The wind outside was a banshee without lungs—low and cruel, whispering through the wooden seams of the longhouse like it wanted to be let in. Not howling. Not screaming. Whispering. Like it knew all their names.
The kind of wind that had memory.
The kind that remembered the first time a child didn't cry when it slipped into the snow and never came back. The kind that remembered the old hunter who froze upright at his post, eyes wide open, coated in frost like he'd seen something in the white and never had time to scream. The kind that, if it could speak, would only say one word:
"More."
Inside, the fire sputtered in protest, its feeble light flickering against seal-fat-soaked walls. The smell of old grease, burnt hair, and too many ghosts hung in the air like a second skin. It wasn't warmth the fire gave—it was the memory of warmth. Enough to pretend. Just enough to remind them what they no longer had.
The seal oil burned low in a cracked stone basin, casting a dim orange glow that left more shadows than it banished.
Twelve elders sat in a ragged circle around it, huddled under layers of stitched furs that had outlived half the people they were sewn for. Faces hollowed by more than hunger. Eyes clouded by more than age. They didn't speak. They didn't need to.
The silence was full.
Full of guilt. Regret. Slow rot.
Full of that unspoken truth that buzzed in all their skulls like a fly too slow to die:
They were dying.
Not quickly. Not dramatically.
But steadily.
Softly.
Qilak was the first to speak. She always was. Not because she was the oldest—though she was—but because she was the one who hadn't yet given up pretending that words mattered.
Her voice rasped like wind sliding over dry bone.
"We buried six this moon," she said.
No one looked at her. They just listened.
"No soil left. Just ice. We stacked them in the cave by the bluff."
She let the sentence hang like a hanged man swaying from a post.
"They'll freeze solid before the thaw," she added. "If it comes."
Her words didn't echo. The fur-lined walls drank sound like thirst.
Miksaq snorted. It wasn't laughter. It was the exhale of someone who didn't want to cry in front of the others.
"If," he said.
And no one corrected him.
They didn't do that anymore.
Correcting people implied there was a truth to return to.
There were no seals. The breathing holes in the ice were dead and dry. The fish were gone. Even the gulls had stopped circling the coast weeks ago. The dogs were dying. Collapsing mid-run. Refusing food. Eating their own waste and growling at shadows.
Two had been butchered the week before.
One of them had still been wagging its tail when the knife went in.
No one spoke of it. But no one forgot.
The children—what few remained—had stopped crying at night. Not from peace. From fatigue. They moved slower. Spoke less. As though their tiny bodies had realized that surviving wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Then came the door.
It groaned like a man who knew the news was bad before he heard it.
A gust of snow and black wind burst inward, and for a moment, the fire flickered so low they thought it might give up.
And then he entered.
Unarjuk.
Alive.
Smiling.
Mad as a frostbitten gull mid-molt.
His silhouette filled the doorway like a returning storm.
He was bundled in a mismatched ensemble of horror: polar bear hide yellowed by age and blood, twisted wire netting wrapped tight around his chest, and sealskin trousers tied with what looked like human hair. A green curtain—yes, a curtain—fluttered from one shoulder like a cape.
His beard was an atrocity of salt, ice, and something that had once been red. It curled like driftwood after a fire. His eyes—bright, wild, impossibly wide—swept across the longhouse like a man checking the guest list for his own funeral.
He stepped forward, arms spread as if to embrace them.
As if they weren't already shivering.
As if he was the fire.
The elders groaned in near-perfect unison.
"Oh, fuck," Miksaq muttered, low and bitter, not bothering to look up.
Tulimaq cursed under her breath and pulled her hood up like a woman expecting a sermon to come flying at her face.
Unarjuk paused just inside the threshold, his breath steaming in great clouds from flared nostrils, his boots crunching the thin frost that had crept inside with him.
The wind slammed the door shut behind him.
He grinned wider.
The grin of a man who had something to say—and didn't care if anyone wanted to hear it.
That was the worst part.
He always had something to say.
Unarjuk didn't wait for permission.
He never did.
He strode forward like a man bringing good news to a funeral, his boots thudding against the hard-packed earth as if even the floor should feel his arrival. The fire hissed in protest as he passed, his ragged cloak brushing embers from the rim of the seal-oil basin.
He stopped in the center of the circle and turned slowly, theatrically, surveying each face with a smile that had too many teeth.
"I have seen the future!" he declared, as if it were the opening line of a great epic and not the prelude to a headache.
Qilak closed her eyes and whispered, "Please no."
But he didn't stop. Unarjuk never stopped.
His voice rose like a mad priest's chant, echoing in the cramped space with a rhythm that felt rehearsed—because it was.
"If we stay here," he said, "if we wait, if we huddle and whisper and gnaw the last scraps of bone until we've eaten each other into silence—then we die. Cold. Forgotten. Like mice in the belly of the ice."
He let that hang. He was good at that.
Then he went on, eyes gleaming with unnatural joy.
"But that is not the only path. I've seen another. In the dream. In the fire that walks like light. In the voice of the whale that speaks in tongues and bleeds maps onto the ice."
Miksaq muttered, "You've been eating yellow snow again, haven't you?"
Unarjuk spun toward him.
His grin widened.
"Mock me if you must. But I know. I've seen it. The Koreans are rising. Riding missile-bound whales. Their orbital shamans sing battle chants that crack satellites in half."
Tulimaq's expression didn't change, but her soul visibly left her body for a moment.
"The Finns will answer," Unarjuk pressed on, "with vodka-fueled walkers powered by national trauma and accordion music. The Chinese—don't even get me started on the reindeer bombs."
He drew in a breath that rattled like he'd inhaled gravel and shouted:
"The Hyperwar is coming!"
Everyone just stared.
Even the fire looked embarrassed.
He didn't care. The fever was in him now.
"And when it comes," he said, "they will forget us. The world will forget us. The land will forget us. Our children will be frozen in glass museums while British children throw candy at our statues."
A beat.
Then, softly:
"They will make us wear pants."
This time, the silence was personal.
No one spoke.
No one could speak.
Unarjuk's voice dropped to a whisper.
"But there is still a way. One way. One path. One circle."
He reached into his coat—far too deep—and pulled out a scroll made of birch bark, stitched at the seams with sinew and madness. He unrolled it on the dirt, revealing ink-black symbols: penguins in Soviet helmets, seals flying with missiles strapped to their backs, polar bears pulling war-chariots, and at the top, a blazing sun with Unarjuk's own smiling face.
"Behold," he breathed, "the future."
Tulimaq tilted her head. "Is that… you?"
"It is us," Unarjuk said reverently. "The New Inuit. The Ones Who Ride. Who rule. Who break the hyperwheel of oppression and ride whales into the heavens."
Miksaq rubbed his face like he wanted to peel it off.
"Where does this happen?" he asked finally. "Where do you think this world begins?"
Unarjuk leaned in, conspiratorial.
"The Stone Circle."
A pause.
Even Qilak's breath caught in her throat.
Not because she believed him.
But because she recognized the name.
They all did.
A place carved into stories whispered to children to keep them close to home.
The Place We Don't Talk About.
Unarjuk saw their hesitation. And like a shark catching the scent of blood, he pressed harder.
"It's real. I've seen it. The stones still stand. They wait. And they remember."
He stood tall again, cloak billowing faintly as he turned in place.
"Twelve will go. The sacred number. Twelve bones in the jaw. Twelve lashes on the execution post. Twelve names in the dream. We will go to the Circle. And we will open the gate."
No one spoke.
Then—softly, uncertainly—Sulia did.
"…What if he's right?"
Her voice was barely more than a breath.
Not conviction.
Just exhaustion.
Qilak stared at her like she'd slapped a seal priest.
Miksaq groaned.
But no one said no.
Because desperation doesn't need faith.
Only the absence of better ideas.
One by one, the elders looked around the fire.
And one by one, they stood.
Unarjuk beamed, his eyes alight with victory.
"Excellent!" he shouted. "We begin at dawn!"
"It's dark all day, idiot," muttered Tulimaq.
"Then we begin… imminently."
Qilak narrowed her eyes.
"You're walking," she said.
Unarjuk hesitated. "I—"
"You're walking," Tulimaq repeated. "And if you talk again, I'll gag you with your own drawing."
He raised both hands.
But the grin never left his face.
Because they were going.
Because they had listened.
And because the Circle—his Circle—was waiting.
They left before dawn, though that meant nothing anymore. The sun hadn't risen in weeks. The only light came from the moon—low and pale—and the long smear of stars that glittered like knives above the white void. The kind of light that made things look closer than they were, safer than they felt, and smaller than they truly were.
Three sleds. Four dogs each. Twelve souls bundled in furs, sinew-wrapped boots dragging across ice older than the tribe's oldest stories. They didn't speak. Their breath fogged in short, sharp bursts, and their eyes were already beginning to water from the wind by the time they reached the sea shelf.
The cold was not an enemy.
It was a god.
Silent, slow, and completely indifferent.
The kind of god that didn't punish—it just waited.
The ice cracked beneath their feet in places. The sound was never loud, just a faint echo—pop-hiss-snap—that made every spine straighten. Every time the runners skidded over a black patch, someone clenched their teeth and tried not to pray. No one wanted to admit it, but the ice was hungry too.
By the second day, the dogs began to falter.
One collapsed. Panting. Whining. Its eyes rimmed with frost.
Unarjuk slit its throat before anyone could protest, carved a chunk of meat from its flank, and chewed it as they kept walking.
No one said a word.
He didn't share.
Unarjuk led from the front, his frame lean but tireless, cutting a steady path over the ice like a man led by fate. His coat flapped in the wind, bloodstained and stitched with dreams, his hood down despite the frostbite crawling along his ears. He never coughed. Never shivered.
If he slept, no one saw it.
At camp, he ate raw. Whispered to the dark. Prayed in a language no one taught him.
And at night—he wandered from fire to fire.
Saying little.
But always choosing his targets.
He started with the boys.
Akinnaq, especially.
Seventeen winters old, scar down his cheek from a seal spear accident, thin but hard. Eyes too old for his age, quiet and watchful. Never fully part of the group. The kind of youth who'd been kicked one too many times by older cousins. The kind who listened when no one thought he was there.
Unarjuk spoke to him in soft tones just beyond the firelight.
Never directly. Always layered in story.
"Do you know who doesn't deserve to eat?" he asked one night, pulling apart a strip of dried tendon with his teeth. "The ones who take and never bleed. Who smile when others suffer. Who speak but never act. Their meat is bitter. But the bones still burn."
Akinnaq didn't answer. Just nodded.
Unarjuk leaned closer.
"There are wolves, and there are dogs. Dogs pull sleds. Wolves run alone. Which do you want to be?"
By day four, the tension was boiling under every step.
The wind was louder. The ice moaned more often. Shadows stretched in ways they shouldn't.
They were down to two sleds.
The third had snapped a runner on a hidden ridge. Half the meat spilled into a crack. No one tried to retrieve it.
Everyone was colder now. Slower.
Qilak coughed up blood that froze before it hit her chin.
Miksaq kept muttering under his breath, staring at Unarjuk with narrowed eyes like he was trying to decide if killing him would take more or less energy than dying quietly.
Fights began. Small ones. Over blankets. Over blubber. Over which dog was pulling more.
One woman slapped her nephew for snoring too loudly. He bit her.
That night, the fire wouldn't light until Sulia cut off a piece of her own hair and burned it like an offering.
Unarjuk was unbothered.
He walked like he was gliding. Like the cold didn't dare touch him.
He smiled more.
Spoke less.
But the whispers didn't stop.
"You saw her eat more than her share."
"They laughed when your brother fell through the ice last winter."
"He said you weren't strong enough to lead. That he'd leave you behind first."
Just little truths.
Little cuts.
And Unarjuk made sure they never scabbed over.
Akinnaq stopped sleeping with the others.
He sharpened his blade more often.
He stared at the back of the group as they walked.
Stared like he was measuring people.
Weight. Weakness. Worth.
By the sixth day, they saw Meighen Island.
It rose from the mist like a wound. Black cliffs. Pale peaks. Nothing green. Nothing soft.
Just stone.
Waiting.
The Circle would be there. At its heart. Carved into the bone of the Earth.
The dogs whined as they drew close. The sleds slowed.
Unarjuk kept walking.
He didn't look back.
Didn't need to.
They were following.
Because the island was there.
And because now—deep down—some of them wanted the Circle to be real.
Even if it killed them.
Especially if it did.
The wind died as they crossed the final ridge.
It didn't stop.
It died—as if it had come to the edge of something older, something it no longer dared to cross. A final exhale before silence.
Meighen Island stretched out beneath them in a sheet of blackened frost and glass-slick rock, the last sunlight this part of the world would see for months already forgotten. The snow had thinned unnaturally near the island's heart, exposing the terrain like something had burned it clean.
And at the center of it all—
The Circle.
Twelve stones.
Tall, hunched, thick as tree trunks, taller than a man, standing in a perfect ring like they'd been waiting. Each monolith was carved—though no one could say with what. There were no chisel marks, no seams. Just deep lines etched in spiral patterns and violent shapes: winged figures with halos of flame clashing with beasts made of shadow, suns breaking open in the sky, wheels descending from the stars.
The carvings felt wrong—not just old, but aware.
Qilak stopped walking first.
Then Tulimaq.
Then the dogs.
They growled low, tails down, hackles raised. Some whined and backed away. One pissed itself and barked at the stones like they were alive.
No one said it, but everyone thought it:
This wasn't legend.
This was a place built to be forgotten.
Unarjuk, of course, was delighted.
He stood at the edge of the circle with arms outstretched, the wind tugging at his patchwork cloak.
"It is here!" he declared, breath fogging in the cold. "The Gate! The Forge! The Womb of Fire!"
Sulia staggered forward, her eyes wide, fixed on the carvings.
"They're… they're watching," she whispered.
Unarjuk turned to her and beamed.
"Of course they are. They've always been watching."
He stepped into the ring.
Nothing happened.
No lightning. No thunder.
Just the soft crunch of his boots against frostbitten moss.
He turned, raised his arms again, and shouted:
"Now—we offer."
Murmurs rippled through the group.
"Offer what?" Miksaq snapped, already fed up. "We've got nothing left."
Unarjuk's smile sharpened. "Ourselves."
He let the word linger.
Not like a death sentence.
Like a prayer.
"The stones are hungry. That is why the wind fears them. That is why the seals never return here. This is where we remake ourselves."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a flensing knife—thin, curved, still stained from the last dog.
"We start small," he said, kneeling beside one of the stones. "A piece of skin. A fingertip. An eye, if you're brave. The circle respects bravery."
No one moved.
Even the dogs were quiet now, ears back, watching with flat, unblinking eyes.
Sulia's voice cracked. "You want us to blind ourselves?"
"Only one eye," Unarjuk replied cheerfully. "We leave one to witness what comes."
Miksaq stepped forward, hand on the bone axe at his belt.
"You said we'd try something. You didn't say we'd butcher ourselves."
"I never said it wouldn't hurt," Unarjuk said. "But pain is truth. Pain is sacrifice. This is the price of awakening."
The group shifted. Whispered. People glanced at each other—measuring fear, faith, fatigue.
And then Akinnaq stepped forward.
Everyone turned.
He walked slow. Controlled. Knife in hand.
He didn't speak.
Didn't look at anyone but the boy beside him—Taktuq. The bigger one. The louder one. The one who had mocked him in the village. Who had taken extra meat. Who had spat on Akinnaq's boots when he thought no one saw.
Taktuq raised his hands.
"Akinnaq—wait—"
The blade flashed.
A wet choke.
Taktuq dropped, gurgling, hands clawing at the slit in his throat.
Blood sprayed across the base of the nearest stone.
Steam rose.
Silence followed.
Akinnaq turned to the group, face cold and unreadable.
"Isn't a whole life better than a finger?"
No one moved.
Then Unarjuk laughed.
Not a cackle.
A warm, delighted, joyful laugh.
"Yes!" he cried. "The boy understands! The stones understand!"
Qilak recoiled. "He just murdered him!"
"He freed him!" Unarjuk corrected. "He offered him!"
The group began to fracture.
Some backed away from the circle.
Some stepped in.
Others argued—shouting now, accusing: "You pushed us here!""This was never part of it!""He was your nephew!"
Voices overlapped.
Blades came out.
One man shoved another into a stone and cracked his skull.
A woman screamed and lunged at Sulia with a bone chisel.
The dogs began barking—then snarling—then biting.
And through it all, Unarjuk stood in the center of the ring, arms raised to the sky, eyes wide, blood dripping from the stone at his feet.
Smiling.
Because it was working.
They had come.
They had believed.
And now, they would burn.
Taktuq's body twitched one last time.
Blood soaked into the moss. It hissed against the cold.
No one spoke.
Then someone screamed.
And everything broke.
The silence shattered like a bone beneath a rock. A woman—Taktuq's aunt—rushed Akinnaq with a carving hook, shrieking in broken syllables, froth at her mouth, grief in her eyes. Akinnaq slashed without hesitation—ripped open her face in a diagonal line from cheek to brow.
She went down with a sound like wet leather tearing.
The boy didn't flinch.
Someone shouted his name.
He didn't hear.
Another woman—older, bent, brittle—ran to her sister's side. She pulled the curved tooth club from her belt and started beating the boy's legs as he backed away, laughing. Laughing.
That's when the others joined in.
Blades flashed in the gloom.
Old words—petty insults, whispered grudges—exploded into the air like sparks from flint. People turned. Lunged. Bled.
The shaman Amuuk tried to shout something, raise his hands in a warding gesture—he was tackled by two cousins who hadn't spoken to each other in years and now seemed united only by the joy of tearing something apart.
A man screamed, "You fucked my sister!" and buried a jawbone blade in another's throat.
Someone shouted, "That was twenty years ago!" and was answered with a kick to the ribs that cracked something loud and final.
The dogs snapped their tethers.
Some fled into the snow.
Some didn't.
One lunged at Tulimaq's leg and took it clean off at the knee. Another tore into a boy's neck like it was untying a rope. Another just sat down and watched it all happen, breathing slowly, the same way Unarjuk did.
Because Unarjuk was still smiling.
Still standing in the center of the ring with his arms open like a preacher in a burning church.
"YES!" he howled. "YES! CLEANSE! REVEAL! BE WORTHY!"
Someone caught fire.
No one knew how.
But they did.
They ran screaming through the circle, setting moss alight, stumbling into two other villagers who immediately caught the blaze. It wasn't a fast fire. It was a slow fire. A fat fire. The kind that doesn't consume but coats.
Three people writhed in it, eyes boiling.
Qilak tried to run.
She didn't get far.
Someone grabbed her by the braids and pulled her down.
She hit her head on the edge of a stone. It didn't kill her. Not immediately.
But it made everything spin.
She crawled through blood and snow and half-digested meat, muttering a prayer to a god that was clearly not listening.
A foot stomped her fingers. She didn't even feel it.
Miksaq fought back.
He always did.
He split two skulls open in under a minute—one with an axe, the other with a rock. He bit a man's nose off. Tore a woman's ear with his teeth. Then he was tackled by a group of Unarjuk's silent admirers. Young ones. The boys who used to look scared when he walked past.
They beat him with femurs.
They beat him until he stopped looking like a man.
And then kept going.
Sulia begged.
Not for her life.
But for them.
She screamed herself hoarse, sobbing as she dragged a dying girl into the shadow of a stone.
"Stop! Please! Just stop!"
Someone threw a sharpened rib at her. It missed.
The second didn't.
By the time the screaming began to fade, it wasn't because it was over.
It was because the people doing the screaming had no throats left.
The wind returned.
Slowly.
Timidly.
As if even it had been afraid.
The stones were coated in red. The ground was slick and warm. Steam curled in lazy waves from twitching limbs and spilled guts.
Someone was still chewing.
Someone was trying to wear another person's face like a mask.
Someone was laughing, and no one knew why.
And at the center of it all—
Unarjuk stood.
Blood up to his elbows.
Eyes alight.
He opened his arms wider.
And whispered:
"Now... we are ready."
There was no more screaming now.
Only twitching.
Only silence broken by the occasional wet slap of muscle sliding off bone, the hiss of cooling blood in frost, the gurgle of a dying breath clinging to a split windpipe.
The air had gone still again.
The wind had receded like it didn't want to be associated with what had just happened.
Bodies lay strewn around the circle like meat offerings flung from the gods' own feeding trough. Arms bent the wrong way. Faces missing lips. Guts looped out like festive garlands no one asked for.
And Unarjuk stood in the center, barefoot now, eyes wide as moons, naked to the waist and drenched in more blood than a slaughterhouse drain.
He breathed deep.
Let the scent of roasted marrow and ruptured bile fill his lungs like incense.
And then he laughed.
Not the cackling giggle of a lunatic.
This was the full-throated joy of belief. Of conviction. Of knowing, truly knowing, that you had found your purpose and it was completely fucking insane.
He dropped to his knees in the middle of the circle, cupped a handful of steaming blood from the pool at his feet, and began to paint.
First, he drew a crude eight-pointed star across the moss in front of the largest stone, using someone's spine like a stylus. He didn't care whose. They were all part of the offering now.
Then came symbols—some remembered from dreams, others from the side of a vodka bottle he once hallucinated a sermon off of. Spirals. Claws. A phallus with wings. A flaming boot.
"Praise be to the Lords of Chaos," he whispered, voice trembling with reverence. "To Khorne, god of righteous murder. To Slaanesh, who pole dances on the sins of the bourgeoisie. To Tzeentch, who rewrites Uncyclopedia articles in his sleep. And to Nurgle... who gave us fermented blubber and the gift of green things on places they should not be."
He stood up again.
Spun once.
Raised both arms to the sky like a stripped priest in a metal album cover.
"AND TO BAT-FUCKING INSANITY, WHICH BROUGHT ME HERE!"
He flung a rib across the circle like a holy javelin.
It thunked into a body.
He took this as a sign.
He walked to the edge of the circle and grabbed a leg—just the leg, from mid-thigh to ankle—and used it to trace a sigil of anarchy on the stone surface. It didn't mean anything. Not even to him. But it felt right.
Then he yelled:
"CHAOS IS FREEDOM! FREEDOM FROM THE WHITE MAN'S PANTS! FREEDOM FROM LOGIC! FREEDOM FROM FISH TAXES!"
He turned and gestured broadly to the corpses.
"These brave souls understood. They died not because they were weak, but because they were UNWORTHY. Their blood is the ink with which I write history. Their intestines are the ribbons of revolution!"
He stomped on a head for emphasis.
It squished.
"Let it be known," he declared, pacing like a one-man doomsday cult, "that THIS is the founding of the Second Age. The Hyperwar hath begun. We are now at war with..."
He paused, thinking.
Then nodded solemnly.
"The Canadians. They sent the seals. They started it. The first shot was fired when they taught us to put butter on bannock instead of boiled dog fat."
He kicked over a femur.
"AND YOU ALL Ate it up!"
He pointed at a nearby stone and began drawing what he believed to be the sacred emblem of Heaven & Hell (the band) but which mostly resembled a walrus performing a backflip into a stripper pole.
"This is the pole of Slaanesh! The Spiral of Sensual Devastation! We grind on it not for coin—but for cosmic glory!"
He stopped. Touched his chest. Closed his eyes.
Then whispered, tears of blood in his eyes:
"I am the avatar of apathy. The herald of harpoons. The final voice of Unreason. I am the 13th penguin."
He fell to his knees again.
Slapped his face with blood.
Then reached down, picked up an eye—someone's—and ate it.
"Eyeballs are the jellybeans of the soul," he muttered, chewing with a smile.
The Circle was quiet now, except for the wind returning in short, confused bursts.
Even the stones seemed unsure.
But Unarjuk?
Unarjuk was home.
Unarjuk didn't stop when the killing did.
No—that's when he truly got to work.
He moved like a man possessed, barefoot and blood-slicked, dragging limbs like logs, hoisting torsos like offerings. The others—those still breathing—had either crawled away into the snow to die, or were too broken to move. Some watched him with wide, silent eyes, pupils shaking like they were seeing the end of a story they hadn't known they were in.
He began stacking the dead.
Neatly.
Lovingly.
Artfully.
It started with the torsos—four in a ring, chest to the sky, arms bent upward as if reaching toward some invisible messiah. Then came the legs, laid outward like compass points. Heads were placed atop them, as if to "guide the energy," though only Unarjuk knew what that meant.
"North is the foot of Anarchy," he muttered. "South is where they invented soup. West is where the white devils keep their forbidden pants. And East—East is Yo Mama."
He paused.
Chuckled.
"Yo mama so fat, she sank Atlantis. Twice. But she still rides."
No one laughed.
That made him grin harder.
He found an arm—still clutching a knife—and wedged it into the highest point of the pile, the blade pointing straight up.
"Sword of destiny," he muttered, wiping a strand of intestine from his forehead like a headband. "Carved from the thigh of a false vegan."
He began shoveling snow over the blood, then carving into it with a sharpened jawbone.
Circles. Stars. Random squiggles.
One looked vaguely like a dancing seal with breasts.
Another looked like a crude imitation of a Christian cross—if the crucified figure was upside-down and holding a cocktail.
"This is my church," Unarjuk announced to the void. "This is my strip mall of dreams. Let all who enter bring nachos, fear, and at least three sacrificial tongues."
He kicked over what was left of a ribcage.
Spun in a circle with his arms raised.
"I baptize this site in the name of chaos, freedom, and poorly structured metaphors! Let there be fire! Let there be blood! Let there be tax exemptions!"
He skidded to a stop and jabbed a finger at the nearest corpse's face.
"YOU! You believed in order. That was your first mistake. The second was using a fork on seal meat, you uncultured sponge."
Then he froze.
Looked upward.
Tilted his head.
"Did you hear that?" he whispered to no one. "That's the sound of destiny unzippering its trousers. We are so close."
He crouched.
Drew a final symbol in the snow.
A spiral.
A loop.
A circle, closed tight with an X through the center.
"The mark of the Hyperwar," he said, eyes gleaming with fever and delusion. "The womb of death. The belly of heaven. The glorious fart of history!"
He stood again.
His "altar" was complete.
The corpses were stacked. Blood coated the snow in layered crusts. The sky above, impossibly still, seemed to lean in, curious. Judging.
And Unarjuk?
He laughed.
He clapped his hands.
And he whispered:
"Come now. Come and see. The door is open. The gate is made of meat. Let the world burn."
And far away through time and space, an answer was about to come and judge Unarjuk for his actions.