The snow had thickened over the village, smoothing rooftops into white humps and softening the paths until each footstep sank with a muffled crunch. Jonas walked with his head bent against the cold, yet his mind was restless. The hush that once comforted him now seemed strained, as though the silence itself was hiding something.
At the tavern, men muttered over ale, voices lowered, eyes darting. Jonas caught fragments: strange dreams, sleepless children, a shadow in the trees. One fisherman swore he had seen Marta at dawn, standing in the snow barefoot, staring at nothing, lips moving soundlessly. She did not remember it later.
Jonas tried to dismiss it as superstition. Villages bred such stories in the winter months. Yet his chest tightened with the same unease he had carried for weeks, a weight that would not lift.
That Sunday, after the chapel bell tolled, he lingered as the villagers filed out. Old Father Aldricht stood by the altar, his shoulders stooped, the thin white hairs of his beard glistening in the candlelight. Jonas approached quietly.
"Father," he said, "have you felt it? The heaviness in the village?"
The priest's eyes, pale and clouded, fixed on him. "You are not the only one who notices," he murmured. "They come to me with their troubles. Dreams of drowning, of being emptied. Waking to tears they cannot explain." His fingers worried at the beads of his rosary. "I have lived through many winters, Jonas. This is not the work of cold or hunger."
"Then what?" Jonas asked.
Father Eirik's gaze flicked toward the dark rafters above. "There are hungers not born of flesh. There are things that drink from us without teeth or blade." His voice trembled. "We are prey in ways we do not see."
A chill slid through Jonas, though the chapel was warm with tallow flames. He almost asked more, but the priest's hands shook so violently on the rosary that Jonas held his tongue.
That evening, he found Sarah near the woodpile behind her cottage. She was splitting kindling, her movements sharp, as though the act itself were a release of something pent inside.
"You should let me help," Jonas called, stepping closer. "Your hands are too fine for this work."
She paused, looking up with a faint smile. "And yours are not?"
He took the axe from her and set another log on the block, striking it cleanly in two. For a while they worked in silence, breath clouding in the air, the steady rhythm of splitting wood the only sound.
At last, Jonas spoke. "The villagers are… different. I hear stories. I see things. And Father Eirik—" He stopped himself, unsure if he should reveal the priest's words.
Sarah stood still, watching him. Her eyes were darker than the sky, and for a heartbeat, he thought he saw something shimmer in them, like light bending through water. Then she blinked, and it was gone.
"What did Father Eirik say?" she asked softly.
Jonas hesitated. "That there are hungers we do not see. That something is draining us."
Her grip tightened on the log she held. He thought she might drop it, but instead she placed it carefully on the pile. "The priest has always feared shadows," she said. "It is his nature."
"Do you think he is wrong?" Jonas pressed.
She turned away, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders. "Perhaps not wrong. But not right, either."
The words puzzled him, half-truths slipping between them like smoke. He wanted to step closer, to catch her chin and hold her gaze until she gave him the truth. But something in her posture —the tautness of her shoulders, the faint tremor in her hands kept him still.
Instead, he touched her arm lightly. "If anything troubles you, Sarah… you do not have to carry it alone."
Her lips parted as though she might speak, but she only looked at him, her eyes shining with something unspoken longing, fear, maybe both. Then she nodded once, sharply, and turned back to the woodpile.
Jonas lingered, watching her in the falling dusk. He had the sense of standing at the edge of a vast dark sea, hearing the waves without seeing them. And though he did not know what waited in those depths, he knew Sarah stood in the water already, half-submerged.
And he could not decide whether to reach for her or run.