasite that gnawed at his tendons and bones and chipped away at his youth. He fought valiantly, though, in the end, Time claims what it’s owed. Time waits for no being.

As they glided through the silence of the night, Chikuk cradled her partner. She was no young jack herself and holding Aklaq steady sapped what little energy remained. She pulled his hood tighter about his face to shade him from the steady stream of chill air, but already a darkness was staining the flat of his broad nose and twisting lips that had once been pink and lithe to shades of frosty gray. As his organs ground to a halt, so too would the final remnants of warmth seep through his pores until all that was left was a frozen husk of a man. A cocoon sheltering only defunct meat and organs. The soul transitioned into the great beyond, living eternally in the dancing river of red in the sky.

Chikuk afforded herself a single tear, the droplet trailing down her cheek and landing upon Aklaq’s lips. There it remained, a frozen gem of her love and devotion and, though she knew it was near impossible, she could have sworn his lips twitched into the ghost of a smile.

The Aurora continued its metamorphosis above them, staining the sky as it completed its kaleidoscopic transformation. Already the alien greens through which the phenomenon had gained its renown were almost gone, and Chikuk knew that if she was looking at it, so too were they.

A stretch of ancient pines came into view, cutting across the snow in front of them. A foreboding border which crossed in either direction as far as Chikuk could see, and it was here on the edge of the forest that she set up camp, easing Aklaq from her lap and covering him with thick, fur-lined blankets to fend off the coming cold. Her hands, gloved in the thick blubber of seals, dug expertly into the snow. She shoveled and compacted the fine powder into solid bricks which she arranged in their circle as the igloo began to take shape. For many, the igloo may take hours to build, but for the expert craftswoman, which Chikuk certainly had once been, she adjusted the final touches no more than an hour later.

Breathless, she turned her pink nose to the sky. Thick plumes of frozen air streamed from her mouth, masking her view of the Aurora. Around her, flakes of snow had started to descend, a gentle flurry for now, but soon things would elevate. Soon there would be little escape from its attack.

She shooed Kazu away from his bed beside his master. The husky had curled up in the crevices Aklaq’s withering body had offered and, though she was sure his body heat would have helped to ease Aklaq’s passing, she had no heart to spare for the creature while her own was dying inside.

With a gentle tug, she presented Aklaq’s face to the night. She was unsurprised to find that he was dead, staring up into the sky with unblinking marble eyes. Eyes which had watched over these lands for decades, ruling with the iron fist that only an ancient legacy can pass down. Eyes which had seen death, had seen love, had seen unimaginable change across the beating heart of the land. Eyes which had fought for their little island of paradise and won.

But at what cost?

Aklaq’s eyes reflected the undulating crimson lights, an illusion of a bloody fire raging inside the hollow of his skull, twinkling with anger and fear. For a moment Chikuk allowed herself to see him one last time, the imposing authoritative commander of the Iñupiat tribe.

With the tenderness that only love can spare, she leaned toward Aklaq and nuzzled her nose across his, ignoring the icy temperature of his skin on hers.

Kazu whined, padding his paws against the snow as his head crooked toward the forest, eyes grown wide as he sensed the others’ arrival through the trees. She could sense them, too. Time was short and nothing would stop them. Their promise had been made, and now it must be kept. It was their time, now.

For a while, at least.

Delicately placing Aklaq into his final resting place in the snow, Chikuk worked as fast as her body would allow to unpack her meager provisions from the sled and bring them inside the igloo. She had brought enough food for the night, as well as resources to make a fire that would fend off the cold and allow her a barrier from the coming monsters. With trembling hands, she created the first spark and birthed a fire in the center of the igloo. The darkness retreated in a sudden burst of light at the exact moment that Kazu rent the night with a bone-chilling howl.

Chikuk crawled to the igloo’s mouth and urgently ushered the dog inside. Anything left outside the confines of the iced hut would be gone by morning. Kazu reared on his haunches and yapped relentlessly, his stubby fangs bared at the pines. Chikuk afforded a glance in their direction, heart stopping at the sight of the first of their kind. A creature, as tall as it was thin, its bone-white mask leering at them with quiet impatience. In its long, slender fingers it held a stone knife which caught the light of the Aurora and flashed as if in warning.

Chikuk hissed at Kazu and the husky barreled toward her, its courage all but spent. She caught him around the neck and threw him roughly inside before glancing one more time at Aklaq, his body twisted and frozen where he lay. The sled empty of all except him. She only wished she could have dismantled the sled and brought it inside before they began. The journey home would be a difficult one come morning.

If she made it to then.

Chikuk scooped the snow to pack the entrance closed. The creature’s cries summoned more of its kind and their marching feet beat a crunching rhythm through the snow. The wind picked up and whistled through the minute cracks in the igloo. Chikuk wrapped her blankets around herself, drawing Kazu closer. The dog’s ears were flat to his head, his eyes wide. A low whine leaked from his throat like the hissing of air through a damaged pipe. She was certain that Kazu was exploring a map in his mind, using his bestial senses to track the invaders. She wondered how close they were already…

…if they had made it to his body.

Chikuk closed her eyes and listened, regretting it almost instantly. Outside the igloo hard objects clacked against each other. Their footsteps were indelicate and strange utterances came from their throats, spoken in a primal language that Chikuk’s people had forgotten long