Even if it meant hurting his father again.
It filled Tomas with a sense of strength, as if the butcher’s cleaver had somehow stored the innocence he had long forgotten he once had, holding on to it over all those years so that it could one day be restored.
Evin barged towards Tomas, knocking him back into the moment with a sudden rush of adrenaline.
“Boy, you will answer me. What is going on? What are you doin’?!” Evin shouted, charging at the crouching Tomas.
Tomas shot up, cleaver in hand, looking his father straight in his angry, grey eyes- something he had never been brave enough to try before. It was immediately intimidating, like facing off against a starving bear.
Yet Tomas maintained the eye contact. He gripped the cleaver behind his back out of sight.
Evin stopped an inch shy of Tomas’s face, stinking of flat ale and sweat-stained clothes.
“The town is under attack,” Tomas told him calmly.
“No shit, boy!”
“I am leaving, and you should too if you want to live.”
Evin shook his head in dismay. “You truly are pathetic, running away once again.”
Tomas went to walk around his father, but Evin pushed him back.
“Did you bring this upon us? You did, didn’t you?” Evin spat, his drunken words slurred over the distant screams.
“I’m leaving, and I’m never coming back. You can do what you like,” Tomas said sternly. He felt his hand shaking at his rear, trying his best to keep his composure.
It was not the response his father had expected. Evin grimaced in confusion, but before he could reply, Tomas tried stepping around his father.
It caught Evin off-balance, causing him to stumble and nearly fall. Tomas made for the front door to their house in a desperate rush.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going, boy? Don’t you dare leave me here.”
But Tomas had no other words he wanted, or needed, to say. He turned his back to his father for the last time ever and stepped out the door of the house he had once grown up in, feeling no need to whisper any sort of farewell to it.
“Get back here, now!” Evin shouted.
Tomas breathed in, feeling a certain weight lifted from his shoulders and letting the cool mountain air fill his chest and relax his twisted stomach, even for a moment.
“Don’t you dare leave your father here! Coward!”
Tomas did not let the words phase him. He focused his attention on the present danger before him. The air was frigid, making the hairs on his arms stand. The village was still in a state of pandemonium as the creatures in the night revealed their twisted forms from the shadows.
“Tomas!” a soft, familiar voice called out from amongst the snowstorm.
It was Lynn. She raced towards him with Old Bertha’s arm over her shoulder, trying her hardest, yet struggling, to keep the elderly woman at a speedy pace. In her other shaky hand, she wielded her dagger.
“Lynn? What are you doing? I told you to stay-”
“We need to leave, now!”
A wall from the neighbouring house exploded as one of the monstrous creatures leapt out with something strange hanging out of its gaping mouth.
Tomas, Lynn, and Old Bertha were knocked over into the snow by the force of broken wood and materials striking them.
Tomas popped back up after realising that the thing he had seen was a child in the creature’s snapping mouth.
It was one of Tomas’s old neighbours. A small, blonde boy named Ren. No older than four years.
The child’s gargled, bloody screams rang in his ears as the creature bounded for the forest edge with immense speed.
The snows beneath it ran red.
Tomas did not see a clear image of the shadowed creature; it was incredibly fast. But what he did see were enough to rattle him.
Many spindly legs, like a spider, with insect-like, segmented bodies. Multiple, finger-like appendages clicked and clattered around its vicious mouth. Within seconds it had vanished into the woods.
Some of the other creatures leapt onto people, large enough to topple them over, before dragging them under houses and into the shadows. They seemed drawn to the dark.
“Tomas!” Lynn shouted. “We must leave, at once, or we are going to die here!”
The urgency in her voice helped Tomas to focus and think. She was right- they had little time before the creatures in the night would pick them off as well.
Tomas drew his sword, looking for an exit as Old Bertha struggled to catch her breath after running. He scoured the area, searching, hoping, begging for an escape.
The river.
Tomas pointed towards the frozen river that ran through town, down an embankment by his old house.
“The river, that’s our escape,” Tomas said.
“You’re sure?” Lynn questioned.
“The mist, it’s frozen the water. We can cross it, follow it downstream and out of the Fist.”
Lynn looked towards the dark gulley, lined with pine trees, bushes and scrub. “Shouldn’t we-”
“Lynn, you said it yourself. We are going to die. Do you have any better ideas?”
Lynn took a moment, realising they had suddenly switched roles from earlier that night.
Another one of the spider-like monsters jumped from the roof of a house with an awful shriek, smashing through the door of another house that a group of people were desperately trying to barricade.
Lynn considered for a moment before nodding, her floppy tricorn hat covering half her face as she gave Tomas a look as if pleading with him to be right.
A guttural scream suddenly came from above.
Tomas jumped in shock, glancing up to see one of the hideous, spider-like creatures on the roof of his old house, its many legs punching holes through the thatch roof, staring back down at them with dozens of small, black eyes.
The creature’s nubbed facial appendages flared out as it
