The Uninvited Guest [Unknown | Antarctica]

[Tristan]

Tristan watched as Thalia disappeared into the shadows, her curiosity outweighing the caution he would have preferred. He stayed in the main room for a moment, his golden eyes sweeping the space. It was an unsettling mix of desolation and haste, as though it had been left behind not by choice but by necessity. Papers fluttered slightly in the draft sneaking through cracks in the walls, and the old machinery stared back at him like the hollow eyes of ghosts. He crouched, picking up a fragment of one of the fallen computer monitors. The jagged edge of the cracked screen reflected faint light, and he frowned at the remnants of what looked like seismic charts beneath the rubble.

"Earthquakes," he muttered to himself, brushing the charts with his fingers. The familiar markings were jagged and erratic, peaks and valleys that spoke of violent activity. His lips pressed into a thin line when he noted the date the earthquakes stopped coming.

The sound of something shuffling, quiet even to his senses, pulled his attention back toward the direction Thalia had gone. He straightened, his sharp gaze cutting across the room to where she had squeezed through the narrow gap of the blocked doorway. He didn’t call out—he knew better than to spook her, especially when she was wrapped in one of her moments of intense focus. Instead, he moved closer to watch.

When she reappeared at the doorway, leaning heavily against the frame, Tristan’s brow furrowed. She looked paler, and her breath misted in uneven puffs in the cold air. The little light she held in her hand flickered, casting strange shadows that danced across the walls. Her voice was casual, but he caught the faint tremor beneath it.

“There are blankets and things in here,” she said, tossing the words out as if they were unimportant. But Tristan noticed her shiver, the way she leaned too heavily on the frame.

He crossed the room quickly, his boots crunching on broken glass and debris. “You’re freezing,” he said, his tone calmer than he felt. His sharp eyes lingered on her for a moment, as though assessing her state, before shifting to the darkened room behind her.

He glanced at her light, then past her shoulder into the dormitory. The air felt heavier in there, untouched for decades. Dust and the smell of old wood and decay clung to the space. Tristan reached out, gently guiding her out of the doorway. “Stay here. I’ll get the blankets.” There was no sharpness in his tone, only a quiet command. She was already pushing herself too hard, and he wasn’t going to let her risk herself further.

He squeezed through the narrow gap she had slipped through. It was a tight fit, his broad shoulders brushing against the edges of the doorway. The dormitory was a stark contrast to the rest of the station. There were no windows here, and the dim light was only bleeding through the opening he’d just entered. Rows of narrow bunk beds lined the walls, their metal frames rusted and bent from decades of moisture. The remains of personal belongings were scattered across the room—a forgotten book, a torn photograph, a pair of boots long worn out. He scanned the space quickly, methodically, picking out what was salvageable.

The blankets she had mentioned were old and moth-eaten, but a few of them seemed sturdy enough to provide some warmth. Tristan gathered them into his arms, his movements efficient. But as he turned to leave, something stopped him—a feeling, cold and sharp, that prickled the back of his neck.

He froze, his breath steady as his eyes scanned the room. And then he saw it. A pale mask, suspended in the air, tilting slightly as though watching him. The sight sent a ripple of tension through his body, and his grip on the blankets tightened. His golden eyes narrowed, the wolfish gleam in them sharp as he stared the thing down.

The mask tilted further, as if in contemplation, before it slipped silently into the shadows, vanishing like smoke. The room fell still again, but the air felt heavier, colder. Tristan’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t linger. Whatever it was, it hadn’t attacked. Not yet.

He squeezed back out through the doorway, returning to where Thalia was waiting. Without a word, he draped one of the blankets over her shoulders, his hands lingering for a moment as he made sure it was snug around her.

“There’s something here. A masked face, a ghost. I saw it in the dormitory. Did you see anything?”

[Thalia]

“I thought I imagined that,” she said. Surprise touched the words, followed by immense relief. The unknown creature itself did not seem to perturb her. Less than it probably ought to anyway. Her panic receded like a distant tide as she glanced across to the shadowed door, more curious than cautious, though not so much as to pull her back in its direction. Mostly she watched Tristan as he fiddled with pulling the blanket around her. It was nice to know she wasn’t mad. Or maybe that they both were, but strangely that was just as comforting.

“I reached out to touch it,” she admitted lightly. “That was before it moved, though.” She didn’t muse on what it was or if it meant them any harm. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in the speculation, and she only confessed out of honesty – in case she’d inadvertently provoked it. Though it hadn’t seemed annoyed to her, just creepy and curious, and perhaps it felt exactly the same way about their own peering faces in its home. “Promise I still have all my fingers,” she added, assuming by the way he looked at her sometimes that he might wonder, but since they were currently wrapped around the pencil and tucked up to her chest she did not elect to prove it.

She gave up trying to suppress the shivering by now. While her arms were squished up tight, trying to keep hold of the heat in her body, it felt like she was curled around a block of ice. The cold was inside. It made everything tremble, and the lack of control might have been fascinating if Thalia wasn't also aware it wasn't a particularly positive sign. She knew it wasn’t practical, but she moved to lean against him. His chest was the perfect height to rest her head. Maybe it was something in his troll blood that made him able to withstand what she apparently couldn’t, and it sparked frustration that she couldn’t keep up. She didn’t want to be dead weight, especially since she landed them in the mess. Or, she’d been the one to insist on exploring the cave under the lake anyway.

A fire could provide temporary heat, and now that she had the pencil, warm was all she could think about. Unlike the cave, there was stuff in here that could fuel it, though without a hearth Thalia had no idea how to do that without risking setting the place ablaze. Though if there were dormitories there had to be a mess hall or kitchen somewhere.

“I have a studio in Moscow. It used to be a fallout shelter – stuff like that all became much less popular after the ASU took root, and by the time I moved to the city they were being sold off. A fashionable way for rich people to show their loyalty, you know? That nuclear war was a threat of the past now we were all apparently at peace.” She paused for a moment, tripping over the memories of the sketches which told her otherwise, but that was another conversation entirely. “It runs on mains these days, but it also has a generator. Kicks in every time I accidentally trip the electrics. Those things last decades. And what I mean is all this equipment must have run somehow, but it doesn’t exactly look like there’s any civilisation nearby. If we can find something like that, maybe between us we can get it working.”

She shifted enough to prop her chin on him and peer up. Though unless he also looked down at her, all it afforded was a magnificent view of his beard. It was a big if, she knew that.

[Tristan]

“When you stop feeling cold, that’s when we worry.”

The words escaped Tristan in a low growl, more to himself than to Thalia, though he knew she could hear him. His breath fogged in the frigid air, curling like ghosts between them before dissipating. "There's a story, almost one hundred years old now. Five campers went trekking in the mountains of Siberia. All seasoned hikers, all experienced adventurers. A month after they went missing, their abandoned campsite was located . Their tents were cut from the inside, their coats and sleeping bags left behind, and the bodies were found over a mile away, scantily clothed and barefoot, as if they had left in a panic in extremely cold temperatures. They all died of hypothermia... the last stage of which is to feel unnaturally hot... and you begin to remove your clothes." 

The story was meant to be reassuring, but survival was all he could focus on now. The horrors of the last few hours and the suffocating heat of the cave had been traded for the relentless, bone-deep cold of this desolate island. But as the adrenaline from their escape drained from his body, exhaustion began to creep in, dragging at his limbs. He knew that if either of them fell asleep now, neither would wake again.

He turned slowly, scanning the dim, hollowed-out dormitory with sharp, calculating eyes. His hands throbbed dully, tingling with the first warnings of going numb. A frustrated rumble vibrated in his chest, but the sound only made him dig his heels in harder. There was no room for anger here, only action.

From the hill, he had counted at least four small buildings in the station. The one they had entered was clearly a combination of a dormitory and a data collection site—old and abandoned, cluttered with papers and dead equipment. But the other structures? He had to hope they might hold something useful.

“I bet one of the other buildings is a mess hall,” he said, more decisively this time. His golden eyes flicked to Thalia, her shoulders trembling beneath the blanket he'd draped over her. “Stay here. I’ll find supplies.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. She looked too cold and drained to argue anyway, and there was no time to waste. He grit his teeth and ducked back out into the icy wind.

The cold slammed into him like a physical force, slicing through the layers of fabric as though they weren’t even there. He squinted against the blinding whiteness of the snow, the wind cutting through the desolate landscape and tearing at his hair. The frost bit hard at his cheeks and nose, but he pushed on, his boots crunching over ash-streaked ice as he approached the nearest building.

The door groaned loudly as he forced it open, the sound echoing in the emptiness. Inside, he quickly scanned the room, his breath fogging in the still air. Long tables were scattered throughout—this was the mess hall, just as he had hoped. The sight sparked a flicker of relief, but it was fleeting. He had to keep moving.

The kitchen was small and cluttered, its stainless steel counters tarnished with age and grime. Cabinets hung open, revealing a scattering of forgotten supplies. He worked quickly, his stiff fingers pawing through the drawers and shelves. A handful of pots and utensils were still intact, and he grabbed what he could: two large pots, a wooden spoon, a ladle, and a couple of metal spoons. He grimaced at the state of the pantry but managed to find a few sealed cans—beans and corn, their labels faded but intact. He checked each can carefully, discarding anything dented or corroded. The undamaged ones, he knew, could last indefinitely.

A rustling in the corner caught his attention, and he turned to find a half-empty bag of charcoal tucked behind a cabinet. It was heavy and awkward to carry, but he hefted it under one arm, his breath quickening in the cold. On the counter, a long chef’s knife glinted faintly in the pale light. He grabbed it without hesitation.

With the supplies bundled against his chest, Tristan trudged back to the dormitory, his fingers numb and throbbing as he shoved the door open. He dumped the items near Thalia with a muttered “Stay warm,” before heading back out again. The cold was unrelenting, but his determination burned hotter than the frost biting at his skin.

The second was a utility building, smaller and more cluttered than the others. Tristan sifted through the debris quickly, his movements growing clumsy as his fingers turned a deeper shade of purple. He found what he’d hoped for: an axe, its blade nicked but still sharp. The rest of the shed held generators, their hulking frames covered in dust, but as he’d suspected, there was no gasoline. Even so, an axe was a win. He could chop up furniture for firewood with it.

On the way back to the dormitory, he crouched by the snowbanks outside, digging through the icy crust to collect smooth rocks. His hands screamed with the cold, his nails caked with frost and dirt, but he didn’t stop. He ignored the throbbing ache, his breath coming in shallow gasps, and carried the rocks back inside.

“Can you light this?” he asked Thalia, motioning to one of the pots where he had dumped the charcoal and torn-up papers from the seismographs. His voice was rough, but there was a spark of urgency in it.

Her light flared, and warmth bloomed. Tristan immediately held his hands out to the flickering flame, shuddering with relief as the frost began to melt from his beard and hair. His fingers tingled painfully, but the fire's heat pulled him back from the edge of real danger. He didn’t linger in the moment of reprieve. There was still work to be done.

He filled the second pot with snow and smaller pebbles, setting it carefully over the first. The fire licked at the bottom of the pot, and soon the snow began to melt, forming a thin layer of water that steamed faintly in the air.

“Once the water boils, we’ll use the hot rocks to keep warm,” he explained, his voice steadier now as the heat returned to his body. He glanced at Thalia, his sharp eyes softening slightly as he noticed the way her shivering had eased. “We’ll drink the snowmelt once it’s warm enough—it’ll stop our body temperature from dropping any further. Then, we’ll eat. Dry out our clothes.”

His gaze flicked toward the window, the barren wasteland beyond still visible through the grimy glass. “Once we’ve rested, I'll search the other buildings. There has to be a map. A radio. Something that tells us where the hell we are.”

For now, the fire filled the room with a fragile warmth… a fragile hope. But Tristan’s jaw remained tight, his mind already spinning with plans. The fire would keep them alive, but survival was only the beginning.

[Thalia]

After a minute she realised he wasn’t really listening. For all Thalia’s distracted nature she wasn’t unperceptive, and she understood then that his absence was because he was busy worrying about her instead of paying attention to the little frozen puffs of her words. The anecdote he shared was far less comforting than he might have intended though; in fact it freaked her out just a little, because she was very carefully not thinking about the reasons she was shivering so badly – and where it was going to lead.

Tristan literally rumbled with the pressure of his frustration. In the same way he allowed her to float after her curiosity undisturbed, Thalia did not obstruct his focus; she understood intuitively that he could not be confined by inaction, and she didn’t try. It was why she’d tried to give him a task to do in the dream when she’d judged their odds impossible. His intention to explore outside also met no argument, despite her own desperate desire to do something other than the pathetic trembling going on beneath the blanket – which was still entirely beyond her control. She wanted to follow, even though she knew it was foolish in the circumstances. Trust in him came easy to her, but she still wasn’t used to allowing others to do things for her. So she watched him duck out the door, irrationally afraid he wouldn’t come back. That something out there would prevent it.

Alone in the station, she couldn’t stay still. Her frozen fingers flexed around the pencil, assuring herself it was still there as she wandered back around the desks. The writings looked Spanish maybe, which meant she couldn’t read them, but she was thinking about ash-strewn glaciers and fiery snakes by then. With a blink she parted the blanket long enough to glance at her own blackened hands – before abruptly regretting the sliver of cold it let in. Not that she was particularly warm beneath it either.

Afterwards she gave in to her desire to explore the raised platform and the grimy window. She used the blanket to rub at it a little, and was contemplating pressing her hands and face to the glass to peer through for a better look at the desolate landscape when Tristan returned the first time to unburden his arms. She barely heard the low grumble of his mutter, but his tone translated anyway – the same one that answered matter of factly why he’d come to Baikal. She wasn’t as delicate as he imagined. But the sentiment warmed in its own way.

After he ducked out again she abandoned curiosity to sit with the things he’d salvaged, bringing the rest of the blankets and casting her eye over it all – the sum of their survival, down to old pots and faded cans. But treasure was treasure. By the time he returned for the second time Tristan looked frozen in a way that tugged new concern into her gaze. She scooted to sit closer by the pot, glad to be able to do something to actually help. Her grip on the power had long since faded, too sharp to hold onto, but she discovered she no longer had any problem calling it back at will.

The small burst of flames flickered a smile to her lips, but not one that lasted when she saw the great shudder with which he warmed himself against them. It made her feel something she couldn’t really describe, that rare break in the stone of his stoicism, but if he was clearly suffering he barely paused in his urgency. Thalia daren’t interrupt him. But she had trouble looking away from the wind-bitten colour of his skin after that.

“Okay,” she said in answer to his instruction, not that she quite understood what he meant about the rocks yet. It’d take time for the water to boil anyway, and she was content to wait. The thin heat didn’t feel nearly enough, but the shivering was a little less even if she couldn’t say she felt comfortable. But it was a coldness with the promise of relief, and that was far easier to deal with. She only needed a tiny bit of hope to smooth the edges of her fears. Beside her, frustration caged Tristan’s assessment of the future instead – the obstacles still waiting. She could tell by the tightness of his expression that he was busy thinking.

She wasn’t sure whether to say anything, aware that it might only be for her own sake. She understood obsession, focus. Truthfully she was glad for the company and didn’t mind the silence. But she did shift closer. Once there she paused, reluctant to break her numb grip on the pencil, but after a moment of looking at it she relaxed her cramping fingers to tuck it behind her ear instead. Her hair was half frozen, melting icy rivulets into the blanket strewn about her shoulders. Somehow she felt that more keenly now that her skin was reaching for warmth. She leaned to take his hand in both of hers, turned his palm over with a frown for the scab, but the touch was only to begin massaging some life back to the chill of his fingers. She’d been joking earlier about having all hers in tact, but she didn’t want him to actually lose any of his. The fire warmed them for the scant time he thought of himself, but this was a comfort more human.

“We’re on a volcano. By the ash, and the fire snake. How else would it be living down there?” She’d seen choppy water by the cave mouth, enough to realise they were also on an island, and Tristan would have seen more from the hill, certainly enough to work out the same. How many frozen volcano islands could there be in the world? Sage had been able to identify Baikal from a drawing, and while they didn’t have Sage, they did have the dream. Thalia might not understand all those mysteries, but she had seen the miraculous way they could create connection. Tristan found her on the rocks in the middle of nowhere. So she spoke with an unshakeable certainty – sure that working out where they were, at least, was entirely within their power. He was thinking practically. But now he’d assured them short-term sanctuary she wondered if better answers might come elsewhere. It wasn’t one of the things she was immediately worried about anyway.

“No running out into the snow naked.” By the quiet way she said it as she rubbed his hands between hers, it might have been a warning for him or a reminder meant for herself. She wasn’t always in control of her faculties when she first woke, it was why she was so attached to the pencil, but that was a worry for later. Her eyes bounced up warm with humour, and she smiled, though she didn’t expect to draw him from his island of determined planning. She got the distinct impression he was used to being alone. But while she was freezing, and certainly shivering the worst of the two of them, he was the one talking about going back out in the tundra. When it came to it she wouldn’t stop him, not any more than he'd stopped her diving the lake, but she did care what happened to him.