Golden Eyes
It was a piercing wind which used to rip at the tree on the edge of the clan lands. Theses trees were battered and broken having resisted the wind for so many years. They seemed to be screaming in agony with every creak. They were old, these trees, older, than memory; timeless, so old they had almost merged into the landscape.
They had survived, not just because their flimsy and frail branches would have been useless for even the smallest of fires, but because these were the guardian tree: guarding the forest from the horrors that lay in wait in the snowy wasteland that lay beyond its borders.
It was easy to see why the drooping branches seemed to exude an air of protection, as though they were reaching down to form a barrier preventing entrance to the forest. The gnarled old branches seemed distorted and twisted, like the bones of the old forest shamans, whether it was this that gave the trees their air of being such a powerful presence, or was it the trees that made people terrified of the shamans.
All the different peculiar noises seemed to give the trees even more of a forbidding presence, almost as though they were chanting out to the creatures of the deep darkness, challenging them to come closer.
No man of the forest had steeped past these trees since the darkness had swept over the ice lands, more than 300 summers ago; 25 summers, almost a lifetime. So many of the old clans had disappeared during that terrible winter: the Seal Clan, gone; the Hares, gone; even the secretive old artic fox clan, the clans had been devastated; only the Wolf Clan had escaped to the forest.