His feet weren't anchored to the spot. Neither were they frostbitten, bereft of the warm red liquid that flowed beneath his skin, and rendering him incapable of movement.
Yet, Atreus, warm-blooded as he was, felt like he had suddenly grown roots that stretched beneath the ice below his feet.
His heart hammered in his chest, fluctuating like a steaming jackhammer and distorting the rhythm at which his chest rose and fell.
The air around him seemed to ask him to stay away. To turn from this obvious future that housed nothing but sorrow for a soul abandoned like his.
Yes, today was a day of peril and ominous foreboding.
A day that held on its breast more shocking horror, pain, and sorrow than he had experienced over his seventeen-year stint on this continent.
But the sum total of all these emotions still seemed to pale in comparison to what he felt gazing upon the structurally sound sight of the cottage in front of him—a good cottage that, for all intents and purposes, could be said to have weathered a rather troubling storm.
His feet took root where he stood.
His lungs felt starved of air.
Even blinking felt like a task too mighty to uphold; ice forming around the tips of his every eyelash.
His world was collapsing. Nay, it already had. Making this game of cat and mouse with an immovable object all the more meaningless.
The forestry all around him seemed to stalk his bruised, battered body, watching him in silence from the perspective of a world forgotten. A world, that seemed to narrow on this one moment, on this one forsaken soul.
Fate had already set about having its way with Avaricia. And before the outcast of Barley could take an ever-so-painful step forward, we, the 'spectator', are forced back to a time not long past recent events.
A time after the accursed boy had set forth out to the volcano Kendosyssis in lieu of his mother Hanna.
—
Snow is silent.
Snow conceals footsteps and muffles sound.
Snow breaks your fall.
But what snow is not allowed to do is trespass upon the space occupied by divinity.
An ever-vibrant Hanna worked to start a fire after her only child had set out.
Her hands trembled slightly as she scooped the salve into a small clay pot.
She hummed quietly to herself, an old wives' hymn that was clearly a generation or two before her, as she strove to busy herself—to mask the worry that built from having her kin out in this type of weather.
Granted, her son was not useless.
For despite growing up without a father, he was particularly capable. But she was only a mother, and a mother is nothing without the unconditional worry and care they exert for their kin.
Their little cottage out in the dense forestry had now fallen silent, save for the crackle of flames and pots as she worked.
A silence that was pierced by a sound that sought to break the serenity.
The sound… was a knock on wood.
A 'tap, tap, tap' that rattled the ancient door to their sanctuary on its creaky hinges.
One, two, three.
'Polite,' she'd have been forgiven for thinking.
Yet, in a place like this, to people like her and her son, there rarely ever were visitors.
'But, surely... surely a soul as spirited and outward as her's had made a habit of checking on others! Surely she made an effort to look upon the well-being of those she called friends!'
Well, she did. Of course she did.
However, I'd have you know that such pleasantries were not often reciprocated.
Hanna made regular visits to the main village. Of that much I can ascertain. Alas, it isn't written anywhere that such visits needed to be reciprocated, or in this case were even welcome.
The young matriarch of House Romani froze mid-motion.
"Atreus?" she thought, her mind whispering silently before her body had even reacted, believing that perhaps her son had left something of import and returned.
"He wouldn't knock on the door to his own home though…"
A puzzle sought to resolve itself in her busy psyche.
Setting the pot down carefully and rubbing her hands against her apron, Hanna sought to loosen it before another knock pierced the silence.
'tap, tap, tap'
The echo reverberated about the space.
Perhaps such a visitor was more impatient than she thought.
"I'll be right there!" Hanna said, abandoning the knot of her apron as she moved to answer the door.
Her palm met the wooden handle, and the door gave an unnerving shriek, like scratches against a blackboard, as it swung open on its tired hinges.
The apron across her neck immediately gave way, hitting the floor with a soft plop, leaving a small smear of green across the wood—a stain from her frantic attempt to get it off just a moment before.
Her eyes widened.
For in the doorway stood a looming figure, shrouded in shadow to all but her, unmoving, like reality froze around the space it occupied.
Its presence was heavy, unnerving.
The snow marked not where this figure stood, or in effect the path it used. An ordeal that would have ordered every instinct in her body to scream, to flee from the unreality she was experiencing. Yet she knew who stood before her.
"φίλτατος," the figure said softly. Or perhaps not—for this author wasn't privy to the language it spoke, to the conversation they shared.
Rest assured, though, the air around its verbal intonations implied it.
She took a startled step back, her throat tightening. "W-what…?"
This face she saw was but a dream, a face she never in the next million years would have expected to see.
Her fear and curiosity were now balanced precariously on a lone needle as she stared it down.
"Why are you—"
A hand came forth from the shadow, bony and inelegant, rough as it approached her without caution.
Hanna's eyes flickered between the hand and the face that made a home in darkness.
And as understanding of this gesture reached her, panic followed immediately.
"w… why…" Her voice trembled, as she felt her legs buckle under the pressure of the encounter.
Her chest tightened.
She collapsed to the floor.
"Now?" she whispered to no one in particular. As the figure unmoving looked upon her feeble mortality, silent but commanding.
Hanna swallowed.
"…not like this… Atreus he…"
A soft, unspoken insistence seemed to fill the space thereafter. Heavy, undeniable.
Hanna's gaze dropped, tracing the bony appendage that remained commanding her accordance. It was clear to her: the thing that occupied the space before her would not take "no" for an answer.
"…" she opened her mouth to speak. "I… I'll…"
—
It had been a solid few minutes since Atreus had made it back home, had begun his staring contest with the cottage.
The snow fell thicker, an attempt that to his broken mind felt like a burial—a world of ice settling upon his empty husk.
Our collective memory of Hanna's fate remained unanswered. And the bitter tang of the present fought with us to find out for ourselves.
The present, after all, is biting.
Atreus hesitated an inch forward.
Moving back two steps before the resolve to move forward was steeled in his core.
He began to limp toward the cottage. Each step a painful negotiation with his mortality.
His back was sore.
His body, bruised.
And the blood that painted his caramel skin had now dried, marking him with streaks of red across the fur garb he donned.
But the boy felt he had to move forward, so he did.
And then... something inside him snapped.
He could walk no longer.
He would limp no longer.
He broke into a full-blown sprint, chest heaving, boots tearing across the snow as the ground sought to hold him in place, forbidding him from seeing what lay behind that wooden door.
The cottage grew closer, familiar yet distinctively alien to the warmth he associated with it.
He slammed into the door with all his strength, flinging it off its ancient hinges as his shoulders drove it open.
"Mother!" he shouted in one exhausted and heavy breath.
A sound that didn't echo as a four-wall structure should.
Because now that he stood in the center of his home, his sanctuary, the facade was broken.
This was not a structurally sound building.
Its whole back half had been blown apart. Various sentimental memorabilia and paraphernalia scattered to the wind, snow, and forestry around.
The roof had splintered. Walls were caved inward. Debris and snow had made a home on the interior, littering the floor.
The silence that followed his shout seemed to swallow the room, forming a vacuum disturbed only by the faint crackle of splintered wood.
"What is this?"
Blood marked the walls and passages of the interior.
Streaks of thick, dark red running across the floors, cutting lines through splintered furniture and shattered walls.
They painted a trail for him to follow.
And as his gaze unwittingly followed it, anxious and searching, he could see that it not only painted the space in a macabre dance of red and white with the building snow, but also cut through the two rooms to his right—one his, and the other his mother's.
Two massive, deep, and uneven holes broken through the walls, like a young calf had perhaps been launched through them, sharing its inner tone with the household.
This was far removed from a homecoming.
And as if on cue, it became quickly clear to Atreus that his shout had awoken the progenitor of this chaos—the artist that had saw fit to remodel his home.
A massive hand, three hair-covered fingers long and covered in coarse, dark red, gripped the edge of the furthest hole, as the world around him seemed to shake from its strength.
It strained upward. Wood splintered, and walls came undone completely, erasing the idea of safety in this home.
The roof groaned, partially collapsing at the height of the beast that tore through it like it was nothing.
It had made its presence known.
And now all that was left, was for Atreus to acknowledge it.