text: [Themes: family friendly, female protagonist]
  
  Reflexively you slide your little hunting rifle off your shoulder and hold it in front of you, ready to fire, even though you know it will do no good. Even in the old days there were few hand-held weapons that could inflict much harm on a Cryndy Warsuit; there were the Mechkiller hand rifles, sure, but there were hard limits to the firepower capable of any gun wielded by a mere human. The only way to really meet the aliens toe-to-toe was in a Battle Mech. Or, at the other extreme, there were the soldiers genetically engineered to grow as tall and strong as a Cryndy; these were the ancestors of the Snowmen, nearly as strange and fierce as the Cryndy themselves.
  
  Your little rabbit-popper is hardly a Mechkiller, and you are no Snowman, but it is the best you've got. How useful it would be, though, to have Joöno Öoto by your side right now! (Assuming of course he hasn't already imbibed too many tippards of ale yet today.)
  
  Stepping cautiously, you follow the tracks forward. They seem to lead over the top of a gentle rise in the forest, beyond which you can see a plume of wispy smoke. So, then, you will not have to continue much farther to see what you have come to see. Hopefully there will be cover to hind behind, something to let you see without being seen. But knowing what it is you are likely to find, each step is an ordeal, as if you are walking into a rubbery wall of fear and dread, one that threatens to bounce you back into the empty forest behind you, the place without any Cryndy in it.
  
  And then things get worse. To your increasing, there are not just two additional tracks coming in from the sides, but at least four distinct sets that you can make out. Looking back, you see Olix cringing in fear, his black eyes bulging and his entire wiry body shivering in the anticipation of bodily harm. Like you, he's never seen a Cryndy, but unlike you he's never listened to any of the stories. Nevertheless, instinct tells him this situation is no good.
  
  There is nothing you can do to assuage his fear; if the aliens are just over the hill, you dare not speak out loud — and for Olix's sake, a dose of fear might not be a bad thing. You need to see what lies over this hill; your fox does not. All you can do is hope he has the good sense to not run off while you are taking your peek.
  
  One cautious step at a time, you creep up the gentle knoll. What an anonymous place to find humanity's greatest enemy, its greatest existential threat: this nondescript place in a forest that is so much like any other place you've ever seen in a lifetime of journeys around the Stead. The trees look ordinary, the air smells normal save for the smoke, and the clouds above the bare treetops are as gray as most winter days.
  
  The hill flattens out after just a few meters of ascent, and then the terrain drops off before you into a secluded glen — a slight depression in the forest floor half encircled by low hills. The thin column of smoke is rising from the middle of it, and you can hear what sounds like the gentle grunting of feeding beasts. On your belly, you inch your way forward until you can see into the hollow from behind the trunk of a small beech. What you see horrifies you.
  
  There are six creatures sitting in the snow below your position, each bigger than the local Snowman living at the Stead by nearly a meter, not even counting the enormous bony protrusions emanating from their skulls — which look more like antlers than horns, except that these grow wildly above their shaggy heads, reminding you of a dogwood bush without leaves. The snow around them is splattered in crimson, making you fear for a second that the Cryndy have, just as the stories say, fetched some hapless humans and are feeding on their bones! But then you notice the squathog skulls and hides tossed carelessly into the woods, and you realize the Cryndy are merely feasting on wild animals — the leaping boars once created in someone's lab in the Way Long Ago for a purpose that has long since been forgotten, and which now roam the forests and wastelands as natural-born inhabitants.
  
  None of the Cryndy speak — not that you are likely to understand anything they might say anyway. They seem preoccupied with their feast, devouring the remains of the poor squathogs like ears of corn, methodical in their bites. If the meat was cooked over their small fire, it was not for very long; squathog blood has been spilled all over this patch of ground, turning the snow into that color that has been so associated with the Cryndy ever since the invasion. You unconsciously pull a lock of your hair back behind your ear.
  
  Do they pose a threat, though? Not at this precise moment, no; they currently have other concerns on their minds. But just their presence so close to the Stead will be alarming to your neighbors.
  
  You feel you've seen enough. Olix must be out of his mind by now, and your own limbs are shaky with a chilly fear — so much so that the Cryndy might soon begin to feel your subtle tremors in the ground. Perhaps a little too quickly, you back away. The Cryndy seem to take no notice, however, and soon you are out of sight. Practically running down the slope, you find Olix shivering behind a fat birch tree.
  
  So these are the Cryndy, huh? For the twelve seconds you viewed them, they appeared even more beastly than you had ever imagined, more like wild predators than intelligent warriors. Your original impulse had been to lay eyes on these beings so you could report your findings to the people of the Stead. This is information they will want to know; the people will be gravely concerned, worried that the Cryndy are staging an attack, and they will want to drive them away before that can happen.
  
  But now that you've seen them, what do you suppose your neighbors can do about it? So half a dozen alien beings are hunting in your forest. You are positive now that you've never seen anything like them here in your lifetime, and perhaps you never will again; perhaps the Cryndy are merely passing through, on their way to somewhere else, never to return. If that's the case, then by dragging the people of the Stead out to this chilly glen you might just cause many people to become needlessly harmed — all for a conflict the Cryndy might not be seeking.
  
  > keep this news to yourself.
  A week passes since that gloomy afternoon deep in the woods, when you and Olix returned to the Stead late in the day, with only a single lean rabbit to feed the two of you — the meager meal, all because you had been too distracted by the Cryndy footprints to think of food. Nobody paid much attention to you when you returned to the shelter of the community; perhaps you were still on edge by your discovery, but to everyone else you were just Elia Redling, the girl-child orphaned long ago under mysterious circumstances, doomed to a life of ostracism and distrust. No one cares too much where you spend your days; no one ever has. So long as you don't ask too much of them, the people of the Stead tolerate your presence, little more.
  
  The next day, both you and Olix were ravenous. So you set off early to go find something for breakfast — intentionally in the opposite direction of the day before, far away from the Cryndy footprints. This took you into the fringes of the Battlefield, that zone of ancient devastation where human Battle Mechs once met Cryndy Warsuits head-to-head, in an epic battle the details of which no one can remember any longer. Out among the martial ruins can be found the wintering sites of many year-round birds, packs of bounding squathogs, and rabbits by the bushel if one so desired. The two of you spent the entire day out there among the bare bushes, stunted trees, and rusted metal, building a fire underneath the exploded husk of a downed Turret Tarantula and eating until you were stuffed. You even took a long nap in the afternoon, Olix curled up against your arm as the flames flickered out in the mild cold.
  
  Your second day after the Cryndy discovery had passed not terribly unlike the first: out in the Battlefield, lurking through the open brushland. Your bellies were still full when you and your trusty fox returned to the Stead this evening, content in the success of your adventures and almost forgetting what you had found out in the forest. But your neighbors were all agitated; a Guard patrol had gone missing, and people were rushing to the Stag Hall to hear the news just as Chief Deadrick himself was hearing it.
  
  If the Stead was cobbled together from the crashed hulk of a fallen War Cruiser, shot out of orbit by a lucky Cryndy blaster strike, then the Stag Hall was the former hangar deck, now reimagined as the great meeting place of all the people. Chief Jonos Deadrick maintained his feasting table at the far end of the hall, below the charred skullpiece of an old alien Warsuit, hung on the high wall as a trophy like the chief himself had slew the mighty being. In truth, no one but yourself had ever seen a living Cryndy — but of course no one knew that.
  
  "Gone? But where?" the chief was bellowing. Deadrick always felt the need to put on a show when people were present. The drama of his voice tickled a human sense that something portentous was happening, and thus drew a bigger crowd to listen. And slowly, this news was drawing much of the Stead.
  
  "Into the deep woods," one of the Captain of the Guards was saying, Philo Anting. He was a big man with a mane of light brown hair, but his influence in the Stag Hall was limited by the fact that Chief Deadrick had three sons of his own who would always take precedence over everyone else in the Stead.
  
  "I'm afraid you'll need to be more specific," Deadrick said dismissively, as if to a minor servant who was wasting his time.
  
  "To the south, near the Mytergal Quadrant of the perimeter trail. It was Captain Oberlin's men, sir."
  
  "Oberlin, huh?" the chief seemed to sneer, but for what reason it wasn't clear. Of what use is a leader if he doesn't have a reason to disdain everyone around him?
  
  "The entire patrol. It was as if something lured them."
  
  "What would lure Captain Oberlin away from his post?"
  
  As it turned out, Captain Anting had already figured that out. "The worst things imaginable," he drawled, now turning to the gathered onlookers to put on a dramatic show of his own.
  
  "I can imagine quite a lot." The chief was backtracking a bit, trying to maintain a measure of mirth, but Anting was insisting on stealing this show with his horrific news.
  
  "I doubt this, though, even if one of their relics hang above your feasting table."
  
  Hesitatingly, Deadrick looked to the Cryndy head above and behind him, preserved inside its Warsuit helmet.
  
  "Yes, the Cryndy," Anting pronounced as the chief was turning his head. The crowd gasped; a young girl shrieked before covering her mouth in embarrassment. "In our own forest, less than a click beyond our perimeter trail."
  
  "We shall mount another patrol!" the chief said, putting on an act of bravery that seemed weak underneath the slight quiver in his voice. "We shall—"
  
  "It would be no use," Anting cut him off. Deadrick's sons, which had still been sitting at the feasting table as if loathe to break off their meal, finally stood up when they sensed their father was being outperformed.
  
  "No use?" Deadrick persisted.
  
  "My own men have been to the site. They are preparing a pyre for their slain comrades as we speak."
  
  "But what makes you think it's the Cryndy, though?" The pomp in Deadrick's voice had left him. This was the honest question any curious person might ask.
  
  "There were tracks in the snow." Anting's voice sent a chill down your spine, even though you were at the rear of the crowd, standing on a table to see over the heads of all the adults. Both he and Captain Oberlin had found the same encampment you had.
  
  "This is not all," the captain continued. "We believe there was a witness."
  
  The crowd gasped again, and this time erupted into nervous murmuring. This was scandalous news! Your spinal chill grew into a fluttery stomach.
  
  "A witness?" asked the chief.
  
  "Yes. The Cryndy tracks led us from the skirmish site to a place where they had been eating squathogs next to a small campfire. There we found human tracks... and those of a tame fox."
  
  And that was more or less the end of it for you. When most of the crowd wasn't immediately able to piece together the implications of these discoveries, Anting helped them put two and two together. Smallish footprints... probably those of a girl... hiking alone far from the Stead... only known friend a white fox that had been the runt of its litter...
  
  Chief Deadrick's subsequent outrage seemed to speak for the entire Stead, and your status there quickly sunk from pariah to traitor. You had been placed at the Cryndy encampment, and you had failed to notify anyone of what you found. Because of you, Captain Oberlin had been led blindly to his doom.
  
  And so here you are, a week after that fateful discovery, Olix leading the way with his usual enthusiasm, still unaware of what it is you are both in for. Chief Deadrick's voice this morning still booms in your memory. "Go, Redling, and never come back. I care not where you wander, but we can no longer afford to keep someone with your ill fortune among our walls."
  
  The doors had slammed shut behind you, the rusted metal reverberating like a deformed bell to announce your banishment.
  
  Now the two of you are following a narrow game trail across the Battlefield, which you've always been told stretches across the continent for hundreds of kilometers. Few people have ever seen the other side. If you must go anywhere at this bleak time of year, this might as well be your route; the ruined mecha and fallen ships will provide you shelter, the brush will yield wood for fires, and even when you run out of bullets for your rifle Olix is trained to share the rabbits he catches with you. It will be a long journey with an uncertain outcome, but you are not entirely without hope.
  
  "What do you think, dude?" you say to the fox. "Maybe you should conserve your energy a bit?"
  
  Olix looks at you briefly as if you've just proposed a game, and then he skips ahead down the trail giddy with a delight only a tame fox could know.