In a forest, the forest is a dream. Hazy moonlight puddles in white pools of light in the snow. It twinkles softly, pure. You make no sound as your boots trudge through it. The only indicator of your existence are your footprints, bubbling blood filling up where you carved the white flesh of the forest floor with your feet.

From above it must look like a scattering of rose petals following some dark wraith. The boots you wear are old leather, spiced by the stench of the soles; pliable and soft. They used to smell like salt and leather, the comfort of a crackling fire, smoke and pinewood. Now they are freezing.

Your red stained wake draws in a fox. It picks at your ankles with its claws and nibbles hesitantly at your calves; perhaps it is assessing whether or not its stumbled upon a corpse. Moonlight, howling, eyes shining in the darkness; small pale globes as round as buttons gleam red as your blood behind the icy branches of the trees. They can smell you too.

A crow joins the fox, its black shock of rumpled feathers perches of your head, talons dig into your scalp. It cranes its neck downward and pecks at your eye. Crimson tears run down your cheeks and gather at your chin. Single droplet falls and hisses hot as it hits the cold, crystalised ground. The liquid squelches, screams and gurgles incubating a small flesh rabbit, raw and dripping in its icy womb.

It grows tooth, claw and fur as pale as the snow all while twisting like something possessed; morphed into being. Red eyes open, blink once, twice. Looks up at its mother. Then runs.

The eyes in the darkness blur from how quickly they move now that your child has gone. Their slobber falls unnoticed, as they lick their chops. You seem like a fine tasty mortal. A filling meal.