Permafrost Hollows puuksraak

The permafrost hollows stretched before her, a latticework of brittle branches clawing at the gray sky, their thin black arms sheathed in an icy rime. Sulukinak moved among them like a shadow, her breath barely visible in the wet snow that sifted endlessly from the heavens. Each step she took pressed shallow into the crusted earth, leaving faint trails of indentations soon claimed by the relentless wind. The forest was lifeless, the air thick with silence save for the occasional groan of a tree swaying under the weight of the season.
She stopped, her eyes lifting to the mountain that reared against the south, its crags lost in the gauzy veil of weather.
The murmur of the Everdark whispered to her through the skeletal trees. It was not a voice but a feeling, crawling up from the marrow of her bones, urging her toward something unnamed. This was the legacy of the Muradoii, her mother’s people, who revered the deathly quiet of the ice and the sharp truths of survival. Her mother, whose words had been wrapped in the cold beauty of certainty, who had knelt before the vast expanse of the frozen land and called it sacred. Sulukinak had thought herself free of it, of her mother’s faith and its endless sacrifices. But there were moments—like now—when she could not deny its presence, the way it seemed to reach for her across time.
The memory of her near-death on the ice flickered unbidden. The cruel sunlight gleaming off an endless sea of white, her breath burning sharp as glass in her throat, her limbs screaming for warmth that would never come. The Muradoii would have called her survival a gift from the Everdark itself, a test endured and passed. Sulukinak had not felt chosen; she had felt broken.
And yet, she was here. She stared at the mountain’s shrouded peak and then looked away, her jaw tightening. It was not the mountain that unsettled her. It was the growing awareness that she no longer knew what she sought.