1
THE JUDGE
Andrik-
They never see me first.
I tell myself it's better that way—that the shock of discovering me mid-step would send them fleeing before I could even speak.
Imagine stepping into a snow-covered forest, and there I am. A creature of winter itself—nine feet of muscle and ancient bone, staring straight into your soul.
If my size alone doesn’t send you skittering back toward the tree line, the jagged birch-patterned antlers clawing toward the sky might finish the job.
Then there's the rest of me.
Plush white fur, thick as storm clouds, covers my body—a ghostly mirror to the snowfall that surrounds us.
My eyes are the pale color of Alaskan glacier water. They glow at night like twin moons caught in the dark.
I know what I am…what I look like.
I'm not naive enough to think humans would come willingly if they knew what waited for them in these woods.
That's the trick, isn't it? Blending in with the quiet and letting the snow mask the monster.
It’s what I’ve always done—stay silent and wait for the call.
I often wonder if it's a curse that binds me here. It's been so long, I can't remember the truth of it anymore.
I’m aware of what the legends say—what human parents whisper over candlelight to frighten their children. But the real story has slipped through my fingers like fog.
All I know is that I’m meant to stay. To listen. To weigh the shape of each soul that steps into my forest.
I don't hunt.
Ijudge.
Those who lie. Those who cheat. Those who spill the blood of the innocent. They never leave these woods. The forest remembers their sins—and so do I.
That’s the actual curse, I think. Memory without meaning. Immortality without an anchor. I remember their screams, but never why I was born to hear them.
Every shriek. Every death. Every soul. They’re written into me like wounds the gods refuse to close.
Why?
That question echoes unanswered through centuries of silence.
It always startsthe same way: an ache I can’t name, sharp and sudden, crawling up my spine like frost spreading across glass.
The air goes still around me. The trees hold their breath. My skin prickles with awareness as everything sharpens into focus. The land is alive in ways it wasn’t moments before.
I hear a single footstep sinking into the snow, and the riddle begins weaving itself in the back of my mind before the second footstep falls.
The forest is already whispering its judgment.
Immediately, I can scent that he’s male and that his heart is caked with the thick, festering sludge of what he’s done.
His victims—I hear them wailing in my mind—so many of them. Their terror floods through me like ice water poured down the spine of a corpse.
