Lost Creek Hollow Samhain

All the way here he had traveled, through the woods, plains, mountains, through rain splatting like spit from a sneeze through the air, all dark and hooded and readying for winter.

Head nestled in the curve on his right collarbone, Wymond dozes off in the 27 degrees Fahrenheit chill, breath escaping from him in misted chimneys of vapor.

Through fitful and oblique skew lines of navy he first hears somebody's footsteps, then glimpses a moment of silver fur. He asks, who's there? with all the bald volume of the character first to die in a pulp horror flick, hubris blown up on a camera so macro you'd swear you could see the atoms of it on the Spanish stucco when the projector gears whir to life --

-- a crow or raven cruising past, volplaning (engines off) back to the fern and dirt tarmac, just overhead. For a second he can see the sleek and seamless underbelly of death's portent (quoth the raven, nevermore! And so on,) and fear is suddenly a condensate on his palms.