Pressed against the windows of our manor like some pale, patient beast, it breathed a cold film upon the glass as though eager to seep into the dim halls. It howled a thin, pitched whine — as a dog overeager for its nightly meal might. Mother insisted, tone sharpened by the strain of her grief, that the sound was only the high mountain wind, but I knew better. We all did. Something older prowled the eaves now, something that had taken Father and Andrei on that final hunt and now circled our home with a hunger sharpened by winter.
Our home, now unprotected, save by my hands.
The evening the Câmpenaru sledge failed to return, the people of Rășinari cried out in horror. Seven hunters — our strongest men, my father foremost among them —vanished into the gorge without a trace. I stood among the searchers as they called the men’s names into the swirling dark, their voices bruised by fear. And when we reached the bottom of the mountain, finding only the sledge abandoned like a broken offering in the snow, I felt something inside me cleave in two.
In the absence of their best providers, the thirty-odd remaining souls of our commune turned their eyes toward me.
As though noble blood alone could fill their empty granaries.
Inside the manor, hunger gnawed with equal cruelty. My two little sisters clung to Mother’s skirts, their faces paled by rationing and worry. My newborn brother wailed through the nights, each cry thin and piercing as splintered ice. Sometimes I feared the sound carried too far: into the forest, up the slopes, toward presences that should never hear a human child.
Mother tried to soothe him, but grief had scraped her voice raw. She scarcely looked at Father’s boots anymore — stiff, hollow things still standing by the hearth where she had placed them, shaped as though a memory wore them in his stead. I could not keep myself from glancing at them: half-dreading, half-hoping they might move. That he might walk, a phantom in our halls, and tell me what to do once more. That Andrei might be in his bed come morrow, rested with his curls all askew on one side of his head; his deepening, crackling voice and broad hand rummaging through my waking moments as he called me to rise, to join him and father.
Outside, Rășinari lay strangled beneath a sky the color of unpolished steel. One by one, the narrow paths vanished under the deepening drifts, as though the mountains meant to reclaim every roof, every chimney, every scrap of life. Each morning the elders gathered, whispering that the winter had grown unnatural: too swift, too ravenous, descending upon us only days after Father and Andrei were lost. They spoke of omens. Of spirits. Of debts owed by ancient places, and guardians lost.
And I, the last son of our house, felt their words settle upon my shoulders like the heaviest snow of all.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY —
The Last Son of Rășinari ( 1896 )