William trudged on ahead, walking a few paces alongside the husky-drawn sled. Ahead of him, five individuals, all a small way apart, walked on in the same direction, the ebbs and flows of snow at times revealing them, at others reducing them to less than silhouettes. He saw nothing out of the corner of his eyes, he’d sacrificed peripheral vision for the extra warmth of snow goggles, but he knew that the rest of his group was around and behind him, 15 people, men and women, and a further two sleds. They all walked with heavy backpacks and rifles slung over their backs, dressed in thick, white winter clothing. The sleds carried what they couldn’t, extra provisions, two mortars and their shells, one man who was nursing a sprained ankle, and the prospecting rig.

The storm was bad, sure, that was to be expected, but as far as Will could tell it was unusually bad. Less than an hour ago it had been full Siberian noon. Slightly dimmer than it should be, from all the ash floating in the upper atmosphere. Only a slight reduction in light, but all around the world, for seven years, had built up and given mankind its very own self-made ice age, a nuclear winter, altering weather patterns invariably for the worse. The storm had not come in from the north as they would expect, nor any of the cardinal directions for that matter, and there was no tell-tale sign beforehand. It seemingly dropped down on them without warning, encasing them in a flurry of snow as they tried to move through the tundra. Inside it was like night, despite the efforts of the huge wind-up lamp they’d activated on the lead sled, the winds buffeting them around.

A sound like crackling, arcing electricity cut through the storm, and the winds suddenly increased. Will became unsteady, stumbling as he continued forward. His friends at the same time became nearly impossible to see, but seemed to be walking just as well as before. A gloved hand shot up in front of his face and teeth gritted, trying to shield himself from the flurry. The lamp’s beam seemed to change direction, flicker and move, and with it the silhouettes of the others shifted and tilted. He stumbled and his sense of balance rebelled, telling him he was walking steady, then moving in all directions at once. His eyes gave less and less with every second, the beam of light moving and dimming constantly, the snow becoming thicker, a static wall of white. His ears gave him a muffled roaring of wind, and a rising, scraping ringing noise. He lost his bearings, and panic raised in his chest, prickling pain crawling across his torso from the fear. William tried to call out for help, but he was falling, past the point where he should have reached the ground, and in all directions at once. The whiteness outside his goggles spun and lost all detail, as the ringing noise grew to cover all else. He smelt and tasted iron, his feet and hands reached out for solid ground but found nothing. His heart threw itself at his ribcage, he felt the rush of adrenaline. In his eyes, his tongue, his limbs, he felt the effects of his heart’s desperate pumping, that animal reaction to danger. As intense as all of these sensations were, they were becoming fainter, more distant.

William Bluff blacked out.

---


The cold hit him hard- at first he didn’t notice, the sheer confusion and his own familiarity with the cold slowing the realisation. But this was definitely worse than it should be. He was face down in a bank of snow, his nose, cheeks and lips burning from the cold, and a strange pressure on his eyes. His limbs moved to push him off, moving into position more quickly than they could have moved a few minutes ago. He pushed himself upwards and realised he was unburdened, missing his thick outer coat, his backpack. Standing upright, he reached to his back to check, and alarm bells began to ring- his rifle was gone. Looking around hurriedly, Will saw what looked like a battlefield, some sort of fortress above him, heavily damaged, with snow and fire everywhere. The debris seemed mostly settled, though fires still raged. Above him rose two curving cliff faces, nearly meeting each other, with a bridge crossing the gap. 

Looking down at himself, seeing what was missing and what wasn’t, he wondered aloud “How the hell…? Blacked out in the storm, maybe they put me on a sled and were ambushed passing through here? Probably got flung away from the sled by some explosive, and they took me for a dead man. No need to scavenge from me as everything worthwhile was stored on the sled after I blacked out, so they never figured out I was alive…”

He looked behind himself, turned and rapidly stepped in the direction of the bridges, eyes widened in shock; there was a cliff, dropping far, far further than it was safe to fall. “But this isn’t anywhere like the Lena basin… The cliffs make sense but the bloody castle, I must have been out for ages…”

Glancing around, a metal glint caught his eye, and he reflexively squinted at it, before realising his glasses were on. A pleasant surprise, not scratched from their time in the snow, and easy to forget when he was used to the same lenses in his goggles. Explained the pressure on his eyes in the snow. They must have forgotten to take them off him when they put him on the sled… His attention went back to the object, clearly not a mine or an unexploded shell, and he approached. Reaching down to uncover it from the snow, his felt the urge to protest. 

“What kind of bandit leaves a Geiger counter?! Do they live in hazmat suits? Even then it is valuable to trade… Ah, well, it’s my Geiger counter.” He cradled the device, listening to it chirp, remembering his jokes about it being ‘The irrational fear meter’ as he checked it for faults. A frown creased his forehead, there was no visible damage, but it was detecting far less than it should even in the best of places. 

Will continued searching around for a few minutes, and the Geiger’s count did not change appreciably. Rather, it proved to not be malfunctioning, as when pointed at himself or his map it went to more familiar levels. Radioactive dust is omnipresent in the ecosystem and things like nuclear wars greatly increase this; eating, breathing and drinking all accumulated trace amounts of unstable isotopes in the body, and his device could detected them as they decayed.