Winter didn't arrive; it collapsed.
For three straight weeks, the gray sky dumped a white wall that swallowed the world whole. Eijiro's cabin, once an isolated refuge on the mountainside, turned into an island in a frozen ocean.
Snow piled up all the way to the eaves, blocking the windows and turning daytime into a permanent twilight.
For Nyra, it was a prison.
And she was a caged animal.
Her recovery had been miraculous by human standards, but painfully slow for someone like her. The Subworld's poison had finally been purged, but it left marks behind—silver scars, shaped like lightning, running up her thigh to her hip. Her muscles, once tight like drawn steel, now felt like slack ropes.
She spent her days sitting close to the hearth, leg stretched out, sharpening a small kitchen knife with a whetstone she'd found.
Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.
The steady sound was her only thread to who she used to be: a weapon.
Eijiro, on the other hand, moved. Always.
The cabin had a back room, reachable through a narrow door, his workshop. Not just a tool shed; a forge. Nyra had learned that the man who saved her wasn't some simple woodsman. He shaped the world with his hands.
One afternoon, with the wind howling outside like the damned souls of Tartarus, Nyra leaned on a crude wooden staff and limped toward the workshop door.
Inside, heat wrapped around her like a heavy blanket. It smelled of charcoal, hot iron, and something metallic in the air.
Eijiro's back was to her, standing in front of a small anvil. He had taken the top of his kimono off, sleeves tied around his waist.
The orange firelight washed over his broad back, sweat rolling down his spine in gleaming trails, following muscles carved by hard labor.
He held a long pair of tongs, a glowing bar of iron clamped at the end.
Clang.
The hammer came down. Sparks burst like angry fireflies, scattering into the shadows.
Clang.
Nyra watched, almost entranced. Her entire life had been about destruction. Her Kaburami had been forged to cut, to separate bone from flesh, life from death. She understood the anatomy of killing.
But this…
This was the opposite.
Eijiro wasn't breaking the metal. He was coaxing it. Forcing it to transform. There was violence in the act the fire, the blows, the hiss of steam, but the result was creation.
He paused. He must've felt her eyes. He didn't turn right away. He plunged the metal into a basin of dark oil, smoke hissing up, and then he looked over his shoulder.
His black hair was tied in a messy knot, stray strands stuck to his forehead with sweat.
"You should be lying down," he said, voice competing with the roar of the fire.
"I'm tired of staring at the ceiling," Nyra shot back, her voice steadier now, though her knees trembled.
She stepped fully inside, letting the heat swallow her chilled body.
"What are you crafting? Doesn't look like farming tools."
Eijiro wiped his hands on a soot-stained rag. He picked up the piece of metal—now darkened—and held it out. A hinge. Small, complex, delicate.
"Winter breaks things," he said simply. "I fix them before they break."
Nyra touched the metal. Still warm. Too precise for a hermit in the mountains.
"You've got hands of a master," she murmured, eyeing his calloused fingers. "Hands that should be working in the capital, earning gold. Not living off roots and rabbits out here."
Eijiro let out a short, humorless laugh. He twirled the hammer in his hand like he'd been born holding it.
"In the capital, hands like mine don't touch gold," he said. "They get cut off."
He turned back to the forge, pumping the bellows. Flames roared, lighting up his profile—strong nose, deep eyes, skin permanently kissed by sun even in winter.
Nyra leaned against a workbench. The closeness in that small, burning-hot room made the air feel heavier. His scent—iron, sweat, and fire—hit her sharply.
"Why?" she asked quietly.
Eijiro glanced at her. Firelight danced in Nyra's electric blue eyes, making them glow.
"Look at me, Nyra. What do you see?"
"A man," she said instantly. "Strong. Skilled."
"Most people see a mistake," he answered, bitterness slipping into his usually steady voice. "My mother was from here. My father… was a sailor from the south. A Namban. A dark-skinned barbarian who sailed in a black ship."
He set the iron back in the fire.
"I'm mixed. A mongrel. In this land, purity is everything. To them, I'm as monstrous as the things hiding in the forest shadows. They tolerate me because I fix their tools, but they don't want me near their daughters or their temples."
Nyra felt something twist inside her—a quiet, sharp ache.
She looked at her own pale hands, hands that could turn into claws if she willed it.
"I understand," she whispered. "More than you think."
Eijiro studied her.
"I know you do," he said. "I saw your eyes when I found you. And I saw how your wounds closed. Human flesh doesn't do that."
Silence stretched between them—not hostile, but heavy. The silence of two predators realizing they didn't need to fight.
"I'm a hybrid," Nyra admitted. Saying it out loud was dangerous, but with the world buried in snow outside, the truth felt smaller. "Half human. Half… Werewolf. Where I was born, I was a weapon. Here, I'm an abomination."
Eijiro nodded. Slowly. Unsurprised.
"I've seen a monster before," he murmured. "A real oni, coming down from the mountain years ago. Red skin. Horns. Killing for fun."
He looked directly into her eyes—those unnatural, icy blue flames.
"You're not that. You've got darkness, sure. But monsters don't feel cold. Monsters don't cry in their sleep."
Nyra's gaze snapped away, heat rising to her cheeks. She hadn't known she cried at night. Vulnerability felt foreign—like clothes that didn't fit.
Trying to steer away from the topic, she looked at the pelts hanging in the corner.
"I lost my coat," she said, louder this time. "When the rift closed. It stayed behind… along with my sword."
"Was it important?" Eijiro asked, hammering again, less force now.
"It was silver," Nyra said softly, picturing it swaying behind her as she fought. "Long. Treated leather with wolf tribal symbols on the back. It was… my armor. Without it, I feel exposed. Bare."
She hugged herself. The thin cotton yukata did nothing to fill the absence.
Eijiro paused mid-swing.
He turned, glanced at the pelts—bear and mountain wolf, thick and warm—then at Nyra. His eyes scanned her like an artisan taking measurements: the width of her shoulders, the line of her waist, the proud posture she kept even when weak.
"Silver's hard to come by here," he said, voice low.
"But I can make the tribal markings."
He put down the hammer and tongs and walked toward her.
He stopped one step away, his body heat mixing with the forge's warmth. His hand lifted, hesitating for a second, then touched her shoulder where the yukata was fraying.
"I can make something better," he said, locking eyes with her. "The leather here's tougher. Handles the winter's bite. And the beast's claw. I'll make you a coat, Nyra."
"You don't have to—" she began.
"You'll need it when you walk out that door," he interrupted, calm but firm. "The world out there doesn't forgive what we are. We need thick skin."
Nyra stared at him—the raw honesty, the hidden gentleness in a face worn by hardship. For the first time in years, something in her shoulders loosened. She wasn't being controlled.
She wasn't being hunted.
Eijiro looked into her electric blue eyes—eyes that scared everyone but him.
"I've got a pigment," he added. "Mountain indigo. Aizome. People say it keeps away snakes and insects. Turns the leather a blue so dark it looks like the night before dawn."
Nyra touched her own arm, feeling the cold that always clung to her.
"Blue, then," she agreed, glancing toward the snow outside.
Eijiro returned to the anvil, and the hammer fell again.
Clang. Clang.
But now, to Nyra, it didn't sound like metal.
It sounded like a heartbeat.
Strong, steady, and oddly comforting.
Outside, the snow kept falling, sealing the cabin and trapping two monsters together in their tiny world of fire and silence.