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The wind howled through the pines, carrying with it the scent of frost and decay. Snow fell in thick, suffocating waves, blotting out the moon. Beneath the trees, the village of Elvik huddled together, its people locking their doors, drawing their curtains, whispering prayers to gods who would not listen.

For he was coming.

They called him Santa.

The legends were old, older than the village, older than the land itself. He was not the jolly gift-bringer the outside world believed him to be. No, he was something else – something ancient, something cold. The Lord of Winter, the Hunger Beneath the Ice, the Man in the Red Coat.

His coat was red, yes, but not from fabric. It was woven from sinew and flesh, stitched together with the frozen veins of the forgotten. His boots crunched not with snow but with the brittle bones of those who had failed to appease him. His sack bulged and writhed, filled with the lamenting souls he had collected over the centuries.

Every year, on the longest night, he came to Elvik. The village’s ancestors had struck a bargain, a desperate attempt to stave off the endless, gnawing cold. A tribute of one, taken willingly or otherwise. A child, a mother, an elder – it mattered not, so long as the sacrifice was made.

And so, as the wind screamed through the night, the villagers gathered in the square, clutching one another, trembling in the biting air. A choice had been made. A boy stood alone in the center, his small form dwarfed by the shadows of those too afraid to meet his gaze. Tears streaked his cheeks, freezing before they reached his chin.

Then, silence.

A distant sound, like the tolling of unseen bells, rang across the forest. Slow, deliberate footsteps followed. Heavy. Inescapable. The trees parted, bowing to the presence that emerged from the dark.

The Man in the Red Coat.

His face was obscured beneath a hood of shifting blackness, but his eyes – impossibly large, impossibly deep – gleamed with the void of midwinter’s abyss. A jagged, frost-bitten smile split the shadows where a mouth should be. He reached out a hand, long fingers tipped with icicle claws.

Behind him, the sleigh loomed.

It was no festive carriage, no merry contraption of polished wood and jingling bells. It was a thing of horror, a construct of jagged iron and frostbitten bone, its runners sharpened to blades that had tasted the blood of countless offerings. The wood, if it had ever been wood, was blackened and warped, exuding a stench of rot, as though it had been hewn from the gallows of the damned.

And the beasts that pulled it – eight in all – were things of nightmare. Once, perhaps, they had been deer. Now, they were nothing but snarling, frothing wretches, their flesh flayed by the iron chains that bound them, their ribs exposed, their eyes wild with madness. They pulled at their bonds, desperate, starving, driven forward by some unseen force. Steam rose from their open wounds as they let out gurgling cries, tongues lolling, breath misting in the frigid air. Their hooves left trails of frozen gore in the snow.

The boy did not scream. He simply shuddered as the cold took him, as his form began to wither, his breath stolen, his warmth devoured. The Man in the Red Coat pulled him close, cradling him as the frost consumed his body, flesh crumbling like brittle paper. In mere moments, there was nothing left but a fine, red mist clinging to the falling snow.

Satisfied, Santa turned, his sack shifting, whispering, sighing in bleak hunger. He took a step back into the trees, and the forest swallowed him whole. The sleigh creaked as the beasts jerked forward, dragging it back into the abyss from whence it came.

The villagers exhaled as one. The wind died down and the night was silent once more.

Until next year.