The wind and snow were fierce. Though the god was barefoot, she left no footprints on the snow.
Shade could only chase after her along the ridge. Fortunately, Tree Father had not dropped him too far away. Before long, he spotted the glow of fire beneath the ridge.
He practically rolled down the snowy slope—it was faster that way. At the bottom stood a large rock, its lower half covered in snow, seemingly from nowhere. The firelight came from behind it. It was a decent place to shelter from the wind.
When Shade approached, he even found that the people by the campfire had used dead branches, cloth, and Ice Blocks to build a tiny sanctuary against the rock.
The sound of his bare feet walking across the snow made all three people by the fire in that drafty shelter turn toward him. They looked as numb as corpses.
The first thing Shade noticed was not that a witch had agreed to hide with a man. It was that the silver-white-haired god from earlier was not here.
There was little snow behind the rock, and the campfire had been built directly on the ground. Two women and a man huddled around it, curling up to keep themselves out of the wind and snow. Snow blowing through the gaps in the crude sanctuary had coated the ground in a thin layer of frost. The three of them watched Shade approach without expression. Even after he crawled into their "sanctuary" and used his body to block its largest gap, none of them spoke.
"Um... hello."
Shade hesitantly greeted them, extending his hands toward the fire for warmth. The flame that could burn here was naturally no ordinary fire. Nor was it a campfire created through witchcraft or even a Mystic Lock. The