The first plague was loss.
A great wind came blasting through the camp; it toppled the shelter they'd built, it scattered their equipment, it spilled their supplies. The snow it tore loose from the trees fell on their fire and smothered it; the brief eruption of stream from its death dissipated and hardened to join the wicked flurry swirling around them in the old pain of this new storm. A gunshot rang out, from Dan's gun. A second, Marcus's. Who can know where the bullets ended up in that vast deep night, but they didn't find their way into an enemy. The spirit had disappeared. By the last glow of the fire's embers, Dipper and Wendy's eyes found each other, and the fear they both saw there was anything but a comfort.
As if in karmic response to the gunshots, the ground gave way beneath them. Rocks tumbled, snow frothed and raged to and fro like smokey water, the fold banished and enveloped them, and they were sliding down the mountainside. Not one of them had had time to grab their packs, or see where they'd ended up in the avalanche, so all their supplies, all their tools, all the precious and necessary things they'd brought, everything but the clothes on their back and the sparse things in the pockets therein, all was lost.
Lost to the first plague.
First of many.
"Damn you."
By the fire's weak light, minutes previous, the spirit glared down at them, with a look of hate. Hate, envy, offense and ill.
Dipper and Wendy moved as one. He stepped back a little nearer the fire, a little nearer to safety, she moved forward a little further from her family, a little further from safety, and they stopped level with one other.
"Hey, hey, whoa, what do you mean?" He was asking it. "Damn us, da-what did we do?"
"And what do you want and who are you?" She was gesturing with the barrel of the gun. "We'll beat you up."
"I come..." The spirit's voice hissed, creaked. Its voice seemed to come from all around, even from beneath them. Especially from beneath them. "From a long weakness and a long sleep... I come to heed the pleading beckon of an ill wood... I come with my judgment-"
"Yeah okay great, but judgment for what, what did we do?" The spirit's sudden appearance had frightened Wendy enough to interrupt it. "We're literally just sitting here, I don't kn-"
"I COME" It interrupted her back. "With judgment for an oath scorned, for a great old treaty violated..." It's eyes bore into the center of each of them. "You have wounded nature." It hissed. It hated. It knew. "You have destroyed. Long have I been its anger. Its anger comes tonight."
"...I? W- I DIDN'T SIGN NO TREATY!" Dan had finally gathered his wits, and stepped forward, making to put himself between the thing and his family. "AND I DIDN'T WOUND NO NATURE AND I AIN'T EVER MET YOU, SO I'D HAVE YOU TELL ME WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT 'FORE YOU SCARE MY KIDS, FREAKY."
The spirit focused in toward the larger man. "You have not?" Its nostrils flared, its eyes darkened. The wind filled with the sound of its sniffing "I should little need to tell the likes of you what this is about!" The spirit stepped between Dipper and Wendy as if they weren't there. "I can smell it upon you, the viscera of my domain... The clods of my dirt, and gravel of beaten boulders and the ichor of plants! And TOOLS! The carnage of saws and the turning of engines and the clanking of treads; I smell the oil of machines! I SMELL THE BLOOD OF TREES!" and glared at Dan. "You have cut down forests."
The second plague was snow.
The avalanche deposited Dipper into the side of the tree, and his bare hand clutched madly at the bark for purchase before he could be carried away by it.
It hadn't been a large avalanche, at least he didn't think so, himself having had no experiences with avalanches beyond internet videos. At least this one hadn't uprooted and carried away these trees, as he'd seen happen in these videos. Indeed, as he clung to it, the sound of the chaos faded away, as everything came crashing back to a halt. Not a perfect halt; he could still hear snow sliding and debris tumbling some distance below him, downhill, but the worst had passed by.
His other hand was still locked to Wendy's. Well, more like hers was locked to his. His eyes followed her arm down to where it disappeared beneath the snow, and he felt her struggling beneath the white powder for the purchase to get up.
It was around then he realized their predicament, and how steep this hill actually was; it seemed nearly vertical. The tree was growing nearly parallel with the ground, and Wendy was very much dangling from it. Despite the steepness, the underbrush and the low branches of the trees kept the snow piled thick against the ground, and she was immersed.
"Gimme your other hand!" He reached around the trunk to give her his, and they met. With both arms at play she finally got her feet under her and emerged from the snow, and spat it from her mouth; she was covered in it. They climbed into better positions on the trunk.
"You okay?" He was covered in it too.
"Yeah. You?"
"Yeah."
Not technically true. Snow has a way of melting deep into places when you're not prepared for it. It was piled into the sides of her hood, it was caked down into his sleeves, some had even gotten up their coats and pants. Dipper's hands were frozen to the bone already, and it had only been a number of minutes since the fire went out. He hadn't any gloves. He shivered, though tried to hide it. She felt it.
"Let's find dad."
"Yeah."
The second plague would endure.
For the night would be long.
"S-smell?" Dan took a step back in fear, then, remembering his children behind him, stood firm. "W-well smell again!" He stuttered up into the spirit's teeth. "If- if you're mad about the logging we do? Is that what you're mad about? If-if you can smell the trees I cut, then you can smell the ones I planted." He held up his hands to sample.
The spirit sniffed again; it was true. It could smell soil, and life, the sap of young trees among the old. "Have wraths before mine caused you fear, then?" It asked, curious, even glad, that the threat had been dealt with. "Have you then repented of destroying the forest?"
"Well...? No, that ain't it. I never 'destroyed' the forest. Replanting is just part of the job."
"Job?" It did not understand.
"Job. Logging. This is a logging forest." Dan gesturing to the trees, still hardly believing that he was standing face-to-face with this bizarre specter, believing even less that he was trying to give his resume to it. "Spruce is a 40-year crop. The company cuts down a swath, then plants new trees, and 40 years later they cut it down again. It's all company land, they put it to good use..."
"Company...?" The spirit stood higher, and looked around. The man's meaning was becoming clear. "What tribe among you men dares lay such ownership over the wood?"
"Weyerhaueser." Dan pointed to the corporate symbol on his jacket. "They own all this land. Millions of arces, up into Washington. I'm just a foreman."
"Do they not know that I own the land?!" The spirit roared down at him. "I am the land! Its blood is my blood!" The man's words lingered in its mind: millions. How much was a million? How large was this lawlessness? "How long has been my rest?" It demanded. "I see now that the memories of men must be short indeed, to have forgotten the treaty their fathers concorded...!"
"I never signed ANY TREATY!" Dan repeated emphatically. A droplet of spit left his mouth and landed in the snow. "SO YOU'LL TELL ME WHAT THIS IS ABOUT!"
"...Did you not have ancestors? Who in ages past raised themselves up an empire from this dirt? Did they not learn secrets and forge metal and construct machines? They saw fit to cut down the green trees and mine the great mountains and make war against lesser life! The fire they lit would never be quenched until it had consumed the very sky and withered all the woods! But an alliance of spirits rose to oppose them, and we cursed them, with such terrible curses that their empire and all the flames of their industry were banished and destroyed! And their survivors fell at our feet and begged for mercy, promising us that they would no more destroy. Humble they became, and returned to nature like the beasts, lighting fires and making tools of rocks and sticks, and never rising higher... So it was from then on, until time immemorial, up to this very day when my eyes fall upon you... You who know not these things?!"
They all, of course, knew not of these things.
"How long ago was this?" Dipper frowned, having a difficult time finding a place to put this in any sort of sensible context in the history of real life; if there really was some industrial civilization in Oregon that was blasted back to the stone age by a spiritual war, it couldn't have been as recent as the town? Could it? Not as recent as America? As Columbus? "I don't... I don't think those were our ancestors."
The third plague was hunger.
The monsters would take awhile to arrive.
Dipper and Wendy worked their way crossways across the steep hill, while a glowing pinprick of breachlight fought its way through the overcast sky above, their only light.
Cold. Every footstep sinking downwards into deep and powdered snow, every finger curled around a branch or scrap of bark, every time they caught themselves from slipping on the ice, every twist and every turn that revealed a parting in their clothing to the wind, ever minute, every second, and the winter drew in nearer. It wanted, and it hated, and the single chance they'd had to plead their case was past.
"DAD!" Wendy's lungs forced another howl into the night. "DAD!"
Far off in the night, something howled back. It wasn't Dan, but it didn't sound like a wolf either. But just on the threshold of hearing, another noise could be heard besides the wind and the unseen monsters, far way, and far downhill: "WENDY!"
"DAD!" Forgetting for a moment even the cold and the dangers of the snow, Wendy let got a branch and slid downhill, Dipper right behind her, snow billowing above and to either side of the wake of her boots.
"Wendy!"
"Dad!"
They found the rest of the family clinging to the nook of a great and gnarled tree on the side of the hill, and embraced. Dan's soul was on fire with fear, and he held them all tight while the night drew older.
None of them had their packs, but Wendy, Dan, and Marcus all had rifles.
Good defense as any against the third plague.
But what they really needed was shelter.
"Not your ancestors?"
"No, I think the empire-builds must have been... Indians? Or something?" Dipper looked to Wendy for confirmation. "Right? Have you ever...?"
"Yeah, well, this isn't friggin' India, he wouldn't call them Indians." Wendy frowned. "Native Americans?"
"Men are no more native to these places than the gnomes or the saucers!" The spirit hissed. "I should know, I who remember when they first came from the North... The spirits named them the Red Man in the day of their invasion; red as the blood of the elk they hunted and the flesh of the fishes they caught, red as a sunrise over a world changed for ill..."
"YEAH GREAT, WELL WE AIN'T THEM!" Dan repeated.
"I see you are not!" The spirit thundered. "Who are you?"
"We're the white man." Dipper said. "We came from the East. From Europe."
"'White man'! And it was the 'white man' that claimed this land in the name of Weyerhaueser?"
"Yes." Dipper nodded. He didn't like where this was going, but if he was going to plead his case or launch into some philosophical argument about man's place in the universe, he couldn't well begin with denial.
"Was it you 'white man' who returned to the sins of old? Was it your people who in this very age learned secrets and forged metal and constructed machines?"
"Yes." What did the sins of old matter? When the damage had already been done, and those who lived today were innocent of them?
"Was it you, then, who usurped the old people and their ways, and made the lessons they learned forgotten? "
"Yes!"
"NO!" Dan spat. "ME AND MY KIDS HERE DIDN'T DRIVE OFF NO INDIANS! AND WE DIDN'T BREAK ANY TREATY, AND WE DIDN'T DESTROY ANY WOODS AND WE DIDN'T COME FROM EUROPE! WE CAME FROM RIGHT HERE! I WAS BORN IN A CABIN NOT 5 MILES FROM HERE, AND MY KIDS IN THE SAME! THIS IS MY LAND! MY HOME!"
"A home you do not own!"
"A HOME WHERE I WAS BORN! WHERE WE'VE LIVED FOR GENERATIONS!"
"A home your people took from others! A home those others took from me!"
"AND MAYBE YOUR DADDY TOOK IT FROM SOMEONE ELSE!"
"If innocent you be!" The spirit declared. "Then repent! And bring me the guilty party! That the spirits might deal with him, be it ever so severely!"
"ANYBODY YOU'D WANT IS ALREADY GONE! WE'VE BEEN HERE A HUNDRED YEARS!"
"If innocent you be!" The spirit repeated. "Then repent! Lay aside your cursed tools and forsake the unquenched flame, and return to nature!"
"WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO THEN? IN ENGLISH!"
"Walk my woods! Eat of the berries and hunt as creatures hunt!" Somewhere far away a wolf howled. "Take food, leave breath, love and mate and live and die; look no further than the happiness of the beasts! For all of nature is in harmony but man!"
"WE AIN'T ABOUT TO DO THAT!" Dan roared.
The fourth plague was wind.
It was going so hard they could hardly hear each other, though huddled as they were. Gus was shivering so fiercely that it didn't look human. Kevin's whole face was blue. Dipper's hands were beyond numb, enough that he couldn't make a fist, enough that he couldn't feel it to reach up and touch his face.
It should not be taken lightly, then, the fact that the wind was NOT their worst problems at the moment.
For the monsters had arrived.
They could hardly be seen past the dark and the driving snow, but Dipper thought he made out details such as bloated stomachs, rounded shoulders, and eyeless faces. One had seized Marcus's shoulder in its jaws before the rest of them had fully realized the proximity of the danger, so Dipper found himself holding the boy's rifle, with his back pressed up to Wendy on one side, and Dan on the other. The gun was in his numb hands, and he wasn't sure how much ammunition it had.
Fortunately enough, it was apparent the monsters were not entirely bulletproof.
This was the first time Dipper had ever solved a supernatural problem in Gravity Falls with a gun, like a literal actual gun. It was efficient, of course, very effective, and very loud, and very quick, but it didn't feel at all elegant or noble to do. It made him feel like he was proving the winter spirit right about a lot of things he'd rather leave false. Was it cheating, in the eyes of God, nature, and the universe, to use a gun? But it was a pack of monsters; what was he supposed to do? Use his fists? Let them come? His friend and her family were behind him and around him, there were children here, what was he meant to do? Not use a gun?
The eyeless creatures got the hint not long after 3 of them were dead. They disappeared back into the night as soon as they had come, leaving the bodies behind.
By force of habit in these types of situations, Dipper attempted to take out his journal and doodle a sketch of the monsters. They certainly were quite unique and interesting now that he got a good look at them; Great Uncle Ford would want to know all the details, want to know whether they were a mutation or a crossbreed or something new entirely, it would be nice to bring back a dna sample to study, but... But the journal wouldn't behave in his fingers. And he couldn't grasp the pen. And Marcus had a wound to attend to. The gun only had two bullets left in it.
And the fourth plague would surely take them, if they couldn't get to shelter.
"B-but m-man thinks!" Dipper spoke up. "We make tools, h-h-haven't we a right to use our minds as we will? Can't we live as well as we can? You wouldn't tell a wolf to spare its teeth!"
"A right? Yes! Can you? You can, for you do!" The spirit nodded. "But ought you? Your race possesses reason, as well as knowledge of good and evil, surely you know there is a difference between capable and correct?"
"Yes, ought we?" Dipper nodded. "Yes our people conquered this land, and used this land, and used many things in nature for our purposes, but it isn't intended all for evil, because we use our capacities to look out for each other! We only make farms for food! We only log the woods to build houses! We only make weapons to keep safe, only do science to make our lives easier, and only kill monsters to protect our families!"
"So you build houses! But is a fortress necessary when your predecessors were content in humbler abodes? When the bear feels safe in his cave and the rabbit in its burrow?" In the face of this intellectual opposition, the spirit matched shot for shot, and for about 5 minutes but felt like longer, it interrogating them fiercely regarding matters of farming, and industry, and lifestyle, and mankind's use of the Earth. Dipper found himself doing most of the talking, and found himself struggling harder and harder to find answers to the questions that satisfied himself, much less the spirit. Was man right to attempt a better life for himself? Was progress right? What was human civilization in the face of the rest of the universe, and which ought to demand more loyalty? Finally the spirit asked him something along the lines of "If, then, your nation no longer fears the cold, and no longer fears fire and hunger and thirst, and nothing remains in the world to predate upon you, how large might your population become?! Though intentions be honest and true, might you destroy nature by becoming large enough for your nests and machines to eat the surface of the world in its entirety?"
Dipper had no reply to that.
Dan did.
"Well!" He thundered. "If you had to make me choose between my family and these woods, I would burn down every tree, turn up all the stumps, and poison the soil with salt! As would any man who had a family, and you too if you had one!"
The spirit looked down into Dan's eyes, and it saw the grim loyalty there, and saw no repentance.
"And we didn't! Destroy! The forest!" Wendy repeated. But then she smelled something. The smell of a memory. A memory of blood, and oil, of burning metal and rusting death, of poisoned water and iron bones. She remembered what used to be where the crater was.
Dipper smelled it too. He remembered the pile in the middle of the black lake.
So did the spirit.
It looked down into the eyes, and discovered the truth in that moment, that they were the ones who had crushed and cleansed the Forest of Daggers. They, and they alone, had killed his kinsman, the Spirit of the SouthEast Wood.
"White men... White?!" The trees around them trembled and shook with the spirit's building rage. "White as cleansing worms and pure sky? White is snow and crystal moonlight upon the mountains, white is frost upon the clouds! White, white you are not, and I name you yellow man! Yellow as the sun that drinks the water from summer's ground, yellow as grass beset by drought, and yellow as the flames that consume and the sickness that corrupts! By the trees and the clouds I curse you, and the woods you named shall name you back: YELLOW AS DEATH! YOU SHALL BE BANISHED AND ENVELOPED THE SAME AS THOSE BEFORE!" Winter raised its clawed hands in fury and clenched them into the sky as its judgment roared like a gale from the west. "MAY THE SEVEN PLAGUES OF WINTER TAKE YOU ALL!"
The fifth plague was...
Who knows.
This hillside was a bizarre thing.
They hadn't been on a hill before the avalanche. They'd been at the bottom of a shallow canyon, nowhere near any sort of dropoff or cliff or steep hill. And even if they had been, that still wouldn't explain a thing, because this hill didn't have a bottom! It went upwards as far as they could see behind them, descended as far as they could see before them.
The clouds parted overhead.
And there was no moon.
And only a single star, glowing exactly as bright as all the heavenly host combined.
But there wasn't that.
There was only the cold.
