april camp novmo '26: in the event of discovery

there will be no spring, or summer. across the frozen wilderness, a group of hunters follow the tracks of a monstrous bear said to roam where the storm first fell, a beast feared as the last great predator of the old world. though, it seems the bear is not theirs alone to find.

It is freezing, the kind that squirms and burns the cartilage of fingers and noses, and yet illogically, Rainer is standing on the frigid deck. In a cold this great, one's skin would fuse to the metal almost immediately. In a cold this great, there should already be the itchy beginnings of frostbite. This, he thinks, I want this forever. When it is all over, he hopes he will remember little of the Arctic, that virulent shell of ice stretching for miles like a glass cocoon. He is shaking, but not with cold.

(I am captivated by the excerpt and the blurb..... more lore WHEN)

day 1 - whatever, wrote a little bit of a scene and gave up

It is always the same dream.

Rainer is flying out of the back door of his mother’s house and into the dark garden. He’s around sixteen in this one, laughing, great big warm guffaws that split the night into pieces, standing still beside the rutabaga patch with his face turned skyward. “I’m here,” she says, and he watches the stars, their light gliding down the slope of her nose, traveling the curve until it bleeds into her lips, then her chin, then her neck and collarbones.

“Yeah,” he says, "I see you." He wants her to look at him. It is a good thing, he thinks, that she doesn’t look because he isn't sure he'd be able to keep from breaking apart right there in the garden in front of her.

He bends to pick up a stone from the cold ground and fiddles with it. He isn't sure why she came out here in the first place or why he followed her, except for that she called him, and he'd follow her anywhere. Dirt from the stone gets on his hands, and he wipes them off self-consciously on his jeans.

When he wakes, his face is wet.

It takes him several seconds to understand that he is crying, and longer still to understand why it feels like loss. He reaches into his pocket for the stone, and it is cold, like all else.

day 2 - wrote like 1.2k words

"They’re there," Korski says, pointing toward his feet. "Fresh."

The tracks begin just beyond the low rise east of the camp, where the wind scours the surface clean each night and lays it down again by morning like a fresh sheet. Rainer has seen them enough times now that he knows where to look, but still there is a moment, always a moment, where the ground appears unbroken, and he wonders if today will be the day they are gone for good. The first print lies ahead of them, perfectly formed, its edges too clean for something that should have passed through hours before. Snow has gathered in the shallowest part of it, a fine, crystalline dust, but the depth remains untouched. It is as if the thing that made it pressed down and withdrew without disturbing anything around it.

Korski steps up beside it and does not step into it. He has never stepped into one of the prints. Rainer has noticed this, though he has said nothing of it.

He crouches, almost without deciding to, and holds his gloved hand just above the depression. The cold rising out of it is different from the ambient air. It feels held, contained, like breath in a closed mouth.

"Don’t."

Rainer had not realized he was lowering his hand.