With a howl that shook the stars, the wolf leapt over the table. Russ sidestepped and caught it at throat and crotch, using its own momentum to pitch it over his head and send it crashing into the fire pit. Burning coals burst everywhere as the wolf yowled in the fire, its shadow fur ablaze. His warriors writhed as if they too were alight. They shredded on the air like smoke on the breeze, and blew upwards, whirling away through the smokehole towards the steely stars. When the wolves were gone, the shades of the aged servants sped after, stretching like dough, their grotesquely elongated faces shrieking.

The hall followed its occupants into the sky. First the furniture fell upwards, rattle-banging into the rafters and shaking loose the shingles. A bench rammed itself across the smokehole, battering repeatedly at it, knocking the space wider and wider. Splinters of wood rained down. Another bench slammed into it, then another, stoppering the hole like debris in a storm drain, until the first bench shattered under the pressure and the others followed, folding in on themselves with dry-branch cracks. A table came apart as it spun madly upwards. Tableware scythed the air like shrapnel. Russ dodged flying crocks and drinking horns. Bloody human bones bounced from his head. A spinning chair caught him a hard blow on the temple and he stumbled. Other tables joined the frantic airborne jig. They rose and fell and danced about before a sudden force hurled them up, where they smashed against the roof and crashed apart and the fragments flew upwards into the sky. A beam dislodged and fell, ringing off the ice with an idiophone's musical impact. Shingles tore from their pegs. Rafters bent themselves in half and shot skywards. The remaining furniture made for these new holes and easier freedom. The boards of the walls shook and wrenched themselves from the ground. Snow burst within, though in truth so little remained of the hall it could no longer be said to enclose a space. The great wolf-headed posts and the timbers of the A-frames were last to go, shaking with such great violence to free themselves from the earth that two exploded into yellow splinters, and the others cracked and sundered with wooden screams as they struggled from their holes.

The Great Wolf stood blazing in its own hearth. It clawed at itself, ripping its flesh in its agony so gravely that skin split in twain from the crown of its head to its belly and sloughed away into the growing fire. A human figure stepped from the ruin into the maelstrom of wood splinters and howling immaterial winds.