A day’s walk behind Cecilia lay Hoelbrak, the Great Lodge of the giant-like, but otherwise quite human-seeming norn. Not a one of them were under eight feet, and some reached almost a foot beyond that. It was difficult not to feel intimidated in their presence, but then, if one had reason to be interested in them, their often solid, muscled builds, the sense of being but a tiny gnat gave way to something more pleasant. The principal problem with people-watching in Hoelbrak was that the norn seemed each to be a well-fed furnace, and so, did not care over-much for insulation or heat, despite living in the bitterly cold Shiverpeaks.

Not that wandering north along the main road improved matters, as such, but she would, at least, not receive any understanding but amused looks for having wrapped herself in four layers. Slim, of no particular bulk for an average human, Cecilia had a need to insulate herself that none of the natives did. Found her fingers always cold, even in the more temperate lands to the west. Divinity’s Reach, or Lion’s Arch. And those same fingers were on the verge of turning into icicles in the bitter winds and whipping torrents of snow so often her companion in the mountains.

When her Captain had ordered her to remain for half a day in Hoelbrak, then, in order to trail behind the main party and watch their backs, watch for anyone creeping after them, it had been a mixed blessing. On one hand, getting to watch two fierce, scarred ladies having a near-naked fistfight in the snow, tattoos, braided hair, charms woven in here and there, taut muscle on display, she had done anything but complain. Warmed her fingers on an over-sized mug of steaming tea, and quietly taken in each move, the two clearly both experienced fighters, even if not quite graceful. But, then, the norn seemed to focus on being effective over being graceful in the way that a meticulous human might be.

Another trudging step. Cecilia let her mind drift back to that morning, wrapped in furs, comfortably breathing misty clouds as she saw the fight to its conclusion. Vicious, brutal, and yet, once it was over, the two were better friends than ever. One wiped the blood from her face, and they both raised an ale in toast to the other’s legend.

Legends. A whole people’s obsession with glory. Cecilia sighed out a misting breath, and took yet another step. What was the point of her trailing after the main party of Lionguard that she was ostensibly with? What threats were left to Tyria, really, and much less the Shiverpeaks? There had been much unrest, but the elder dragons were gone. The gods had retreated. The kryptis demons, even. What danger remained on the road, save the occasional blizzard?

The real danger was her getting trampled by a rogue dolyak pack-beast. Or caught by a crazed, starved wolf. Refusing orders was no way to get promoted, and though she had no real wish to command anyone, she needed the pay hike. To take care of herself, sure, but more so to send more back home to her parents, and smaller siblings, all of whom struggled to make their way in the solitary, human bastion city left: Divinity’s Reach. Were it not for them, she might have been doing something else. Might not have joined the Lionguard, and certainly would not have spent weeks trudging through ice and snow to patrol trade routes. This paid marginally better, though. But, then, if not for this specific patrol route, she also would not have gotten to spend downtime admiring the norn.

Mid-afternoon, she reached the first haven, the first stop on the trade road that curled first north, and then west, from Hoelbrak to Lion’s Arch. A small, square fortress, home to a permanent garrison, and a few local craftsmen. For reasons Cecilia preferred not to spend terribly much time contemplating, she often got her news and gossip from the local norn, rather than her fellow Lionguard. So it was today, too, when she spotted the haven’s smith. A near nine-foot norn woman, with pale hair in a single braid down her back, clad in little more than solid shoes, trousers, and a smith’s apron. Thick, corded with pleasantly bulging muscle, Cecilia allowed herself a few seconds to admire the woman from afar. Spotted a drop of sweat rolling over her forehead, disappearing into one eyebrow.

It took only a little, slightly awkward, conversing to find out that her companions had passed through the haven several hours ago. The smith suspected they would be heading for the Crossroads Haven, a little further up the road, a journey that would take a good day and a half. Nothing too strenuous, even for a human, but the local shaman promised bad weather incoming. Not that the norn would necessarily mind, but, even generating as much heat as relatively little movement did for them, they would have trouble navigating the blinding, whipping snows of a storming blizzard. She had recommended Cecilia stay, wait out the storm. And, seeing an inviting glimmer in the smith’s dangerously blue eyes, Cecilia had almost caved to that suggestion – an invitation she might just have been fooling herself with.

Orders were orders, though, and there was a real chance that she would safely catch up to the others in the Crossroads Haven, as she had been ordered to. So, after loading up with food and drink, she set out northwards once more. Slowly rising wind did what it could to cover the trail with fine-grained snow, glittering with a hundred thousand little crystals of ice, carving into what little of her face occasionally peeked past the cloth mask she wore. Every other part of her, save the eyes and nostrils and mouth, was completely wrapped in layer after layer, and so, she was anything but graceful. Certain that the norn, who wore simple clothes, rarely more than one or two thin layers, found her waddling gait both absurd and humorous. But, then, as her Captain had tersely told her when she was first assigned to patrol the road between Hoelbrak and Lion’s Arch: Better to be a laughing stock and alive than serious and dead.

The last few hours of that day, and then a night in her sturdy tent, at first had her convinced that she had made the right choice. Waking up to find the road basically gone, buried under a layer of snow two feet deep, made her reconsider that previous surety. But, more or less halfway between the two havens, she might as well continue north. Though buried, the landscape still curved in a way that revealed where the road was, and so she could follow it without real issue. The rising wind carried snow everywhere, made it difficult for her to pack her belongings, but, more worryingly, capped visibility. And, as she walked, she could see less and less. The road, which had seemed easy enough to follow but an hour earlier, seemed to shrink from clear perception and meld instead into the endless, snowy landscape.

Even that landscape was, over the next few hours, taken from her. A whirling wall, wind whipping snow up all around her, buffeting her, rose, and though she knew that the sun, painfully sharp, reflected from every snow-covered surface, raged somewhere above, only an endless gray-white – increasingly gray – surrounded her. Closed slowly in around her. Hurricane wind, carrying clouds of snow and ice, turned day into night, until Cecilia no longer quite knew how long she had been walking north. It could be night again. But then she would have reached the haven. Surely.

A notion gripped her, as the wind and cold dug cold claws through her layers of wool and fur and cloth, and she halted. Quite separate from the raging, icy storm outside her, a fresh, piercing coldness materialized in her throat. In her chest. She fell to one knee, digging and hacking through the snow and ice to reach the ground she knew had to be beneath. The well-trodden, packed earth of the road.

It was not there.

Withered grass and moss greeted her instead, in between packed snow and shards of ice. She had wandered off the road, somewhere. Somehow. In some direction. West? East? Was she going back south? In a circle, somehow? She raised her head to look out over the landscape, but the gray darkness, whirling with endless snow and ice crystals, allowed her little visibility. In the midst of the storm, the dunes she could see were largely without texture, rising and falling to no tune, no rhythm, certainly not one suggesting a road beneath.

For a long moment, a kind of lonesome vertigo squeezed Cecilia’s heart. And her mind. The world grew simultaneously massive and uncaring, with her just an insignificant speck somewhere in the Shiverpeaks, and tiny. What existed save the little hole she had dug, her, and the increasing cold? Even wrapped in as many layers as she was, she would not last forever. If she could find shelter, she might last the night. Not in the tent, it would collapse under the weight of snow while she slept, and end her then and there. But what else was there? Continue to walk in a direction she could not be sure was north, potentially getting more and more lost for every step? Supplies ever dwindling?

She could turn around, retrace her steps, but even that would grow perilous in not very long, with the blizzard tearing at her covers, smearing the landscape so that her trail disappeared. And, even assuming she did not end up lost, the trek back to Twinspur would likely kill her, too, given the weather. Shelter was the only option, and none of it was where she sat, slowly getting buried in the filling hole she had dug out of the snow.

Cecilia, after a moment of trying to calm her galloping heart, set out. Forward, a little offset from the direction she had thought was north, trying to watch for shelter. A large tree, a curving cliff. Anything.

Some amount of time later, she did not know how long, only that it was darker still, and that her fingers had begun not just to feel cold, but to feel numb, she neared a shadow in the monochrome wall that was her horizon. Something solid – a cliff. Heaving through the near hip-high snow, she made her way to it. Pressing herself against it, into it, a few minutes passed, as far as she knew. There was no shelter there, the wind ripping at her every moment, only an increasingly flimsy lie told by her desperately searching mind, one that broke down as it met reality. She was still cold. Colder, and colder.

Again, Cecilia set out in search of shelter of any kind. Scouting around herself, in the little bubble of the world which she could see, trying to find safety in a land that offered none. It was dark. Darker, seemingly, for every breath.

In the darkness, there was a shadow. Another one. Behind her. One which seemed to move. Large, and lumbering, the ice and snow broken before it. Did she see thick, gray fur whipping in the wind? Hear a hungering snarl? A giant wolf, perhaps, maddened with hunger, picking up her trail. It was impossible to hide one’s passing if the snow did not allow it, and the thing was too close for her to have a chance of hiding anything.

She upped her speed, half jogging, half throwing herself against the piles and dunes of snow. Thigh-high, hip-high, waist high. Changing all the time, but, as ever more fell from the violent sky, the layer grew deeper with every passing minute. Not something she could make an escape from anyone, or anything, pushing her way through. Another flash of fur, a bleached tooth. Red – blood, from a recent meal? Why go after her, then, in the blizzard?

Cecilia increased her pace, ice cold air digging into her throat and lungs, panic setting in. Her breaths became sobs. Tears prompted by the cold froze against her cheeks. She toppled as she tried to lunge forward into a heavy pile. Scrabbled, clawed for purchase, rising and running. As best she could.

She slipped, and fell.

Again, she rose, crawling more than moving upright through the crystal snow, sinking into it awkwardly each time she set a limb down into it, trying to support her weight against the treacherous surface. A look over one shoulder told her that the shadow was closer still. A truly massive creature, perhaps some rabid shaman trapped in the form of a wolf, seeking the blood and flesh and warmth of the uncorrupted living.

Cecilia crawled forward, one thick mitten coming off in her frantic clawing and crawling. She would have time to regret it later, if there was a later. For the tenth time, she collapsed, one arm plunging into the snow and ice. She pulled it free, rolled, and then found the whole mound of snow she had tried to dig and push through collapsing around, and atop her. The high-pitched, almost whining snarl was very close.

Very close.

She curled up, raising her hands to her head to protect it. Raised her legs to her chin to try to protect her guts. It would do nothing. The monster was close, and in no hurry. Had not exhausted itself trying to catch up to her, recognizing that she was easy prey. One just had to patiently follow, until she was too tired to go on.

There was an impact against her left shoulder, the one facing up, away from the earth. She screamed into the bleak and uncaring dark. Into the snowy nothingness. Tried to roll away. There was nowhere to roll to, save more snow and ice. Nowhere to go. And she could not wrestle whatever it was off her shoulder. Whatever it was.

No teeth. No claws.

Fingers.

A hand.

Someone, not something, had taken hold of her shoulder. A voice. Someone was shouting, but she could not hear it over the shrieking blizzard, could not make out the words. Only the sound that had been a snarl. The red came into view again, when she looked up. Red hair. Deeply red, a kind of richness of color that did not come natural to any human, but this person was not human. It was a norn.

While Cecilia felt every part of her, but particularly her hands, numbing from the cold, this madwoman wore but a simple shirt, and a vest above it. Did not look entirely comfortable, perhaps, but it seemed more to be the wind that bothered her than the cold. Bare arms. Bare arms, in that blizzard. Cecilia shook her head, and then realized that the norn was still trying to communicate with her. Shouting words unheard. Incomprehensible.

Pulling the covers away from her mouth, planting her hands on either side of herself, Cecilia managed to stand unsteadily. She waved the norn down, so that their mouths were closer to each other’s ears, and then formed a cone before her mouth with her hands to shout.

“What!?”

At first, the norn did not appear to understand even that. But, rather than indulging in a thoroughly exhausting, humorless exchange of whats back and forth, the woman took a moment to consider. Using gestures instead of words, she leaned her head to one side and put two hands beneath it, miming sleep.

Sleep. A place to sleep. Somewhere warm, perhaps? Cecilia, though she felt as if her layers and layers of clothes had been punctured by the blizzard in her mad scrabble to escape the wintry wolf that never was, nodded. Wondered how long she would have to trudge after the norn, or what kind of shelter she would encounter. While the over-sized human-like beings were generally friendly, that was not unanimous. Many were rough around the edges. A few were downright rotten. This woman could be one of those. But, then, what choice was there? Die in the blizzard, or only maybe die, following a stranger?