The storm had not let up in six days.
Snow fell sideways, painting the world white in both directions. Ice formed in thick ridges on the doorframes of the village homes. The dogs no longer barked—they simply lay beneath draped furs, conserving what little warmth their bodies could muster. Even the wind, always a presence in these high Arctic reaches, no longer howled. It groaned. Old. Tired. Like a world grown cold from too many deaths.
Inside the longhouse, the air was thick with breath and fear.
Twelve people sat in a ring around the low-burning seal oil lamp, its flickering flame casting orange light on hollow cheeks and weathered brows. Most were elders—some too old to hunt, too frail to walk unaided. Others were shamans, silent and severe, wrapped in black-dyed furs, their faces painted in ash and blood.
No one spoke.
The last hunt had returned empty. The seal holes were barren. The ice cracked too early. The sun barely crested the horizon now, and when it did, it gave no heat. Just a pale light, like a dying eye.
Qilak, the old crone with silver eyes and fingers like dried kelp, was the first to break the silence. Her voice creaked like wind over bone. "We have buried four this moon. No soil to dig. Just ice. We stack them now like driftwood."
No one answered. She wasn't asking for one.
Aput, a younger shaman with a jagged scar across his nose, stared into the flame. "The cold does not come like it used to. This is not the storm of seasons. This is punishment."
Another elder, Miksaq, shook his head, breath hissing through yellow teeth. "We honored the old ways. We bled the stones. We sang to the wind. It did not listen."
"It did," said a voice from the back of the longhouse.
Heads turned.
Unarjuk stepped forward—tall, cloaked in black wolf fur, younger than most by decades, but respected nonetheless. He carried a bone staff etched with runes that no one alive could translate fully. His presence was unnerving, not because of arrogance, but because of certainty. He knelt beside the fire and removed a small object from his pouch.
A stone.
Rounded. Obsidian-black. Etched with spirals and slashes that flickered when the light touched them. Old. Older than their tribe. Older than the land, some whispered.
He placed it beside the fire. The air chilled around it.
Unarjuk said, "There is another place. Far to the west. Past the great ice. Past the broken seas. On a rock that the sun never loves. A circle of standing stones—older than even the bones of the ice. My grandfather told me of it, before he vanished."
"The cursed place?" whispered Qilak. "The Sun-Wound?"
Unarjuk nodded. "It is not a curse. It is a gate."
Miksaq spat into the fire. "You would summon spirits we do not name. From a place none return."
"I would ask them," Unarjuk said, calmly. "Not for power. Not for conquest. I would ask them to see us. Hear us. Help us survive. Before we all vanish like ash in snow."
The oil flame cracked sharply, startling several in the circle.
Another voice, weaker, rasped from the shadows. Takok—ancient, blind, so still most thought he had died days ago.
"The wind has taken my hearing," Takok said. "But I remember the warmth of the sky when I was a boy. I remember spring. You all speak of death. But I say this…"
He raised a trembling finger.
"We go to the stone. We bring the old blood. We sing the old tongue. If the spirits are cruel, then we die faster. If they are kind, we live. But no more waiting. No more freezing slowly while we pray to empty stars."
No one argued.
Not because they agreed.
But because there was nothing left to say.
---
By dawn, the dogs were harnessed.
The sleds were packed—lightly, silently. No one laughed. No one gave farewells.
Twelve souls departed into the white. Three shamans. Nine elders and hunters. They carried seal meat, prayer beads, carved bone, and oil.
They left the village not as explorers, but as sacrifices.
The storm swallowed their tracks within the hour.
And none of them returned.
---
Location: Meighen Island
Time: Seven days after departure
Weather: Red moon, cloudless sky, absolute stillness
---
By the time they reached Meighen Island, the dogs were dying.
Their legs trembled with every step, fur crusted with ice, eyes wide and bloodshot. Of the twelve that had set out, only eight remained, pulling half-buried sleds across a sea of cracked ice and endless snowdrifts. One of the hunters had collapsed two days earlier. They did not stop to bury him.
The storm had broken on the sixth night—not faded, but broken, as if something in the sky had simply decided to stop breathing. When they looked up, the clouds had vanished, leaving behind a sheet of red-black sky, and a moon the color of fresh blood.
The men did not speak of omens. They were too tired. Too cold. And too close.
---
They found the circle just before midnight.
Not by accident. Not by guidance. The land seemed to lead them—a faint pressure beneath the snow, a magnetic wrongness that pulled them forward through the mist.
It lay nestled in the bowl of a wind-sheltered valley, not far from the jagged cliffs overlooking the northern coast. No snow lay within the hollow. The ground there was bare, black, and breathing faint steam. The dogs refused to enter. They whined, tails tucked, eyes wide.
Even before the men saw the stones, they felt them.
They rose like teeth, tall and wide, spaced in a perfect circle. Twelve monoliths. Each carved with impossible depth, their surfaces etched in twisting runes and spirals that moved when not directly watched.
The carvings were a contradiction—angels with wings of flame clashing against serpents with screaming faces. At one angle, a stone depicted a sword descending from heaven. At another, it showed a sun tearing itself apart. And at the center of one slab, a small figure knelt in light, arms raised, surrounded by both wings and horns.
The hunters dropped to their knees without being told.
The shamans approached the center.
---
Unarjuk, his face gaunt and painted in blood from a ritual wound, placed a carved seal skull in the middle of the circle. Around it, they laid offerings—bones etched with ancestral names, strips of sinew, a handful of sunstones passed down from the glacier tribes.
They began to chant.
Not in their modern tongue—but in the Old Speech. The language no longer spoken, only remembered in dreams. The words came like grinding stone. Like broken wind.
> "From the frost we come.
From the dark we crawl.
Flame of the sky—
See us. Hear us. Judge us."
The chant echoed across the circle.
One shaman sliced his palm and let the blood drip onto the skull.
Another laid down his staff, shaped from the ribs of a killer whale, and shattered it across his knee.
The circle responded.
The steam from the ground thickened. The air warmed—but not gently. Not as mercy. As pressure. The kind that comes before thunder.
The carvings began to glow.
The snow outside the circle began to melt.
---
Qilak, the oldest, whispered without moving her lips:
> "This is not a place of men. This is a wound in the world."
But Unarjuk only raised his arms higher.
> "We do not ask for power.
We ask for mercy.
We ask for warmth.
For our children.
For the land."
He cast the final bone into the center.
And then it happened.
---
The stars shuddered.
The air fractured.
And from the dead sky came a beam of light so bright it tore open the night—a lance of sunfire, blinding and golden, screaming downward at impossible speed.
It struck the center of the stone circle like a divine spear. The seal skull shattered into dust, and the ground around it exploded in a cone of white flame.
The shamans were obliterated instantly. Their bodies blackened in less than a second—screams lost before they could escape their lungs. Bones twisted. Flesh burned away. Eyes liquefied.
The hunters tried to run—but the blast radius expanded in a breath. Snow vaporized. Clothing ignited. Skin peeled. Blood boiled.
One man fell to his knees as his own bones glowed from within, a prayer frozen on his lips before he collapsed, charred and smoking.
The dogs, still outside the circle, bolted into the wild, howling like damned souls.
The circle remained.
Untouched.
The stones now glowed from within, their carvings lit like stained glass from a fire no one could see.
---
And in the center of the crater—surrounded by steaming ash and twisted corpses—a figure knelt.
Naked. Small. Golden.
Hair like sunlight. Eyes still closed.
He was breathing.
The steam curled off his shoulders like incense. His muscles twitched—young, but coiled with unnatural power.
Cain opened his eyes.
And the Earth remembered fire.
---