The Hunter’s Son

She woke to warmth.

At first, it was only a dim awareness, a fragile sensation hovering at the edge of her senses. After so many nights claimed by the cold, the heat felt almost hostile, a thing she could not name. She thought, fleetingly, that she ought to recoil, but her limbs refused her.

Heat gathered along her spine, settled in her palms, it breathed against her cheek. The weight of blankets lay across her shoulders, heavy with unfamiliar safety. A muted glow pressed through her closed lids, a soft radiance she recognized, belatedly, as firelight.

She listened. The quiet crackle of burning wood met her, steady and patient. Beneath it, another sound threaded through the silence, the measured rhythm of someone else breathing.

She opened her eyes.

Beams of rough timber curved overhead, their edges darkened by age and smoke. The walls were sealed with moss and packed clay. Across the room, a low hearth pulsed with shifting light, the flames sending shadows crawling along earthen floors.

Turning her head cost her more effort than she had expected. Pain rippled through her neck and settled deep behind her eyes, but she let it pass. She studied the room in slow increments, seeking some proof she had not wandered into another fevered memory.

A single chamber. A fire burned low and watchful. Shelves lined the far wall, crowded with jars and bundles she could not name. The air was sharp with the scent of dried leaves and something resinous that reminded her, distantly, of old rites.

Her gaze drifted to the simple things… a folded garment laid with deliberate care, a wooden bowl waiting near the hearth, a fur arranged by the door. All ordinary, all anchored in a world she was not certain she deserved to rejoin.

Something tightened in her chest, a familiar knot of memory and dread. She remembered another darkness, damp and stinking of blood. She remembered the cave, the silhouette that had blocked her escape, the rough weapon she had carved without understanding why.

The way it had felt when the wood sank into flesh. The ragged sound that had followed her into every silence since.

Her breath caught. She pressed her palms to her ribs, feeling the old wounds echo beneath the newer aches.

The door shifted open. Light spilled across the floor, pale and unhurried.

A figure stepped inside. Broad shoulders, familiar in a way she could not allow. For a moment, past and present blurred, and she could not tell if she meant to rise or to flee.

He paused, a cautious distance away. His gaze touched her face and did not waver. When he spoke, his voice carried the kind of gentleness that came only from understanding how easily a person could break.

“You’re awake.”

She didn’t answer.

He crouched by the hearth, setting down what he carried, a folded cloth, a small sack of kindling.

“I brought water,” he said, softer now.

He lifted the bowl, slow enough that she could read each movement for threat. He dipped his fingers into it, lifted them to his lips, and siped the drops into his mouth, watching her over for approval.

“See?” he murmured. “It’s good.”

Still, she did not trust him. But she trusted her thirst less.

She reached for the bowl. Their hands touched, skin brushing skin. For a single heartbeat, she felt warmth bloom in the hollow of her palm, startling in its gentleness.

She pulled the bowl close and drank. The water was cold, clean, and unadorned. It steadied her in a way she couldn’t explain.

When she lowered it, he had not stepped away. His gaze held no accusation, only the quiet fatigue of someone who had also run out of certainties.

He straightened and looked toward the curtained doorway.

“You know…” He hesitated, the line of his mouth taut. “You’re fortunate to be alive. Some of the villagers thought you might be something they should fear.”

Her voice rose before she could temper it.

“What do they fear?”

His brows lifted, surprise softening the lines of his face.

“Anything they can’t understand.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“What moon is it?”

Silence fell. When she looked up, he was studying the shadows rather than her.

“That isn’t a question you should ask,” he said at last. “Not here.”

She extended the bowl without speaking. Their fingers brushed again, and she did not know whether the heat that followed belonged to her or to him.

He took the bowl and stepped back.

The door opened a second time. A woman entered, her bearing measured, her eyes dark with curiosity and something softer.

The man moved aside, slipping past her into the evening light.

The woman came to the side of the bed and folded her hands in her lap.

“Now,” she said gently, “I see in your eyes you remember more than you wish to.”

Ishtar swallowed, her throat raw from more than thirst.

“You must be careful,” the woman went on. “Learn quickly what they will accept. What they will forgive.”

A hand reached out, touched her cheek with a tenderness that made her chest ache.

“I too was once a stranger among them,” she murmured. “Whatever else you do…don’t let the young women catch you watching my son.”

Heat rose unbidden to her face. She did not look away.

The woman’s smile was small and wry. She stood and crossed to the door.

“There are more blankets if you wake up cold,” she said. “And water. If you need anything else, just ask.”

The door closed behind her with a hush that felt like a kindness she had no language to name.

For a long time, Ishtar lay listening to the fire. The crackle of the flames filled the quiet, warm and patient - a promise she did not yet trust enough to believe.

The Forbidden Hunger

Snow drifted in slow spirals, settling on the young deer’s back as it picked its way through the clearing. Ishtar crouched behind a tangle of bare shrubs, her breath shallow, her heart loud in her ears.

She had not meant to stay so long watching it. There was something delicate about its searching, the way it pressed its small hooves into the frost, unaware it was already living its last moments.

That was when she sensed them.

She did not hear them. Hunters made no careless noise when they stalked prey. But she felt the change in the air—the weight of intention.

Her pulse jumped.

She tasted the drift of their scent on the cold: leather, steel, old smoke. They were close.

Too close.

She was downwind. They would not smell her, not unless she moved at the wrong moment. But if they pressed farther into the trees—if they glanced past the thicket—she would be seen.

Slowly, she rose. Careful, measured steps. She moved toward the nearby cave mouth she had glimpsed earlier, a low hollow in the rock half-covered by brush and fallen pine limbs.

She slipped inside, dragging a drift of dead boughs across the entrance, weaving them into a screen. She crouched against the rear wall, hidden in the shadows.

From here, she could see.

The deer lifted its head, ears swiveling. A soft tremor ran through its flanks, sensing the danger but not yet placing it.

A single hunter stepped into the clearing, his bow half-raised. Another figure ghosted through the trees on the far side, bowstring already taut.

She willed it to run.

Go. Please—go.

The second hunter loosed the arrow without a word.

It struck cleanly behind the shoulder. The deer jerked, stumbled, and folded to the ground.

Blood spilled onto the snow—so vivid against the white it looked unreal.

Heat stirred in her belly. A pulse of something old, nameless, and hungry.

No.

Her breath thickened.

She pressed her palms flat against the cave floor. She would not move. She would not answer it.

Outside, the hunters emerged from the trees—four of them, moving in the silent, precise choreography of men who had killed many times before. No laughter. No words. Just the work of their knives.

They knelt around the carcass, swift hands preparing it for the carry home.

The smell reached her—fresh, metallic, alive.

Her nostrils flared. Her heartbeat quickened until her ribs felt too narrow to hold it.

Her hands moved without her permission, fingers curling around the small blade she had carved in another life, when she still believed she could belong here.

I don’t want this, she pleaded with the dark. I never wanted this.

Her vision began to narrow. The edges fell away until there was nothing left but the men beyond the brush and the bright smear on the snow.

Something inside her lifted its head—something her people had tried to bury.

Zii.

Among the Fae, the word was never spoken. A curse. A warning. The wild inheritance she had no right to claim.

Her people were gentle. Honor-bound. They laid hands on the earth in reverence. They did not draw blood.

But in her veins, another inheritance waited—feral, unrepentant.

She pressed herself deeper into the shadows.

Let them finish. Let them leave. Let them live.

One of the hunters rose, scanning the clearing. His gaze passed the cave mouth, lingered a fraction too long on the uneven line of brush.

He took a cautious step forward.

No.

He paused, studying the cave as if some instinct whispered that it was not empty.

Please… don’t.

Another step.

He slipped a hand inside the branches, parting them. His eyes searched the dark—and met hers.

Time cracked open.

The darkness in her uncoiled, stretching to fill her limbs.

She rose.

Her blade gleamed in the narrow light.

The man inhaled sharply.

In that last instant, she thought she might still speak… might warn him.

But the hunger had already claimed her.

Her vision dissolved into red.

She lunged.

Everything after was heat and motion and the sound of meat parting under her hands. The taste of blood splattering onto her tongue. The certainty, terrible and undeniable, that this was what she had been made for.

When her senses returned, she was standing alone. The man’s body lay crumpled on the cave floor behind her and two more at the cave mouth. Blood seeped into the frost, steaming faintly in the cold.

Her hands were slick to the wrist.

She let the blade fall.

The snow enveloped it, as if the earth herself were ashamed of what she had done. .

Without looking back, she fled past the dead and the living alike - into the forest beyond, where no eyes could see what she had become.

More Coming Soon...

A Bed of Snow and Sorrow

A Bed of Snow and Sorrow

Banished by the people who named her monster, Ishtar wanders the frozen wilderness carrying scars she cannot outpace. Each step in the snow is a plea for silence, for an ending—until a hunter’s son lifts her from the brink of death and thrusts her into a village that fears what she is as much as what she might become.

But warmth is as dangerous as cold. In the quiet firelight of hearth and hall, suspicion tightens around her, old hunger stirs in her blood, and fragile bonds of trust spark into something far more perilous. As raiders descend and whispers of the Fae haunt every choice, Ishtar must decide whether to surrender to the exile carved into her name—or claim a destiny steeped in blood, desire, and the thawing of a heart long taught to be silent.

A Bed of Snow and Sorrow is a haunting tale of exile and belonging, of power that cannot be buried, and of love that risks turning even the coldest winter into fire.