Many people said it was no surprise.
It came on the heels of a heavy storm that pressed the mountains down so much, they folded. It was simply nature—clockwork determinism—inevitable as the turning of seasons, and as indifferent as arithmetic. The village existed in a precarious equilibrium with the mountains. A Mexican standoff with the elements, one day it was bound to collapse.
Some swore they’d heard a sound right before it struck: a crack like a cannon’s roar, as though the earth itself had fired a warning shot. Or, as rumors would have it, not a warning but a call to arms—a menacing force stirring, Edric’s killer covering their tracks with a boom. That, they whispered, was what made the mountains move.
Regardless of cause, the avalanche had arrived; a white leviathan unmoored, it tore through the village with a hunger that felt personal. Its roar rattled the valley, shaking windows and wringing any silence out of the air. It wasn’t just noise; it was a wave that drowned flesh, sank into bone, and made men feel small. Snow and stone fell on the village like judgment day, collapsing from the heights in an unstoppable white tide of condemnation, sealing Threadneedle off from the Crown, and the world.
By the time the castle’s bells tolled their frantic alarm, the white beast had already all but destroyed the village and sunk back into the abyss.
Folks stumbled through the drifts with shovels and axes, their breath fogging the brittle air as they worked against time and matter. The snow was too deep, the debris too thick, to move these mountains themselves.
At her doorway, a woman, wrapped in a shawl, waited silently, her face toward the darkened peak, as if expecting a second calamity. Somewhere in the enveloping stillness, a child cried, carried like a dust-shard of glass on the frozen wind.
In the black hours between disaster and dawn, the cold held its grip on the village and the castle held its breath, afraid to awaken the sleeping giant that had descended from the mountains. Meanwhile, in the great hall, the survivors gathered under vaulted ribs, as if entering the very belly of the beast itself.