Still Winter

Since the Great Cataclysm, nothing has been the same; where once there were beautiful meadows, now only lies frozen tundra. No plant life exists anymore, save for the occasional burnt tree. There are, of course, beasts – a savage mockery of what they were before, they feed upon the flesh of man and other beasts; there aren't any left who eat plants. This savage, frozen world is where the story of Kall begins and ends.

It began when Kall was fifteen — his family was killed by a beast, he was out fetching some wood so they could make a fire, and when he returned, he found his family home to be covered in the blood and organs of his family members. His last sight before falling unconscious was the beast's appearance, its head dotted by grotesque growths oozing with puss, while its mouth was filled with gleaming teeth, coated in dry blood. Its eyes were missing, and only empty sockets with overgrown rotten skin in their place, its body a malformed mockery of a hound's and a man's, seemingly sewn together by bits of rotting sinew. Its arms and legs however, were barely even able to be considered limbs, as the flesh on them was stripped away, and the exposed bone was sharpened by some manner of machine.

A decade later, Kall had found the beast's lair. “Covered in ice, of course...” he thought to himself as he tightly clutched his sheathed sword. As he was walking through the dark halls of the icy cave, Kall's chain mail began to grow heavy, he was becoming tired, but he couldn't rest in the lair of the beast... no, he would continue. After what seemed like hours of aimless wandering through halls marked with strange, long forgotten letters, Kall had finally found the chamber where the beast was hidden, it was asleep. This would be his chance to strike, however, as he approached the beast, he stepped on a sort of paper, which, upon closer examination, looked to be a very thin book-like object with a yellowish cover. Kall opened the item he had picked up out of curiosity, unfortunately for Kall, the rustling of papers alerted the beast. The last thing Kall saw before he died, was the contents of the file folder he was viewing: “U.S. Army Nuclear Weapons Experiment” with a bold red stamp on it, reading “FAILED”.