text: When he sees you approaching through the scrubland, one of the Guards quickly stands and grabs for his gun.
  
  "What, ho!" he shouts from his position atop the watchtower, which is really just a covered platform mounted awkwardly to the top of a burned-out Battle Mech, at about the point where the missing head should be.
  
  Olix runs enthusiastically toward the sound of other people, but you know you need to approach more cautiously. You raise your arms and let the Guard get a good look at you, shaking your head to ensure your mane of red hair is easily seen.
  
  "Jupiters, it's the Redling!" he shouts to his companions at the base of the old Battle Mech. It is hardly a call to stand down; your presence is probably the most upsetting thing these men have seen in months of watchfulness.
  
  You enter the swath of bare ground surrounding the station, your hands still raised. Olix is busy serving as your ambassador, giving each Guardsman a friendly greeting as if to demonstrate you are not raiders from some roving gang. Of course, you know that's not what the men are worried about.
  
  One of them stands up from the campfire; by the gold felt on his cap, you can tell this is the captain. You recognize the man as Dolph Oberlin, and he must certainly recognize you. All of you have lived in the same Stead all your lives, but because of your hair everyone here sees you and your discarded runt of a fox as different, a curse to which the entire settlement has been consigned to suffer.
  
  "Elia! What in the red star are you doing here?" Captain Oberlin says, standing forward as if to separate you from his men. His sidearm is holstered, but you notice his hand hovering nearby.
  
  You stop about ten meters away from him, gently lowering your hands. These are your own people; why should you have to live in fear of them? "Captain, sir, have you and your men heard any disturbances in the last half-day?"
  
  "Any what now?"
  
  "Any unusual noises," you clarify, "like something crashing through the forest. In that direction." You point back down the crawler trail toward the distant forest.
  
  Captain Oberlin looks skeptical. "Loud noises crashing through the forest... like a bearphant, you mean? Maybe can't find itself a place to bed down for the winter?"
  
  "No, this was much bigger," you say, realizing this is going to be hard to explain.
  
  "Like a Snowman, maybe?" one of the other men by the campfire pipes up.
  
  "Maybe Joöno going for a stroll!" someone else adds.
  
  "I did seem 'im last night with a full tippard of ale! Probably needed to go make some yellow Snowman snow!" The four Guardsmen laugh at their shared joke.
  
  "This was bigger than a Snowman," you say, doing your best to remain undaunted. "Olix and I found a footprint about two clicks from the Stead that was almost as big as me. We were following the tracks through the forest when we came across your perimeter trail; thought maybe you and your men should know, if you didn't already."
  
  The captain turns his head and grunts at his men to shut them up. Then he turns back to you. "How big, Elia?"
  
  "Huge," you say, holding up one arm and pointing from your shoulder to your fingertips with the other. "At least this big. It walked right through the thickest part of the forest like it was nothing."
  
  "Well shoot, there ain't nothing that big around here, except..."
  
  The captain is unable to finish his own sentence, so one of the Guardsmen in the background completes the thought for him. "Somebody better go count those old Cryndy Warsuits out there. Sounds like maybe we got one missing."
  
  "Was prob'ly out looking for the girl, trying to get his fix of red for the day."
  
  "Let him have her, I say. Nothing good comes from that color."
  
  All of the campfire Guards murmur their agreement. Captain Oberlin, on the other hand, seems very concerned by your news.
  
  "Where was this again?" he says.
  
  "About three, maybe four clicks that way," you reply, again pointing up the trail from which you came.
  
  "Riggs, fire up the crawler!" the captain orders one of the hecklers behind him.
  
  "Say what, sir?"
  
  "You heard me. We're going on patrol."
  
  The man Riggs stands up from the fire. "Patrol for what, sir? If you don't mind me asking." The gruffness in his voice makes the polite deference to the officer seem more ironic than sincere.
  
  "For whatever it is the Redling saw, of course. Hurry it up, Riggs, let's not take all afternoon! None of us will want to be late for sup-time!"
  
  Riggs squints his eyes at Oberlin, but then rushes toward the waiting crawler. The captain turns to his other men, including the one still on top of the improvised watchtower.
  
  "Preace, Aldernes, you stay here with the redhead. The rest of you are coming with us for a quick look-see."
  
  Two of the other Guardsmen sitting by the fire get up to follow Riggs. But the two that have been ordered to remain look to be more upset than those assigned to the patrol.
  
  "Stay with the redhead!" Preace protests from the platform atop the old Battle Mech. "Why, if she's right and there's Cryndy running about after all these years, she's just as likely to draw them here!"
  
  The other man, Aldernes, whines his agreement.
  
  You don't like the idea of being left behind, either. This was your discovery; you didn't jog all this way just so the mysterious tracks could be dismissed by some bored officer who doesn't want to miss his supper. On the other hand, these Guardsmen can barely tolerate you as it is; riding in the cramped confines of the crawler isn't likely to make anyone happier about your presence here.
  
  > Agree to stay behind.
  It's enough that you've convinced the captain to take a look at the tracks; going with the patrol, you know all too well, would only spook the Guardsmen into thinking they've been hexed, especially if something goes wrong.
  
  The six-wheeled crawler hums to electric life. It looks as ancient as anything on the Battlefield, and rightly so: nearly all of the Stead's military equipment has been cobbled together from parts scavenged from the fallen war machines, just like the Stead itself. Riggs and the other two patrolmen are already inside, waiting on the captain.
  
  "I don't expect we'll be gone more than an hour or two," Oberlin says to Preace and Aldernes. "My supper better be waiting for me when I return!"
  
  You step back as the crawler lurches forward, your hands wrapped around Olix to keep him out of harm's way. Like a giant armored groundhog the crawler winds its way out of the clearing and down the long trail, slowly vanishing into the distant forest.
  
  "This is absurd," Aldernes mumbles to himself as he returns to his seat beside the fire, now all by himself. You hear Preace spitting from his perch above you, the sputum landing just meters away from you and your fox.
  
  The no one says anything further. You hadn't planned it this way, but the situation does leave you and Olix a long way from home with nothing to eat for sup-time. And you have nothing to do but wait until Captain Oberlin's patrol returns from the forest. It has been a mild day as far as winter afternoons go, but it is still winter nonetheless. Sitting still for too long will cause you to become chilly, so you invite yourself to a spot by the fire, opposite from Aldernes. Olix climbs up into your lap and figures out a way to rest comfortably between your thighbones.
  
  "I suppose you didn't get anything with that rifle of yours, huh?" It takes you a moment to realize Aldernes is addressing you directly from across the smoky fire. His hair is peppered gray, and his tunic has been mended many times over the years; you wonder if, underneath all those stitches, his body has the scars to match the rends of that old uniform.
  
  "I never got around to it," you admit.
  
  "Yeah, and that runt will want to eat too I imagine."
  
  You watch as Aldernes retrieves a store of wild bison meat from a coolbox set into the icy ground and prepares to cook enough steaks for the entire complement of the post, including those on patrol. But before the meat goes on the fire, he trims some of the grizzle and feeds this to Olix. The fox, oblivious to the way some of these human companions regard him, couldn't be happier.
  
  "They're late," Preace says sometime later, the sun already set for the day and the daylight growing dim.
  
  "Not my problem," Aldernes says, as if he really doesn't care.
  
  But when darkness arrives, and only three of the steaks have been eaten, it becomes clear that both Guardsmen really are concerned. Aldernes joins his companion at the top of the tower, followed by you and Olix. A steel ladder ripped out of a fallen warship and propped against the Battle Mech is the only way to reach the top, and you originally hoped your fox would tolerate you climbing up it without him. When he whines and tries to climb the ladder behind you, there is nothing you can do but awkwardly hold him in one arm as you ascend.
  
  Preace is on the radio when you reach the platform. Neither he nor Aldernes pay you much attention. "...yes sir, he went off on patrol maybe three hours ago... No, nothing since... Well you see, sir, it was the redhead that started it all... Yes, sir, I understand, sir." Then he downs the receiver.
  
  "What is it?" Aldernes presses.
  
  "Chief Deadrick himself is coming," Preace says, eying you quickly as if this whole incident were all your fault.
  
  > Next page.
  Nevertheless, the three of you remain on top of the Battle Mech the rest of the night, watching the surrounding Battlefield to see who shows up first. The perimeter trail and the forest are in one direction, but all is dark and silent there. The Stead is to the left, and an hour later that is the direction from which Chief Deadrick's crawler arrives.
  
  A dozen Guardsmen spill out of the transport, half of them forming a perimeter around the encampment. The chief and another one of his men make a beeline toward the ladder.
  
  Someone once showed Jonos Deadrick a drawing of a king from the Way Long Ago, and that image has since informed the chief's choice in attire ever since. Of course, that dead king had been dressed in red, and so the image was seen just before being tossed into a fire. But the chief now wears a blue cloak with fur lining; he'd probably wear a crown, too, but none of these wrecked ships or Warsuits have any gold.
  
  "Still no word?" he says to Preace and Aldernes, barely even noticing you and Olix.
  
  "None, sir," Preace says, and this begins a long night of watchfulness and dread as everyone waits for dawn.
  
  When daylight comes, Chief Deadrick's crawler leads a column of Guardsmen down the perimeter trail into the woods, everyone silent, speaking no more than the minimum to get the job done. You and Olix tag along; no one gives you permission, but no one objects either. By this time, everyone knows the story of what happened yesterday afternoon: the tracks you claimed to find, your report to Captain Oberlin, the fact he and three of his men never returned. Foolishly you had once hoped to be the hero of the day, bringing news of an unusual and important discovery; now you sense you are soon to become the scapegoat for the loss of an entire patrol.
  
  It takes an hour to reach the point where the unexplained tracks crossed the crawler trail. You find Oberlin's crawler here, but no sign of the men. Chief Deadrick, huddled inside his kingly robe against the morning chill, sends his own captain into the woods to track down the lost patrol.
  
  An hour passes, then two, and the freezing Guardsmen begin to mumble amongst each other that yet another patrol has been lost. Olix wants to go make friends with each man, but you decide it's best to hold him back, especially after catching a number of the men glancing at you out of the corner of their eyes just before spitting into the snow.
  
  The Guards tense up at the sound of footsteps approaching through the thick forest, but when it's the chief's captain who emerges the rifles are lowered once again.
  
  "Report?" Chief Deadrick says, all but his head appearing above the blue cloak, a puff of moisture hovering in the air before his face.
  
  "Not good, not good," the captain says, shaking his head. For the first time you notice how distraught he appears; you do a quick headcount, determining all his men returned with him, but all appear to be shaken. A minute passes before the captain can report his findings.
  
  Blood. Broken trees. Dropped weapons, but no patrol — this is the gist of the captain's report. Yes, he confirms, something big passed this way yesterday — not just big, but ginormous, just like all the stories say.
  
  Cryndy? the chief asks, and the captain affirms that was indeed his impression. There is nothing else known to man that comes anywhere close. And probably not one of those Warsuits either; a Cryndy in its native, unarmored form could be dangerous enough. So everyone knows, of course. Every child knows those stories.
  
  "But why? Why now?" the chief says, as if rhetorically, a question he expects no one to answer. But one by one all of the Guardsmen turn toward you. His steely eyes are the last to find yours, and a chill goes through your body.
  
  "Right, now. I should have known," he says, nodding to two of his men. The Guards stomp through the snow, grabbing you by the arms.
  
  "Wait, what?" you say, the only female voice in this forest, the sound strange even to your ears after spending the last fourteen hours in company of the Guardsmen. "This is not my fault! I found the tracks! I reported them!"
  
  Chief Deadrick turns his back and prepares to reenter the warmth of his crawler. The two Guards force you to kneel in the snow, never loosening their grip. Olix paces nervously, this hostility beyond his comprehension. After a moment he begins barking at the men with his raspy, high-pitched voice, but the Guards ignore him.
  
  A third man whips out a large knife and steps toward you, its meaning inspiring a terrifying thought. But he reaches for your hair, grabs an entire handful of it, and cuts it roughly with the knife. A moment later most of your hair is lying beside you in the snow. The knife-wielding man spits on it.
  
  "Bring her back to the Stead," he says. "We'll give the Redling a proper haircut there. I doubt we'll ever see these Cryndy again."