Some Scion struggled to find their place among The Great Dichotomy. Nicholas Iceblown, The Prince of Gifts, made a name for himself during the war by providing supplies to both sides of the conflict. Demophistopholese, Betrayer of Truths, made enemies of his brothers and sisters in both Summer and Winter's camps with his lies and deceit. Being the children of both stewards, each Scion held the capacity for Light and Darkness. Therefore the side they each chose was a reflection of their hearts and desire.

-The Third Verses of Creation

A desperate cry pierced the night like a dagger to the heart, accompanied by cruel taunts and cackles. Jordan opened his eyes to the cold darkness of his secluded shack. His senses instantly registered the presence of other bodies in the dark. His hand slid under his pillow and gripped the hilt of Wyrm's Tooth. The familiar feel of the weapon grounded the old warrior, reminding him of the stark differences between his past and present.

"Someone out there needs our help," Akiko whispered.

"No. Just like on the road, we must stay inside until the sun rises." Haru sounded tired, not just physically but as if she'd had to explain tis multiple times.

"But you can help them!"

"If the spirits have them, no one can help them..."

Something shifted in the darkness.

"Your magik can help! There are so many trees out there, you can do anything." Akiko's voice came from a different angle and much clearer. She was standing.

Jordan visualized the strange pair. The girl with her hands on her hips, full of challenge and indignation. The young woman, shifting on the floor to hold onto the little bit of sleep she'd managed. They both had Summer features but there they were in deep Winter country. The weight of years spent in solitude creak in his bones in tandem with the shaking roof shingles. A strong wind howled through his clearing, its chill sneaking through the cracks of his home, and Jordan remembered that the world he knew, the world from two hundred years ago, might not exist anymore.

Winter girls with Summer faces might be the norm.

"I can't save them, Akiko, and if I tried it might put us both in danger."

"I don't understand."

The miserable screams of agony and torment drowned out the winds.

"We can't just hide in here," Akiko whined. "You said we should always help when we can."

"Well right now, we can't."

"How have you two lived this long?" Jordan grumbled, startling them both. "She's naïve and you're a liar."

Even back at the beginning of the forever winter people had started fending for themselves. People learned quickly that they could only trust their own and strangers were to be avoided. Being the children of those survivors, he would expect the pair to be less caring. Jordan didn't know how to feel about their obvious contradiction.

"It's not naïve to want to help people, no matter how many old folks say it! Haru, I want to do something." THe girl stamped her foot.

"You can lay down and tune out the sound, because, if you go out there, those duppy will tear you apart and eat your heart. And, unless I'm a poor judge, Haru will run out after you and die too."

"But—"

"Lie down, child!" Jordan snapped, shocking them both into silence. He eased his tone. "It is late and you have a long trip awaiting you in the morning."

"Don't talk to her like that," Haru said. Jordan could sense her rise though he couldn't see her.

"Someone has to before she gets herself or someone else killed. If she's old enough to talk, she's old enough to know what's out there. If you love her, you'll make sure she learns from you rather than from the world."

The shack fell silent while the howls and screams continued.

"Come and lay down, Akiko. Tomorrow is going to be a long day."

The floorboards creaked as Akiko returned to her place on the floor. The screams abruptly stopped, punctuated by the loud sound of bones breaking. The duppy chuckled uproariously then their voices trailed off. They always hid during sunrise even though that only meant a brightening of the gray sky. The girls would have at least until late afternoon before that specific threat reared its head. They found him, maybe they'd make it out of the swamp.

Maybe.

"Why did you come here," Jordan asked. "And don't give me some story about men sending you. That's nonsense."

"It isn't nonsense," Haru answered. "We... we were poisoned and told we would only receive the antidote if we found you and convinced you to come back with us."

Jordan's caustic response froze on the tip of his tongue.

"Poisoned? What kind of poison?" He thought he knew what kind, thought he'd smelled it faintly while they ate.

"The kind that muddles the senses and weakens the muscles. I've tried everything with my knowledge of forestlore and could only manage to slow its effects."

"Then you are a naturalist."

The naturalist orders he knew would never allow such a young novice away from the enclave.

"Yes..."

The poison, if it was in fact the poison Jordan believed it to be, had been created specifically to thwart forestlore and all but the strongest healing magik. There was a time when the substance was known to a very small few.

"I did not lie when I said we were sent by men too cowardly to come into The Belgaul themselves. They thought one with my talents would have a better chance of survival than a group of bounty hunters."

Jordan thought of the bloody bounty bulletin torn and scattered among his box of tinder. He felt The Circle closing in, binding everything together into a knot, intertwining their fates, a continuous loop, unbroken.

"The poison is called Druid's Bane," Jordan said. "I am not well versed in forestlore, but I know that the name of a thing can help in finding a poultice."

"Druid's Bane," Haru repeated as if committing the name to memory.

"Perhaps the recordkeepers within your enclave may have notes on its treatment."

"Perhaps... but I will not be going to them for help."

An outcast then, just as he'd suspected.

The howling of the winds filled the silence that followed and the three drifted off to sleep.

Jordan always pretended not to be of the introspective sort, yet anyone who grew to know him knew he spent an inordinate amount of time in his own head. Whether it was always his nature of just a side effect of his time in exile, I was never sure.

The next morning, Jordan sat by his rear window, watching the old ganmar tree stand sentinel over Belgaul. It had been his stalwart neighbor for two centuries, its massive trunk a landmark and sometimes a shelter. Despite its timeless presence, Jordan had seen the truth. It was dying, slowly. In another decade Jordan would be all alone.

Shaking away thoughts of his unnaturally long life, he stood and began to load his travel pack. Stopping on occasion, he watched his visitors. Their rest was far from serene. The nerve-damaging effects of Druid's Bane, twisting them into uncomfortable positions they were powerless to resist. Thankfully they were asleep, but they're strained muscles would remember. As he sheathed Wyrm's Tooth and rested it on his table, Jordan gave the shack a wistful once over. The structure had been his home for so long, he found it hard to imagine the place without him... or himself without the place. Inwardly, he said farewell, for he suspected that they would not likely see one another again.

The girl, Akiko, awakened to a coughing fit, likely brought on by chest muscles that struggled to pump her lungs. Haru was awake instantly, though her arms moved with a drugged lethargy. Pouring the pair a cup of water, he distributed the remainder into his two canteens. They happily accepted the drinks.

"If we leave immediately, we can reach the old ganmar by mid-afternoon. Camping there and striking out at first light, a hard march should bring us to the outskirts."

Haru studied him for a few moments.

"So you will come with us?"

"Yes. I'd like to know who is using Druid's Bane to coerce people to hunt me down." He hooked the scabbard of his broken sword to his belt. "Once you have the antidote, I'll make sure they learn to let dead things lie."

She stared at him with an unreadable expression then patted Akiko on the shoulder. "Get up. We're leaving."

They departed the shack in the middle of the swamp with a tiny breakfast and little ceremony, though Jordan made a point of taking what he could from his shabby garden. He left the door latched and the fence closed, though the minor blessing that kept out malevolent spirits would fade after a few days with no occupants. He made a rueful laugh as the structure slipped out of view. In more than a hundred years, he'd never spent more than a single night away from home.

"Oh, sun. Oh, sun. Please come out for me. The winter is biting and I can't go out and play. Oh, sun. Oh, sun. Please shine for me. The freezing teeth have killed my friends, please chase them all away."

Akiko sang the song as the trio followed a dirt path between bramble thickets and stagnant bodies of foul mud that had once been murky ponds. Giant toads croaked, their voices echoing off the crooked trees obfuscating their distance. Jordan slowed his pace a fraction so that he walked side by side with the child. Haru watched him like a hawk, but said nothing. She didn't trust him and Jordan was fine with that. He didn't fully trust her yet either.

"Where did you hear that song?"

Akiko looked up and frowned. "Everyone knows that song. They sing it in the temples and orphanages. Even the criers sing it just before nightfall when the evening chill starts to bite at you." She gesticulated like a clawing rodent.

"I see." He scanned the area beyond the brambles, barely visible despite his height. "When I was a boy, we sang a similar song, though the words were... brighter."

"You have a lot of gray hair. You must be old." She repeated her rat impression. "Did winter not bite back then?"

He chuckled at the way she scrunched her face to appear viscous, though she only succeeded in looking cute.

"No, the winter bit back then too, but, well... times were different."

"Things change yet stay the same. A circle, unbroken," she said with ritual formality, her little voice full of reverence.

"A circle, unbroken," Jordan repeated. Acknowledgement of the divine's all encompassing grip. "Those words are wisdom to those who will heed them."

"Or ramblings of misguided fools," Haru cut in.

Jordan raised an eyebrow, but continued to scan the swamp. "You wouldn't be the first naturalist to deny the existence of The Unbroken Circle."

"I didn't say I don't believe in the divine," she grumbled, pushing past him and taking Akiko's hand. "What I meant was only misguided fools quote phrases like that in response to every little coincidence. A butterfly in The Farglades flapped its wings, causing a tsunami to wash away the dwarven city of Duwarn-Dink on the Baked Coast. What do fools say? It is divine will. A circle, unbroken."

Jordan thought about finding the bulletin and the arrival of a young woman and little girl on his doorstep. He thought of Haru's face and her resemblance to...

"Is it foolish?" Jordan wondered aloud.

"It's ignorance and blind dogma."

"It is the way of our world and all other worlds." While he had heard those words preached in the halls of temples as a child, he'd witnessed the truth of it many times throughout his life.

"So you're one of them..." Haru stopped and turned to confront him. There was an anger there he couldn't place.

"One of who?"

"One of the doomsayers who believe the Forever Winter is The Unbroken Circle cleansing this age in order to start anew. They used to be madmen shouting sermons in the streets, now they run the temples and use crusaders to push their doctrine by knife point."

"Crusaders burnt down our home," Akiko said, clinging tightly to Haru.

Jordan opened then closed his mouth, unsure of what to say. He had no idea who these crusaders were, but he'd met religious zealots before.

"I– get down!"

He rushed forward and Haru threw up her hands, waving them before her much like she'd done at his shack the day before. With the knowledge that she was a naturalist, the action appeared eldritch. Mind racing he listened intently. The croaking had grown more and more distant as they'd spoken, as if the frogs had retreated, but the predatory toads in Belgaul would not have left without something substantial to scare them off.

Brambles to the right of Akiko tapped as the huge flat head of a giant toad emerged. Jordan grabbed the hilt of Wyrm's Tooth and a cord of sticky sinew wrapped around his wrist and thigh. The first toad had been a decoy. Clever beasts.

"Run."

No sooner had the word left his lips, he was yanked through the brambles and into the maw of a waiting toad. The creature's spiky tufts of hair bore the same mucus coating as the rest of its heavily muscled form. Jordan caught a glimpse of three rows of small teeth before it clamped down on arm and leg. The layers intended to protect him from the elements acted as armor against the bite. The toad that was nearly the size of a bear shook him violently then tried to swallow the old warrior.

With Wyrm's Tooth pinned to his side, he drew his hunting knife and stabbed the toad repeatedly. Using each impact as leverage he moved up the creature's face until he had a clean shot at its eye. The toad croaked, a rumbling bass that made its throat sack billow, and sent vibrations through Jordan's body. Fighting the sudden numbness in his fingers and the hound-sized toads approaching, he adjusted his grip and plunged the blade into the creature's huge bulbous eye. It spit him out so abruptly he didn't have time to brace before he crashed through the wall of brambles and onto the dirt path.

Scrambling to his feet, he drew his broken sword and hesitated as a toad twice the size of the original pounced on the wounded creature and swallowed it down. Seeing the girls in the distance, Jordan ran. The chorus of croaks resumed in his wake.

The trio didn't stop running until they'd left the drying muck pools behind and reached tall dry brown grass clustered beneath the shadows of sagging crooked willows. The tall trees framed a meandering trench that had once been a wide stream leading to the base of the old ganmar. Muddy slush squelched underfoot as the trio followed the trench. Jordan scanned the wide barren branches of the gargantuan tree. A thousand spans high, the tree was visible from miles away. In its full splendor, its purple leaves glittered with dew from the passing clouds. In its decline, massive ten-foot tall ambush ravens nested in its bare canopy.

As they passed a knot of roots as thick as Akiko was tall, Haru stopped and ran her hand along the graying bark. Pieces flaked off under her touch, revealing thinning fibers and mold.

"This isn't root rot... this is corruption." She pressed her cheek to the root. "I can remove this fungal growth, Old One, but it will be a patch not a cure."

Jordan imagined he felt a slight tremor.

"Where is your local guardian? Surely she could have stopped this before it spread so thoroughly."

"No one lives in these parts except me and them." Jordan pointed towards the black figures up above. "The few who called Belgaul home left when the animals did. The local naturalist lost her home in a brush fire while away and never bothered to rebuild, even though I'd offered to help."

"Another arson..." she said under her breath. "These are dark times indeed. You said you wished to make camp here? In the morning, I can do something about this fungus."

Jordan nodded, though his mind mulled over what she'd said. Arson. It had never occurred to him that the naturalist's fire might have been intentional, even though brush fires were nearly unheard of in the swamp.

Haru removed a length of yellow cloth from her pack and pinned it to the root with a long needle topped by the symbol of the naturalists, a mustard bud at the center of a silver and gold ring. The flag meant the area was a site of research and aid for their order.

"I'm sorry, Old One. We'd given you a wide berth in our search for this him. Time was of the essence." To punctuate her words, her arm went into a fit of convulsions. The Druid's Bane continued its work.

"We can set up a shelter under the arching roots near the–"

Jordan spun around, drawing his broken sword in a defensive stance. A mass of fur and muscle attempted to bowl him over, but he pushed and slashed even as he turned aside. A shaggy tiger rolled and came to its six paws. Long braids hung from its head, weighted down by the bones of small animals. Unnatural talons jutted from between its toes. The creature grinned, pieces of Jordan's coat hanging in strips from its maw.

"Akiko!" Haru snapped, waving the little girl over.

Together, they climbed out of the trench.

"My we are far from home," the tiger purred. The too human words sounded alien coming from the beast's jaws. "Clever leaving so early in the day. I'd nearly missed your scent. I had to put on a form better suited for a hunt."

"You should have let me go."

"You? I don't want you." It turned its big shaggy head towards the girls, the bones in its hair jingling. "The child smells exquisite."

Jordan moved to put himself between the monster and Akiko, but he needn't. The tiger jerked its gaze back to him as he moved.

"Killing you merely gets the biggest threat out of my way."

It bound forward with a hunting cat's speed and grace, despite its bulk. Jordan maintained his defensive stance just until the creature pounced, then dove beneath it, slicing the edge of Wyrm's Tooth down the monster's belly. He slid across the slush and hit his shoulder on a stone sticking out of the ground. Swearing, he rolled to his feet. The tiger growled and shifted into its doe-eyed caricature of a woman. She grinned, mouth full of too many teeth.

"I thought you were smarter than this, mortal. Your little trinkets can't do more than make me angry." With a sound like tearing fabric, one of its four arms fell off in a pile of translucent slime. The duppy looked down in shock.

Jordan gritted his teeth and switched to an offensive stance.

"This trinket is more than enough for your damned soul." he flicked a glob of her substance off the edge of his broken sword. "As I said, you should have let me go."

The duppy made a shriek like a banshee's deathsong and charged, talons outstretched like spears. Jordan let the monster close the distance and struck with a precise arc he'd practiced nearly every day. Cutting through and past the duppy, he spun and removed its head. A mass of translucent goo splashed into the slush on the stream bed and hissed as the heat melted the frost.

Jordan climbed out of the trench, ignoring the pain in his shoulder. He found Haru and Akiko beside a failing willow. The little girl hid, the look in her eyes saying she'd heard the duppy call for her blood. Haru had summoned the magiks of nature in preparation, the grass beneath her feet had turned green in response. Jordan flicked Wyrm's Tooth then sheathed the broken sword. The blood staining his hand brought his attention to the tear in his sleeve where the duppy had scored a hit.

He heard Sir Oberon's voice through the decades and the cold.

Sloppy, boy. Very sloppy.