I did not remember falling asleep.
I remembered snow.
I remembered headlights smeared across a windshield and the violent certainty that a road should not have been where it was. One second there had been winter break, my phone buzzing in my pocket, my mother's voice waiting for me back home. The next there was only white; white sky, white breath, white forest swallowing every sound.
Then I heard running.
I crouched in a thicket heavy with frost, afraid to breathe too loudly. Ahead of me, a boy and a girl crashed between the trees. They looked my age, maybe a little older. The boy kept glancing over his shoulder as if terror itself were chasing him. The girl stumbled once, twice, and only stayed on her feet because he dragged her upright by the wrist.
Two adults followed them at an easy pace.
That was the worst part. They were not panicked. They were not even hurrying. The man wore his confidence like a smile. The woman moved with the stillness of someone who already knew how the night would end.
"Don't let them reach the road," the woman said.
The road appeared suddenly through the trees, black and wet between drifts of snow. An old car waited there with its engine running. The boy shoved the girl into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and threw himself behind the wheel. Tires screamed. Slush spat against the trunks. For a heartbeat I thought they had made it.
Then the car clipped a buried stone, skidded sideways, and crashed into a pine.
Metal shrieked. Glass burst. Snow leaped into the air in a glittering cloud.
The boy sagged over the wheel. Blood darkened the cracks spreading through the windshield. The girl crawled from the passenger side, half-conscious, one hand reaching toward him.
The man caught her by the collar and drove her face-first into the snow.
"Found you," he said pleasantly.
She tried to rise. The woman stepped in and struck the base of her neck with two fingers. The girl went limp at once.
My body forgot how to move.
The man turned.
For an instant I told myself he could not possibly have seen me through the brush and dark and falling snow. Then his gaze found mine with lazy certainty.
"Well," he said, "that solves another problem."
I should have run. Instead I froze as he walked over, boots crunching softly. Up close, he did not look like a murderer. He looked like a traveler in an expensive coat, amused by bad weather.
"You saw too much," he said. "If you want to die in this forest, keep crouching. If not, come with us."
The woman had already lifted the unconscious girl onto her shoulder. She gave me one measured glance. No anger. No urgency. Just judgment. As if she had already decided resistance would be stupid.
My legs obeyed before my mind did.
We walked for what felt like hours through a forest that seemed determined never to end. Snow blew sideways through the trees. More than once I nearly lost sight of them and panicked at the thought of being left alone. The man never offered comfort. He only slowed just enough to let me keep up.
At last the trees opened.
A village lay in the clearing, half-buried beneath winter. Lanterns burned in the square. Smoke rose from low roofs and flattened under the wind. And every person in that square, every man, woman, and child, was kneeling in the snow with their heads bowed.
At the front stood an old man in white furs, leaning on a staff made from pale wood.
"Tonight," he rasped, "the prophecy is fulfilled. The Winter Demon returns to us."
Something cold moved inside my chest.
I had no reason to understand him. I had never seen this place, never heard those words, never belonged among those bowed heads and lantern shadows. Yet the truth arrived whole and merciless all the same.
They were not waiting for a monster in the mountains.
They were waiting for me.