Coals At The Treeline

By: Ashcroft, Ian

The winter has gone on too long. The herds have thinned to rumour, the drying-frames stand bare, and the ring of lodges pulls a little tighter each night around the one fire that is never allowed to die. Orn is young enough to still be sent out into the dark for water and fuel, and old enough to feel the cold reaching for the soft places behind the eyes.

Then the taking begins - out at the far edge of the camp, where the light gives up: a hunter gone between one breath and the next, a track in the snow too heavy to have a name. The people have a song for nights like this. It tells how the fathers of the fathers made fire and spear and drove the great dark back into the white, so that from that night nothing has hunted the people.

But the winter is not finished with them yet. And out past the last reach of the firelight, something has been counting.

They built the fire to keep the dark out. It had been lighting the dark's eyes all along.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKYTQFJL
• ISBN13: 9798237456073
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Ashcroft Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"