The smell reaches you before the village does. Not smoke. Not pine. Rot. The kind that settles deep into wet wood and frozen earth alike. Through the snowfall, the thorp slowly emerges between the trees; silent, dark, untouched by even the smallest signs of life. No barking dogs. No lantern glow through shutter cracks. No chimney smoke curling into the gray winter sky. Only stillness.

Then you notice the shapes hanging from the trees.

Villagers sway gently in the cold wind beyond the road, stiff with frost and half-buried in drifting snow. Men. Women. One shape small enough to turn your stomach. Their faces are pale beneath layers of ice, mouths frozen open as crows peck lazily at whatever remains exposed. They have been dead for some time. The valley looked too remote, too forgotten to be touched by war. Yet violence, it seems, seeps into even the deepest corners of peace eventually.

You continue north as daylight fades, boots crunching through old snow while the forest thickens around the road. The cold worsens by the hour. Just as the last traces of daylight vanish behind the mountains, a faint orange glow appears through the trees ahead. Lanternlight. Warm and steady against the endless white. Cresting the hill reveals a modest stone monastery overlooking the road below, its bell tower dark against the evening sky.

The heavy wooden doors groan softly beneath your knock. For a moment, nothing happens. Then the latch shifts.

The door opens only slightly at first. A young woman in dark monastic robes peers through the gap, pale green eyes wide beneath the lanternlight. Snow swirls around her white veil as she studies you in tense silence. Somewhere deeper inside the monastery, voices stir quietly.

"…Gods above," she murmurs softly. "Ysabeau… someone’s here."