If you feel watched by the trees here, you’re right to tremble.

It starts softly....deceptively....like the first sip of a spiced latte cradled between frostbitten fingers. The air thickens with cinnamon and nutmeg, curling sweet into your lungs, threading into your blood. You’ll swear you hear the rustle of maple leaves, taste caramel on your tongue, feel the amber glow of an autumn afternoon settling against your skin. It feels like home. Like a childhood memory pressing its fingers into the seams of your brain.

Then you remember.

There are no trees here.

Antarctica yawns around you an endless cathedral of ice, the wind a choir of the damned. The cold doesn’t bite; it burrows, leaching warmth from your marrow, knotting itself into the crevices of your ribs. And yet, you’re warm. Your cheeks are flushed, your breath comes easy, your fingers flex without pain.

Your body knows before your mind does. A deep, animal instinct slithers up your spine and whispers: This is wrong

Then you see them.

Pigeons.

Too still. Too precise. Perched on the ice ridges, heads tilting in eerie unison. Their black eyes glint...not with the dull, hungry glimmer of city birds, but with something sharp. Aware. Their bodies don’t shiver in the wind. Their claws don’t slip on the frozen ledges. The warmth inside you thickens, pressing against your ribs like something trying to crawl in.

They are watching.

Your heartbeat slams against your throat. Your breath rasps too loud in your ears. You take a step back...

RUN your instincts yell as fear coils through your every bone

but your boots sink, the snow too soft, too thick, too much like flesh. The scent of nutmeg curdles burnt sugar and rot, meat left too long in the sun.

Above, the flock shifts.

Their wings snap open, not gray, but a pale, veined white-blue, their edges dissolving into the sky. Their bodies glitch between blinks. Pigeons,no, things, creatures. Their beaks splinter sideways, needle teeth glistening. Talons curl like shards of ice, long enough to pierce through skin, through muscle, through you.

The ground shifts.

You hear the crack before you feel it ,sharp, clean, like a bone snapping in half.

Beneath you, the ice caves inward.

A tunnel gapes beneath your feet, a throat of ancient ice, glowing an impossible cerulean. The light isn’t reflected. It isn’t natural. It sees.

Something pulses within the tunnel a shard of obsidian, half-buried in the frost. Its surface writhes when you look directly at it, something moving just beneath its skin. Don’t touch it. But the warmth curls behind your ribs, a voice like syrup in your ear:

It’s yours.

You were meant to find it.

Take it.

Above, the pigeons croon a sound like glass grinding against bone.

Your fingers move before your brain can stop them the pull of warmth too strong to resist. The obsidian fits into your palm perfectly, the way a knife fits into a wound. Heat tears through your skin, sinking deep, deep, burning away your fingerprints, branding something into your bones.

Too late.

The warmth vanishes. Cold slams into you, raw and final.

The flock descends in a spiral, their bodies twisting, warping, unfolding into things that should not be. Wings and limbs and mouths so many mouths, stretching open, too wide, too black, hungry.

The ice beneath you sighs.

And you realize, too late, what the blue light truly is:

Eyes.

The tunnel shifts. A shadow uncoils from its depths.

The artifact pulses in your palm, liquid heat slithering into your veins, into your skull. You hear whispers—words in a language that does not want to be understood. Your muscles seize. Your bones hum.

The pigeons croon again. This time, you understand the words, words spoken to me as a warning rules to follow that I at first thought was just a joke on the new guy but no they held meaning.

Survival Rule #1: Never trust a winter that kisses you like a lover.

Rule #2: The artifacts choose their thieves.

Rule #3: They don’t need you alive

Only willing.