This is my entry for this season's drabble challenge at Pan Erotica - 100 words on the theme of 'winter'. I based this on one of my collaborative fiction characters, a werewolf named Winter, whose story I wrote in 'Love Bites' in the Doors novel at PE a few years ago. It was nice to revisit him, albeit in a brief vignette.

Winter solstice; a far-off bell strikes the midnight hour.

Ash-grey and moon-silver, a wolf runs along the wood’s snow-shrouded edge. Pausing to snuff the familiar woodsmoke drifting across the frosted air from the tumbledown farm below, it raises its head to howl a night-song that pierces the glittering stillness like an arrow.

In the darkness of an upper window, a light flares up before banking to a steady glow. The wolf’s lover tends the beacon-torch that guides him home from his wilderness, until the night he too can shed his skin and dance with his mate in the moonlit snow.