The Mouth Of Winter – Chapter 1
Every year since 2021 I’ve released a serialised adventure throughout December, putting out one part a day every day from the 1st until Christmas. This year I decided that instead of writing an adventure, I’d write a novella.
The Mouth Of Winter is a serialised grimdark fantasy/horror novella releasing one chapter per day from December 1st through December 25th, 2025 – an advent calendar of grim decisions, ancient horrors, and the cost of survival, for readers who enjoy the atmospheric dread of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and the violence and moral complexity of Joe Abercrombie.
What You’re Getting Into
This is a story about a mercenary company that takes a winter contract to garrison a remote monastery. It’s a simple job for easy money – three months of cold work, then home. Except they arrive to find thirty prisoners staging a desperate escape, and the mercenaries do what mercenaries do; they cut them down efficiently in the snow.
Only afterwards do they discover those prisoners were the annual sacrifice, part of an eight-hundred-year covenant that keeps something ancient and hungry sleeping beneath the mountain. Now trapped by winter storms with no way down, Rhod and his company face an impossible choice – become murderers to honour the covenant, or maintain their humanity and doom everyone when the creature wakes.
This is grimdark fantasy with teeth. It’s about the ugly arithmetic of survival, the distance between necessary and right, and what happens when all your choices are bad but you still have to choose. There are no clever solutions. No last-minute saves. Just people making terrible decisions and living with the consequences. Or not living with them, as the case may be.
Free Sample
Below you’ll find the complete first chapter – roughly 2,000 words of mountain climbing, blizzards, near-death experiences, and at least one screaming horse. It’s a taste of what’s coming: visceral action, character dynamics that matter, and the creeping dread of something vast stirring in the dark.
If you like what you read, the second chapter is already available, with the others releasing daily through 25th December 2025. Twenty-five chapters. One long descent into choices that can’t be taken back.
Fair warning: this isn’t a story where the heroes save the day. This is about what people become when survival demands it.
Chapter One
The wind comes up the mountain like a living thing, claws at Rhod’s face, tears water from his eyes. He leans into it, one boot after another, the path narrow enough that his shoulder scrapes rock on the left side. To his right, nothing but white air and the memory of a drop that goes down further than a man wants to think about. Behind him the company strings out in a ragged line. Twenty-eight men and women, plus whatever supplies the horses can carry. Minus whatever the horses will lose when the storm gets worse.
And it will get worse.
“How much further?” Cadi’s voice cuts through the wind. She’s close behind him, always is, has been for seven years now. His second, his left hand, the one who’ll tell him when he’s being an idiot.
“Another hour,” he shouts back. “Maybe two.”
“Shit.”
He doesn’t disagree.
The monastery sits at the top of this pass, exactly where the monks wanted it close to a millennium ago when they decided that holiness required suffering. The contract had seemed simple enough on paper – three months over winter, protect the monks from bandits and the occasional curious warlord. Easy coin for cold work. The monks would feed them, house them, keep them dry and relatively warm until spring melted the passes and the company could march back down to civilisation. Simple.
Rhod’s father used to say that “simple” and “easy” weren’t the same thing, and the old bastard had been right about that if nothing else.
The path narrows further. Rhod presses himself against the rock face, inches forward. The wind screams past, tries to pluck him off the mountain and send him tumbling down into the white nothing below. His fingers find purchase in cracks in the stone, and he pulls himself along, boots scraping for grip on ice-slicked rock. His gloves are wet, frozen, slick. Can’t decide whether it’s better to keep them on and protect his fingers from the weather, or tear them off for better grip. Both seem like bad choices.
He glances back. Cadi is doing the same, and behind her the rest of the company. Tam is in the middle of the line, one massive hand wrapped around the lead rope of the pack horses. Three of them, loaded with gear, supplies, weapons they couldn’t carry. The big man’s face is set in concentration, his other hand pressed against the rock.
Further back, barely visible through the snow, Rhod can make out Jes and Alyn bringing up the rear. The recruits. Green as summer grass, both of them, signed on a month ago in the valley town where the monks had posted their notice. Good with a blade, Jes, and Alyn could shoot. That would have to be enough.
The wind drops for a moment. In the sudden quiet, Rhod hears someone muttering prayers. He can’t tell who. Then the gust hits, harder than before, and one of the horses screams.
Rhod whips around in time to see it happen. The rear pack horse, the one at the end of Tam’s lead, loses its footing. Its hooves skid on ice, scramble for purchase, find nothing. The horse pitches sideways, eyes rolling white with terror, and then it’s gone, tumbling over the edge with a shriek that the wind swallows almost immediately.
Tam hauls back on the lead rope, muscles bunching under his coat. For a terrible moment Rhod thinks the weight of the falling horse will drag the others over, drag Tam himself over. But the rope snaps, and the big man staggers back against the rock face, gasping. Then silence, except for the wind.
“Keep moving!” Rhod shouts. No time to mourn a horse. No time to mourn anything. They need to get off this mountain before the storm gets them all.
He turns back to the path and pushes forward. His legs are burning now, thighs screaming with each step. The cold is seeping through his coat, through his boots, settling into his bones. Behind him he can hear the company moving, boots scraping stone, harsh breathing, the occasional muttered curse.
The path widens slightly. Not much, but enough that Rhod can walk without pressing himself to the rock. He picks up the pace, Cadi matching him step for step.
“Lost a third of our supplies,” she says.
“Still have two horses.”
“For now.”
He doesn’t answer. She’s right, of course. She usually is.
They climb for another hour. The light is fading, what little of it penetrates the storm. Rhod’s hands are numb inside his gloves, his face raw and aching. Each breath burns in his chest, the air so cold it feels sharp. He’s starting to think about shelter, about finding somewhere to hole up until morning, when he hears Tam shout.
“Bridge! Snow bridge!”
Rhod stops. Ahead, the path seems to continue across a gap in the rock. But it’s not stone. It’s snow, a fragile span of ice and wind-packed powder stretched across empty space.
“How wide?” Cadi calls out.
Rhod edges forward, crouches, tries to see through the blowing snow. Ten feet. Maybe twelve.
“Could go around,” he says. “Find another route.”
“Could,” Cadi agrees. “Or we could be here three more hours, lose the light completely, freeze to death.”
“You always were an optimist.”
She almost smiles. Almost.
Rhod studies the bridge. It looks stable enough, if you squint and lie to yourself. The alternative is backtracking in a blizzard, trying to find a path they hadn’t seen on the way up, burning time and energy they don’t have.
“One at a time,” he says. “Lightest first. Rope between each person.”
Cadi nods, starts getting the rope out. Rhod watches the bridge, watches the snow blow across it in sheets. If it holds, they might make it to the monastery before full dark. If it doesn’t, someone’s going to die.
He goes first. Has to. Can’t ask anyone to do something he won’t.
The bridge creaks under his weight. He moves slowly, carefully, each step a negotiation with gravity and luck. How much weight can packed snow take? He’s about to find out. The wind pushes at him, tries to shove him sideways into nothing. His hands are spread for balance, and through the bottom of his boots he can feel the bridge shifting, settling, groaning.
Halfway across. The snow under his right foot gives slightly. Rhod freezes, shifts his weight to his left, keeps moving. Behind him, he can hear Cadi shouting something, but the words are lost in the wind.
Three-quarters. Almost there.
His left foot breaks through.
Rhod throws himself forward, hits solid rock on the other side of the bridge, scrabbles for purchase. For a moment he’s sliding backward, the rope around his waist going taut as Cadi and the others haul on it from the far side. Then his fingers find a crack in the stone and he drags himself up, rolls onto his back, chest heaving.
“Still intact!” he shouts back. “Come on!”
One by one, they cross. Cadi moves like a cat, quick and sure. Tam is slow but steady, his weight making the bridge groan and sag but holding. The others follow, some confident, some terrified, all alive.
Until Jes. The recruit is halfway across when the bridge goes. One moment he’s there, the next the snow is collapsing under him and he’s falling with it, arms flailing. The rope jerks tight, catches him, and he slams into the rock face below the bridge with a sound that makes Rhod’s teeth ache.
“Haul!” Cadi is already pulling, Rhod grabbing the rope beside her. They drag Jes up hand over hand, his weight making the rope cut into Rhod’s palms even through his gloves. The young man’s face appears over the edge, white with shock, blood streaming from his nose.
They pull him onto solid ground. He lies there gasping, eyes wide.
“Can you walk?” Rhod asks.
Jes nods, tries to stand, collapses. Tam catches him, hauls him upright with one hand.
“I’ve got him,” the big man says.
Rhod looks at the rest of the company. Exhausted, frozen, bleeding in Jes’s case, but alive. All of them alive.
“Another hour,” he says. “Maybe less. The monastery’s just up ahead.”
It’s a lie. He has no idea how far they still have to go. But sometimes a lie is what people need to keep moving.
They climb.
The darkness comes down like a fist, sudden and complete. Rhod keeps one hand on the rock face, feeling his way forward, the company strung out behind him on the rope. His legs have gone beyond pain into a kind of numb persistence. Each step is mechanical, automatic, divorced from thought. Then, through the swirling snow, he sees light. Torches. Dozens of them, burning in the distance, painting the mountainside in flickering orange and gold.
“There!” Cadi sees them too. “The monastery!”
The company surges forward, exhaustion forgotten, the promise of warmth and food and rest pulling them on. Rhod picks up the pace, squinting through the snow at the lights. The monastery is big, bigger than he expected, a sprawl of stone walls and towers clinging to the mountain like a barnacle to a ship’s hull.
They’re less than a hundred yards away when Rhod hears the screaming. It comes from below the monastery, from somewhere in the darkness beyond the torchlight. Dozens of voices, maybe more, shrieking and wailing in wordless terror. Then he sees them, figures pouring out of a lower entrance, running and stumbling through the snow, heading down the mountain toward the company. His hand goes to his sword.
“Arms!” he shouts. “Everyone arms! Now!”
The company drops the rope, scatters, everyone drawing weapons. Rhod’s sword hisses free of its sheath, the steel cold against his palm even through the thick leather and fur of his gloves. Beside him, Cadi has her blade out too, her face set in the hard lines of someone who’s killed before and will do it again.
The figures keep coming, closer now, their screams echoing off the rock. Rhod can’t see them clearly through the snow and darkness, but there are a lot of them. Too many.
“Ambush!” someone shouts behind him. “It’s a fucking ambush!”
Maybe. Or maybe something worse.
The figures are thirty yards away now. Twenty. The torchlight from the monastery casts their shadows long and distorted across the snow. Rhod raises his sword.
“Hold!” he calls out. “Wait for it! Wait for my word!”
The company forms up around him, a loose line across the path. Twenty-eight against however many are coming down the mountain. Bad odds. But then, odds have never been in his favour.
The figures are close enough now that Rhod can hear individual voices in the chaos, can see them stumbling and falling and pulling themselves up again. They’re not attacking with any kind of discipline. They’re not attacking at all.
They’re running. From what, Rhod doesn’t know. But whatever it is, it’s behind them in the monastery, and the company is standing directly in their path.
“Brace!” Rhod shouts.
The first figure crashes into him a heartbeat later.
What Happens Next?
If you want to read the rest of The Mouth Of Winter, chapters one and two are already available, with new chapters releasing daily through 25th December 2025.
You can follow along in two ways:
- Read the story on itch.io – The novella, with new chapters added daily throughout December
- Support me on Patreon – Get bonus chapters, deleted scenes, and behind-the-scenes development notes throughout the month
The Mouth Of Winter is brutal, unflinching, and asks uncomfortable questions about what we’re willing to sacrifice to survive. If you’re here for that, I think you’ll enjoy the descent.
See you in the deep places.
