New to Nina? Let me Introduce you...

She comes to the clearing like a dae on thin ice. The moon is hard and round above us, sickle-bright, making the snow glow blue where it isn’t trampled to dirt.

Her hair is a flame against the night, wild and loose, and she breathes in short, desperate puffs that turn the air to glass between us. I crouch in the trees, so close I can smell the salt of her sweat.

It would be easy to end it here. I have done it a thousand times before. I could move so quick she’d never see me, could silence her before the scream left her throat. But I stay where I am, watching her pulse beat frantic in the hollow of her neck, the way her hands shake as she builds a fire atop last week’s snow.
Tonight, I understand that it is not firewood she seeks.

She sits with arms wrapped around her knees, and stares into the darkness that surrounds her.

The wind shifts, and I know she smells me; the raw musk that marks me as the only predator left in these woods. She lifts her head, and our eyes meet across the gulf of moonlight and shadow.

She does not scream. She does not run.

She only looks at me, really looks, and I feel the weight of her gaze as if it could shatter bone. In that moment, I am more than a monster. I am everything she has lost: warmth, safety, the promise of another day.

I step from the trees, careful and slow, keeping my claws hidden. The moon paints me in silver, and I know what she sees: a monster too tall for any dark elf or man.

My eyes burn golden in the dark, the way all cursed things do. My hands are not hands, not really, but something in between: long, twisted, with nails that could split her from jaw to groin if I wished.

She does not move, not even to flinch.

I approach the fire, each step deliberate, the way a penitent approaches a shrine. She watches me, her mouth open just enough to taste the cold. Her heart is a drumbeat I can hear even above the crackle of the flames.

She is afraid—she would be a fool not to be—but she is not afraid in the way most are. She is not afraid of death. She is afraid of meaning, of what it costs to look a nightmare in the face and still find something familiar in it.

I stop just outside the ring of light and kneel. The snow bites through my bone, but I welcome the pain. I take a small flower from my tunic pocket and place on the snow in front of me.

I lower my head, and offer her the chance to reign a blow down upon it.
She reaches out, slow and careful, and takes the flower instead