I had just returned unsuccessful from a hunt, my face numb against the biting chill of winter. Flurries of snowfall poured from an ashen-gray sky, pulling the landscape beneath a frantic sweep of snow and ice. The snow piled near my ankles. Flakes batted at my face. 

But escape was just within reach, the hazy stretch of neighboring huts taking form on the horizon.

The wind broke; bitter gusts of air slipped into the slivers of jacket exposing skin. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself and trudged on.

It wasn’t long before the hazy shapes of people came into view. As I drew closer, I recognized faces: Mother, Ram, my eldest cousin, and my uncle. They stood in a circle, their petrified eyes cast downward. 

I followed the look, and the air left me at once. 

Amid that circle, my brother lay limp. An arrow stuck from his ribs, blood spreading across his chest, soaking through his woolen jacket and pooling beneath him

 A strangled scream clawed its way from my throat as I ran toward him. But Mother grabbed my hand.

“No, Feba, don’t go around him.” Her voice came out thick and strange. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. "It isn’t safe.”

I froze. What was going on here, what did she mean? Surely, Sang couldn’t have been ill. . . He was fine when I left him at the riverbank a few hours earlier. He’d waved me off with a smile while his hair tangled in a breeze. The last thing he’d said to me: May our hunt be great, and our bellies be full.

I reiterated the scene in my head. Again and again, I recaptured the way my brother appeared those last few moments before our departure, trying to gauge anything about him that seemed off, but nothing came to me. Light brown skin and dark coils and everything else in between. My brother was the healthy boy I’d always known him as. 

One last time, I echoed the memory, remembering how his eyes glinted silver beneath the wash of moonlight.

“To darkness with Etisha!” My Uncle's voice snapped me from my thoughts. My eyes swished toward him. He marched toward Sang, pride in every step, and pulled the arrow effortlessly from Sang’s ribs. Flecks of blood flicked free from the sharp tip as he raised it high and roared, “to another generation free of her curse!”

The ice melted from my thoughts. My attention drifted back to my brother. I forced my gaze to steady on his face. His skin was so pale. And his eyes—---

A dead chill slithered down my spine as I comprehended. Unbidden, the image of Sang’s eyes under moonlight flashed across my memory.

“The fire’s ready,” said Ram. His voice came muffled and far away, as if he’d spoken from underwater. Yet succumbing to the haze of my numbing thoughts, it was I who couldn’t breathe. I limped forward, reaching.

Mother grabbed me by the shoulders then, forced me around so that her intense gaze held mine. “No he’s gone,” she said, “there was nothing we could do.”

Despite the cold, despite her tears, my blood simmered. I snatched myself out of Mother’s bruising grip, glowering at her, my own eyes stinging.

I shifted to face Ram and my uncle as they hoisted Sang into a sling. 

“He didn’t do anything,” I said, my words trembling. But I could do nothing except watch while they carried Sang’s body toward the distant blaze of fire burning deep in the mountains.

There, they would burn him.