Their hike reached far into the hills, ever closer toward the grey sky, yet somehow never further from the roots of the trees. Though the still air worked hard to steal their heat, the exertion of their walking and climbing did more to resupply it, so that after an hour or so, all but Gus had stripped down to a light jacket and were breathing hard. Dipper threw his heavy coat over his shoulder and Wendy tied hers around her middle, and Dipper was having less trouble from the environment than he was from the ache in his side, and his ankle that he'd rolled on a root. He mentioned neither of his afflictions to anyone else, for fear of coming across as a whiny baby. I should play more sports.

Dan was talking. "You know, if it ever came down to World War III, it would look like this all year." He was saying, gesturing to the sky. "Nuclear winter. So much smoke that the sun can't get through. Farming don't work. Plants and animals die, and the folks who survived would have a hard time of it too. And with no gas to run cars, if it came down to it, we'd be traveling like this a lot."

"How long would nuclear winter last?" Kevin asked.

"Two years or so."

Dipper didn't think that sounded quite right, but didn't know enough about the nuclear chemistry to dispute it. "Wouldn't we need oxygen masks or hazmat suits or something if we were gonna be walking out in the open?" He asked instead.

"Radiation will mess you up." Wendy agreed, speaking from experience.

"Well." Dan grunted. "You're the little science boy. Why don't you tell us why we'd need a mask or a suit?"

"Uh, well the mask would keep you from breathing anything hazardous into your actual lungs." Dipper shrugged. "And the suit itself will block some radiation, at least the alpha and beta rays. Couldn't do anything against gamma rays though."

"How do you stop the gamma rays, then?" Dan asked.

"Nominal foot and a half of lead." Dipper answered. "...Or seven feet of rock."

"Hmm." Dan nodded, glad to see that there were some youth besides his own which took interest in such important matters. "Which is why we need bunkers."

"Yeah. Bunkers block everything."

"How much do masks cost?" He asked.

"I dunno." Dipper shrugged.

"Could we make one?"

"I don't think so."

"So... He's saying hiking at all is a no-no during the apocalypse?" Kevin clarified.

"Well yeah, but it's not like we need to travel." Marcus nodded. "We'll just have to hunker down somewhere good and live on canned food until the radiation faded off."

"Hmm." Wendy agreed. That's what she'd done, after all.

"...You know, for that matter, we don't know that there'd be radiation." Dipper pointed out. "Nuclear war is only one possibility in terms of apocalypses. There's also hostile AI takeover, orbital cleansing by aliens, grey goo scenario, biblical stage 1, biblical stage 2, solar flare, meteor impact, pathogen outbreak, hypno drones, and of course supernatural invasion..."

"Zombie outbreak?" Marcus added.

"That falls under pathogen." Dipper clarified.

"Wendy, go back to the store and get a new boyfriend, this one's a know-it-all." Kevin snickered.

"Let him talk, Kevin." Marcus snapped. "This is interesting."

"A-a-actually, I'm getting nervous could we talk about something else?" Gus's voice had an edge to it. He was taking all these things deeply to heart, as kids do.

"Sorry." Dipper apologized.

"Hey, don't worry, man." Marcus glanced back at his younger brother. "We lived through one apocalypse, we can live through another, right?"

"We didn't all live through the last one." Kevin frowned back at him. "Bill got us all, but maybe he wouldn't have if YOU-"

"DON'T TALK LIKE THAT!" Dan snapped. "Don't talk like that."

They continued in silence.

"...What's the difference between biblical stage 1 and 2?" Wendy asked.

"Stage 1 is all the righteous and godly people get taken up to heaven." Dipper said. "Which would presumably create a lot of civil unrest and car and plane crashes among the remainder. Stage 2 is the reign of the Antichrist and a lot of plagues, which presumably concludes in the partial or complete annihilation of the universe. There's some ambiguity on the specifics and length of time between them."

"Ah."

Dan took his family to church, and fancied himself a Godly enough man. He wasn't scared of any biblical apocalypse, since heaven was no threat.

Wendy wasn't scared of it either, but mostly because she wasn't scared of much. She wondered if perhaps she should be.

Marcus fancied himself a good man, so he wasn't scared of the biblical apocalypse either.

Kevin was just slightly scared.

Gus couldn't wait for heaven.

Dipper had seen enough magic and ghosts and aliens in his life to know that the Bible gave only part of the story. And he'd seen enough of the future to know that whatever it foretold wouldn't happen for a long time. Certainly not until after the veil.

But in any case, no matter the shape of the world's big-picture story, and no matter its apocalyptic conclusion, the more pressing matters for people, all people, to deal with were the mundane and present and small disasters. Disasters like zombie outbreaks, monster attacks, the fall of America, or the Time War. Little things.

The rapture or the meteor or the radioactive extinction of man may not happen upon them this Christmas, or even in their lifetimes, but something smaller might yet. And being prepared for everything would help with anything.

As they climbed across a hill they reached the site of a former landslide, where no trees grew, and the valley yawned deep to their left, and the hill steep to their right. As they crossed out of the trees the wind picked up. Feeling it, Dan told them all to put their heavy coats back on immediately; the long exerting climb may have kept them warm, but it also made them sweat, and when the wind touched the moisture they could lose body heat rapidly.

A good percentage of the rocks on the old landslide were more than four feet across, big enough to hide behind, so Dan took the opportunity to have them practice their stealth, using a game rather like hide-and-seek; he counted to thirty while they hid, and then they had to sneak across the boulder field without being seen. They turned up their grey hoods to hide their red hair, crouched low, and slunk off across the acre. Dipper's coat was a dark blue that didn't blend in to anything at all, and he felt almost silly trying to join in. He was one of the first ones spotted.

It was a fun game, all told.

They were cold afterwards though, and the sun had passed noon in the sky, so Dan figured it would be high time to go looking for shelter. "So." He pulled out his map and held it up to the valley. "Who can tell me where we are?"

They all gave various guesses, and some of those guesses, namely Dipper's, Wendy's, and Marcus's, matched up with Dan's, which Dipper was proud of. By the contours on the map, they could see there was a shallow canyon about a half mile to their north, with a narrow stream running through it. That meant drinking water, and implied fish, timber, maybe animals, and possibly caves. All good and useful things. They had a few handfuls of nuts as lunch, and made for the canyon.

Three hours later they'd constructed an appreciable little hut out of branches and fallen logs in the lee of a small cliff, not far from the stream, and the younger boys were trying their hand at making a fire without matches. Dan let them have their go at it for about fifteen minutes before stepping in to show them what they were doing wrong, and how to do it right. Two hours after that the fire was blazing, and Wendy was thawing a pot full of snow to use for soup. Dipper was scribbling down various of the day's observations in his journal, and Dan and the boys were unpacking their sleeping bags.

The sun had gone down, and the light was fading from the sky.

"Gets creepy out here at night." Wendy warned him, as she glanced up from the heating water. "Who knows what could be lurking out there." Her eyes were twinkling like stars in the firelight.

"I'm shaking and quivering." Dipper smiled, and looked over his shoulder at the trees. "Let's all tell ghost stories to pass the time."

"Ghost stories. Okay, yeah, I have one." Wendy sloshed the water around, wondering if that would make it heat faster. "So... Once upon a time, there was this old abandoned convenience store."

"Oooh, oh yeah? What happened then?"

"Then... It was full of ghosts!"

He gasped. "NOooooo."

"True story."

"Wow... Okay, my turn. Once upon a time, there was this huge mansion on a hill."

"Yeah?"

"And it was full of ghosts!"

"NOOOOOOoooooo really?"

"Yes. Really."

"Wow... And once upon a time there was this alien spaceship or something."

"Full of ghosts?"

"Full of GHOSTS!"

"Oooooooh I'm getting chills." Dipper shuddered, and smiled.

Despite both of their implacable nonchalance, the night was, in point of fact, growing steadily spookier. The trees were black now, the spaces between them blacker than black, and the spaces between those blacker still. Birds had stopped singing long ago, and bugs were dead or hibernating this time of year. What remained of the sky was broken all around by the spear-like crests of tree heads. The stream was noiseless completely beneath its own ice, silent but for a distant drip-drip-dripping from somewhere far upstream. The wind, the cold creeping December wind, slithered between the trees past their camp. It rustled the tips and frills of the sturdy trees, and some of them, the brittle ones, it shook to their very cores. A loud and haunting crack of splitting wood echoed across the forest from somewhere nearby, and a lone bird cried out with no one to answer it. A branch hit the ground somewhere.

Tomorrow was the solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Tonight would be the longest night.

The night would be long.

Long.

The wind touched Dipper's shoulder, seeming to reach right past his cloak and down to his skin. It was vivid enough, cold enough, that he actually turned around to see if anybody or anything was standing behind him.

Something was.

"Wendy." He whispered, and didn't take his eyes off it.

"Wha- uh. DAD." She hissed.

It stood on the very edge of the circle of firelight, not 5 feet behind him. Tall as a tree and as small as a mouse. Thick and deadly as a sleeping bear, thin and hungry as an emaciated doe. Spirits don't have shapes, not usually, no bodies as men would understand bodies, and they aren't seen as men see. When seen, if indeed they choose to be seen, they are seen with the soul; directly with those parts of the brain that deal with impressions, and interpretations, and symbols, and meanings. So thus were the impressions, contradictory and interfering, which weighed upon Dipper's mind as he looked up at it, looked down; though he could not so much as picture the being in his mind's eye, could never draw a picture of it, yet he knew it to be lean, gaunt, grey, feathered, furred, with a wide set of a bears' teeth for its face, and a mirrored pair of bare and twisted branches for its antlers, a drift of snow as the cloak about its shoulders, dried bramble and twisted old hawks' feathers made its crown, a blizzard its beard.

It looked down at them with three eyes. Two eyes were like eyes of men, but that they didn't reflect the firelight. The third eye looked inwards.

Dipper didn't see Dan exit the shelter, but he heard him sputter some frightened profanity and load a cartridge in his rifle, heard him shove Kevin and Gus back inside. He heard Marcus and Wendy ready weapons as well.

Did they know guns couldn't hurt spirits? Wendy did. Guns must just feel nice to hold. He heard her step forward, ready and willing to fight, weapon or fists it didn't matter.

Dipper had read all of Ford's journals front to back, and had seen spirits mentioned and described therein. Though he didn't recognize this one, he'd heard described ones like it.

Forest spirits. Keepers of hills and glades and creeks and the silhouettes of trees, as old as the land they walked, for perhaps they were the land. Though Ford had all the spirits in Gravity Falls recorded, he had learned from the old gnomes that some of the spirits were missing, like the one that kept the southeast wood, and the one that kept the lake, and the one that kept the winter. Dipper had theories as to what had slayed the first two, which left...

"Old man winter." He greeted their visistor with a nod, unsure if he should bow or what. "To what do we owe the honor?"

The spirit's gaze turned down to regard him. Then it looked toward Wendy. Then to their fire. Then to their shelter. Then to Dan, then to Marcus, then to Kevin, then to Gus, and finally back to Dipper.

Its lips parted and its teeth spread and its voice came down, as solemn and quiet and hissing as a flurry through a field of jagged flint. "Damn you."