19

Wendigo, Hungry Winter, moved quickly, but cautiously around Colin’s circle. The Atlantean was down, crumpled in an impossible, defenseless position. Within seconds, she was next to him. With one great paw, she rolled her meal on to its back, the better to remove the heart from the chest. His eyes began to flutter open, but it was too late. She had won.

The meal muttered to itself in a language she did not understand. It did not sound like the usual whimperings and beggings, but this meal had always been a strange one. “Mind if I have a go at it, Colin? Or do you still think you can beat it without me?”

Whatever it meant, she didn’t care and plunged her teeth into its chest. Except it didn’t quite happen that way. A quartet of black tendrils wrapped around her maw, slamming it shut. She reached up with her paws to claw her mouth free, but they too were quickly enveloped by a host of tentacles. One after another, the tentacles burst forth from her meal: this one coming from his palm, that one from his armpit, another five from his belly...

Impossibly, the meal rose, standing her up, high and away from him. Wendigo struggled, but her opponent was stronger. With an effortless snap of his body, he threw her across the landscape. A trio of Shadowland trees checked her flight, but only after she’d gone straight through the trunk of one and put dents in the other two.

She panted. “You…you can’t kill me. I am Winter, eternal. I will eat you, Atlantean.”

The tentacled Atlantean paused to consider her threat. A twitch of a tentacle sent the glowing purple book flying from circle to tendril tip. “How unfortunate for you. Some fates are far worse than death.” He spoke in the ancient tongue before turning his attention to the tome. The language he read from there was older still, its intonations shrill and piercing to her ears.

She charged him as he read, a frantic leap carrying her into the midst of the mighty tendrils. She would never land, her body frozen in air momentarily, before vanishing as if she’d never been there.

Yog Soggoth paused to inspect the newly inscribed artwork of a great winter wolf, before closing the Necronomicon and beginning the retreat into the depths of his host’s body. “Let’s see how she likes ten thousand years in the far realms beyond space and time. Maybe dog ownership will help Cthulhu’s temper.” Yog Soggoth smiled at that, before collapsing to the ground. He was stronger now, but his pact host was weak…and the banishing spell more difficult than it should have been. He would have to trust to luck, and his host’s stubbornness, to make sure he, the Walker of Shadows, Lord of the Ancient Caverns of Insanity, Master of the Unfathomable Abyss, didn’t die of hypothermia.