Halek was the first to return to the gate.

  Lyrn had already seen Halek approaching from a distance. He had already pushed the gate open a little and had walked a short distance toward him. Halek called out anyway—briefly, haltingly, and without really catching his breath.

  “The fourth border post has fallen!”

  “It has shifted,” Eirik corrected him from behind.

  He had trotted after Halek, but had no trouble arriving at almost the same time. Mindful of the effect of their arrival, he placed a reassuring hand on Halek's shoulder.

  Lyrn's gaze shifted from Halek to Eirik. “Moved? With the ground?”

  “It looks that way,” Eirik confirmed.

  A brief pause. Then Lyrn clenched his jaw and headed for the signal ropes in his shelter. “Brynja?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “And the council,” said Eirik. “Quietly.”

  Lyrn hesitated long enough to make clear he understood what quietly meant in this context. Then he pulled the cord.

  Within an hour, five figures stood in the wide snowy plain, looking at the boundary post in the gray light of late morning. The clearly slanted post cast a shadow on the snow that was clearly too short due to its inclination.

  Brynja circled the post carefully, looking at it from every angle.

  Then she pressed the tip of her boot against the snow to push it aside. Small cracks were also visible in the ground.

  Thoughtfully, she took her time to compose her next words. Finally, she asked Eirik, “Was it still standing straight yesterday?” She looked at him intently, as if trying to gauge whether he was hesitating.

  “Absolutely. No mistake about it,” Eirik affirmed. He looked her in the eyes.

  “And you're sure it wasn't frost heave.”

  It wasn't really a question. Halek opened his mouth, but closed it again. He wanted to say something, but then decided he would have to take it back later.

  “It was straight,” Eirik explained again. “And frost heave doesn't cause cracks that run outward from the base of the post.” He pointed to the ground. “Those weren't there earlier, by the way.”

  Brynja nodded reluctantly. “Check it again carefully, Halek.”

  Halek knelt down and rammed a calibration rod into the snow next to the mark. He worked with the methodical care that had earned him a reputation as an outsider in his youth. Someone who knew that the figures he was about to present would have to stand up in the council chamber. Meanwhile, Lyrn walked the distance to the second post without being asked and counted quietly to himself. Vardek stood a little apart from the others, watching the snow at his feet rather than the group around him.

  The numbers confirmed what could be seen with the naked eye: the line of boundary posts had shifted.

  Not far. Not by any amount that would have been significant to someone who hadn't walked along this row of markers every season for twenty years. But it was enough. Barely half a man's length of ground had shifted around the boundary post. Clearly visible in the direction of Wintermark.

  Brynja looked north toward the pale horizon where the ice fields lay.

  “When did it shift?”

  “During the second noise,” said Eirik. He searched for words to make the experience tangible. “The first crack reached the base. The post clearly shifted only after that, with the second rumble. But before the third, which came from somewhere over there.” He pointed in the direction of the ice fields.

  “After that means...”

  “After whatever caused the noise had already passed.”

  Brynja took note of this without any obvious reaction. Next to her, Vardek said nothing for a few breaths. Then he added:

  “It didn't break outward. It widened.”

  Brynja turned to him. “Can you say that again, please?”

  Vardek pressed his palm onto the snow. His eyes closed. “The ground gave way from below. Not from pressure coming from the north.” He paused. “The ice fields themselves didn't cause it. Something beneath the surface gave way—or created space.”

  Halek's frown had deepened since the word “widened.” “Land sinkings...” he emphasized the word “...is common near ice. The ground freezes unevenly, melts in some places, and the surface sinks. That doesn't mean...”

  “We're far from the field,” Vardek interrupted him brusquely.

  “Not as far as three winters ago.” Halek shot back.

  Brynja raised her hand effectly ending the argument.

  “I'm closing the northern hunting trail,” she decided. “From now on, until the council decides otherwise.”

  Halek looked up. “That's three miles of our most important hunting grounds.”

  “Three miles where we currently cannot stand safely.” she stated flatly. “I'm not taking any chances when we can't see or determine what's happening here. Last winter should be warning enough.”

  Eirik said nothing. The northern trail was not just a border for them. It represented also the moose corridor—a narrow strip of land between the tree line in the south and the first mountain ridge, where the animals pushed south as the cold increased. In short winters, it hardly mattered. But this winter had not been short by any means - it had started unusually early last year. Because of the extreme cold, the logging teams had already been unable to go out for several days twice. The smokehouse in the village contained about six weeks' worth of smoked meat. Six weeks would not be enough without the moose in the northern corridor. Not if the winter lasted as long as it currently appeared it would. All the signs pointed to that.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He said nothing. Eirik knew that Brynja had the same figures in her head as he did, and yet she had made the decision. He gazed into the distance along the familiar hunting corridor – in his opinion, it was the right decision for the moment. But it was also a decision that would provoke discussion and at the same time make it more difficult to feed the village for the next few months.

  Brynja interrupted his thoughts. “We will add additional guards at the third and fourth markers,” she added. “Two-man rotation, day and night. No one is allowed to move beyond the fourth post without the council's consent.” She looked at Lyrn and ordered: “Starting tonight.”

  “Understood,” Lyrn said.

  Halek did not object again. The decision had been made, and he knew when he could no longer contribute any further arguments to a discussion.

  On their way back, the cold returned more oppressive and complete their companion.

  By noon, the news had spread anyway.

  Wintermark was too small for them to keep the decision or the reason for it a secret for long. The people in such a small community had a keen sense of change in their routine. They had seen the group come and go. The woodcutters at the southern edge of the forest had also seen them come and go, and their natural curiosity eventually led them back to the small tavern earlier than usual. Ardis happened to have left her forge by chance long enough to watch the arriving group at the northern gate of the palisade, her arms crossed and her hammer still in her hand. Later on, children were prevented from playing outside the protective palisades. Without explanation to them, which was an explanation in and of itself.

  The village did not panic, but it adapted silently. Pragmatically in a way a community adapts when it is well-established.

  The quiet composure unsettled Eirik more than he wanted to admit. It meant that people recognized the situation. They had already begun to wonder what a blockade of the northern territories might mean for the coming months.

  He was still thinking through the consequences of the decision himself when Brynja found him behind the hall by the woodpile.

  She wasted no time with preambles. “Have the hunters who set out this morning before the road was closed already returned?”

  He put the log he was holding back on the woodpile when Brynja spoke to him.

  “An hour ago,” Eirik replied. After a short pause, he added, “Empty-handed.”

  Brynja was silent for a moment. “How far north did they go on their hunt?”

  “Not beyond the second ridge. About as far as the 5th or 6th boundary posts. They said the tracks were false.” He picked up another piece of wood from the ground and placed it further up the pile. “The path out of the gorge—the one that runs along the eastern slope—was clear, they said. Fresh snow covered it. No animals have crossed the ridge since the last snowfall two nights ago.”

  Brynja paused. “That corridor runs further north than the third marker.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at the pile of wood for a moment, then back at him. Her expression didn't change. But he could see her coming to the same conclusions as him. “So the animals were already moving differently before this morning,” she noted reluctantly.

  “That would be my interpretation as well.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I want the smoke shed counted by tonight. Please do a complete inventory. Please don't send Halek—he tends to count too positively.”

  “I'll do it myself.”

  She nodded once and left without further comment.

  Eirik watched her go and thought about the path in the ravine. About the lack of tracks in the fresh snow and the fact that animals that had used this corridor every winter for as long as anyone could remember had apparently stopped using it. And long before anyone in Wintermark had noticed that something was wrong.

  He picked up another log and added it to the pile.

  In the late afternoon, Eirik once again set off along the northern route with Halek and two of the younger guards. Halek rammed a new iron rod, specially made for this purpose, into the ground. He carefully noted the deviation between the tilted third marker and the new iron rod, which was standing vertically. As they made their way to the markers, the sky had taken on the color of old ash. With a bit of bad luck, they would have to complete the return journey in the dark.

  When they got to the fourth post, Halek stopped.

  Halek blieb stehen kurz bevor sie den vierten Marker endgültig erreichten.

  Einen langen Moment stand er ganz still da und betrachtete ihn bevor er sich zu Eirik umwandte.

  ?War der heute Morgen noch gerade?“, fragte er schlie?lich Erik.

  Eirik der hinter Halek gegangen war, trat an ihm vorbei, um einen besseren Blick auf den Grenzpfosten zu erhalten.

  The fourth marker post stood upright. So upright that he would not have given it a second glance on a normal border patrol. But now there was something strange about it. He knelt down next to the border post and pressed his palm against the side of the post to examine it. He felt something he couldn't quite place—a slight resistance, as if the marker were held in a rubbery, tough substance rather than simply stuck in the frozen and therefore immovable earth. He withdrew his hand without actually being able to move the marker.

  “Measure it,” he said.

  Halek repeated the process as he had done with the third marker. He drove an iron rod into the ground and aligned it with the plumb line. Then he measured the angle. Then again. His jaws were tense. “Am I mistaken, or does it look crooked? But the angle is correct.” He looked at his notes in confusion.

  On the way to the marker, Eirik had deliberately counted the distance between the third and fourth posts. It was shorter than it should have been. Not dramatically so, but more than could be explained by a counting error or a misjudgment by someone who had walked this route repeatedly in every season for fifteen years.

  Halek stared silently at the numbers he had scratched into his wooden board for a long time.

  “That's not right,” he finally said. Erik recognized the same words he had used himself that morning, standing there alone over the first depression. To hear those words echoed by someone else now was not particularly comforting.

  He twisted his mouth. “No,” Eirik agreed.

  They turned together and looked south along the line—at the third post, which was visibly slanted even from a distance, and at the area between them.

  The line of the trail was no longer straight. Even with goodwill and slight deviations to the left and right due to stones or small elevations, it could no longer be ignored.

  It curved inward. Inconspicuous to those unfamiliar with the area, yet as obvious as a curve to the experienced border guards – a clear shift in perspective. Eirik had spent his entire life checking the lines on his hikes as a border guard – he knew the difference between an illusion and a fact.

  “This didn't start today,” he thought.

  One of the younger guards—a broad-shouldered boy named Osric, who had been silent throughout the march—looked up from the trail to Eirik. “How long do you think?” he asked. He glanced at Eirik. “The shift—I mean, how long has it been there?”

  Eirik thought of the report about the path in the ravine. How there were no tracks in two nights of untouched snow.

  “Long enough that we should have noticed it sooner,” he finally said.

  The fourth post stood slightly crooked in the cold gray light, yet it was proven to be at the correct angle. The third post behind it was already crooked, and the line between the two described a curve that, according to all reasonable logic, had no business being there.

  He turned his head back toward the north. Somewhere out there, beyond the tree line, the ridge, and the adjacent ice fields that they couldn't see from here, something had been waiting patiently. Without them noticing.

  Now it had stirred.