06/03/2026: Watching for Wintersplinter

The fog hangs so thick over Vallaki that the wereravens circling the walls watching for Wintersplinter are little more than sounds. Below them, the city does not sleep so much as hold its breath. Catapults wait. Torches burn low in brackets along the Sunset Gate. Orbart Glandin makes his way through the preparation to offer his services.

Orbart is difficult to miss: a minotaur, seven feet and eight inches of dense muscle, sharpened horn and quiet reserve, wearing a chainmail shirt with a slight hood and boots that have given way at the toe. He carries an amulet bearing a strange symbol, which he uses to channel his magic, and he has his own moral code, arrived at independent of his god. He has been in Vallaki for two months, renting a room from a widow who would not have him if extreme old age had not dimmed her vision. In his short time here, he has watched three different rulers occupy the Burgomaster’s mansion. Two of these changes in power occurred through violent deaths. But during these upheavals, the city of Vallaki itself was never threatened.

That has changed, it seems.

Dunlarr, the current acting Burgomaster, takes in Orbart’s horns, his chainmail, his understated excitement in the face of approaching battle, and points him toward Captain Trei, giving orders near the Sunset Gate. Trei looks him over from broken boot to horn and decides not to ask questions. “You look to be a good man to have fighting beside us,” the officer tells Orbart.

In the center of the city, the main force stands at the ready, waiting to see which approach Wintersplinter will take. A single catapult has been left in position at the Sunset Gate. The other three are moveable if they have to be, though everyone with eyes knows they won’t be moved fast. Krelldutt pulls himself out of a nap neither long enough nor particularly satisfying. He is not rested, and looks it. The ranger moves toward the Sunset Gate, longbow on his back, squinting into the fog and wondering when the enormous Wintersplinter will arrive.

⚔

Torgan finds the trail without difficulty. A creature the size of a hill does not slip easily through a dense forest. Trees shoved aside, roots torn out leaving deep craters in the moist earth — Wintersplinter’s path is written in violence, and Torgan follows it through the treeline at a careful distance.

He nearly walks past Viktor entirely.

The man steps out from behind a rock, his young daughter half a step behind him: a girl of nine or ten who curtsies, introduces herself as Arabella, and checks that she has done it correctly. They are dressed as the Vistani do: colorful and ragged in equal measure.

 Brow creased with worry, Viktor explains quietly that he and his daughter are being pursued. He wishes to reach Vallaki, although he knows Vallakians will not want him. He will ask anyway, for Arabella’s sake. Torgan weighs his decision to help against the fact that they are in the middle of a forest with Wintersplinter somewhere ahead and armed men somewhere behind.

Torgan agrees to aid the two. He recognizes them by their voices: he heard in the trees outside the Vistani encampment earlier. They move, cautiously, in the trail of destruction Wintersplinter has left.

⚔

Viktor signals for silence and points ahead of them: the trees here have stopped falling. 

Whatever was tearing through the forest has gone still.

 Wintersplinter is waiting, somewhere nearby in the fog. Viktor recognizes this behavior — the enormous creature waited like this at the foot of the hill where the Vistani camp. It was hard to spot then, as well.

Stealthily, they find cover. Torgan takes the rocks and scrub just off the trail. Viktor boosts Arabella into the branches of a pine and crouches in the brush beneath her.

Shortly, two Vistani come through the undergrowth on foot, following Wintersplinter’s wide path. They did not hear them, nor realize they were being followed. The scouts are cautious, slow.

Torgan lets the first one pass him by the outcrop of rock he hides behind, then pulls the second into the bushes with one arm locked around her throat and his hand axe ready. He slits her throat quickly. 

It is not quiet enough.

The second Vistani whips around — too late for subtlety, too early for escape. He draws his scimitar. Torgan grapples him and takes two dagger strikes across the ribs for his trouble. He remains on his feet. Viktor, round-eyed, leaps from the brush with his crossbow up and misses badly. Arabella begins to shimmy down the rough trunk of the pine.

Then, not far away, something enormous turns its head toward the noise.

⚔

Wintersplinter moves. Seventy feet of animated wood and vine, and it covers ground faster than anyone present could have guessed. Viktor runs, scooping up Arabella, but the Vistani scout is faster. He slashes Viktor across the back, and Viktor drops the girl, who screams. Wintersplinter roars at the sound. It is earsplitting.

Torgan runs, shouting over his shoulder, cutting away from Viktor at an angle — anything to draw the massive creature’s attention. He then pauses to throw both his hand axes toward the Vistani pursuing Viktor and his daughter. Only one finds its mark. The dwarf is still shouting when the raven lands.

It alights atop Wintersplinter’s head. The tree blight goes still. The raven bobs once, then animatedly caws loudly into the air. With a creak of boughs and snap of tree branches, Wintersplinter pivots away from Torgan, away from Viktor, away from the screaming child, and begins to move north. Toward Vallaki. The raven lifts from its head and vanishes into the fog.

Behind it, Arabella finds Torgan. She does not speak. She stands behind him, round-eyed, and he approaches the second scout, who snarls at his prey Viktor raises his crossbow with trembling, bloody hands.

⚔

At the Sunset Gate, they hear it before they see it. The approaching pounding comes up through the muddy earth of the central streets, the puddles vibrate with its approach. Each waiting protector of Vallaki feels the vibrations through their boots. The guards standing on the rampart spot the dark form emerging from the mist. 

Then Wintersplinter steps out of the treeline.

It stands, towering over a barn and a low rooftop of the abandoned house outside the gate, and looks toward the wall. Wintersplinter stoops to pick up a rock and heaves it at a section of the heavy stockade fence that encircles the city.

The wall gives way. A section of Vallaki’s western fortification simply comes apart — logs and thick sinews and a hundred years of standing as protection, gone in seconds. The crack carries like thunder across the whole city. Striding closer, Wintersplinter reaches into the wreckage, pulls free a length of stockade, and strips off one log to hold like a club.

Danika breaks from the wall in raven form and beats her wings toward the center of town, where Trei and the main force are waiting. She will give them the word they need. Yeska, the boy appointed as runner, cowers upon the wall, unable to force his legs to move. All he can do is gawp up at the massive being only yards away from him.

Atop the nearby towers flanking the Sunset Gate, guards dip their spears into the pitch bucket, touch them to a torch, and throw. Only one finds its mark. It sticks, smoldering against the creature’s shaggy bark — not quite catching, not quite going out.

Knights and guards push forward toward the broken wall. Orbart moves at a run toward the wall, unable to act at this distance.

Feesh reaches the edge of the portcullis and fires a crossbow bolt at long range — it lands, but Wintersplinter gives no sign of noticing: the bolt has been subsumed into the body of the tree blight. 

The spear still smolders, sending a thin coil of smoke into the swirling fog around Wintersplinter’s side. 

The tree blight is large enough that small wounds mean nothing to it. But fire is patient, and the pitch soaked into the bark is catching. What began as a flicker is becoming something the creature cannot simply absorb. It is on fire. The fire is spreading.

⚔

Somewhere in the forest, Torgan is still fighting the man who put a dagger in his side. Arabella stands behind him and does not make a sound, trembling. 

Somewhere in Vallaki, a horns are sounding.