Dark Hearts

Chapter 1

A/N: Sorta how I imagined the tavern where Cade works.

The rumble of chatter from within the bar was relatively loud considering it was the middle of the week and harvest days were arriving quickly. A full week dedicated to traveling vendors and local farmers to set up rusty wagons and crumbling carts in order to sell their trade to townsfolk. Although it was usual for the hard-working farmers to crash loudly with stomachs full of mead at the rundown bar, it was peculiar that the crowd was as large as it was this evening. It was practically custom for the first few days before harvest to be spent resting as much as possible to prepare for the endless hours of standing beside stalls of freshly picked fruits and vegetables, so the swelling group of middle aged men in their faded tunics and heavy pants to be occupying the scattered tables and chairs surprised the boy working behind the counter. Buck, the owner of the shabby shack maneuvered between the couple tables, occasionally stopping to sip some of the drink in his friends' glasses with throaty laughs at whatever the topic of their conversation was. It was no surprise that Buck had abandoned the barrels of plain beer and left his young assistant to handle the rush by himself.

The boy, who was not sure of his age but had to be between the ages of 18 and 20, had been working at Buck's tavern for so long most of the patrons knew him by name and had even bothered to consider themselves surrogates for the parents he never knew. He had even given himself his own name when he was young after travelling along the winding pathways with a new pseudonym for each village he passed through until he deemed one worthy; he had chosen Cade. On the occasion that he would stay for a short period of time in a small town he would look for any bit of work available and for the first couple of years on the road he would ask if any parents had lost a child. Eventually he stopped asking when the answer continued to be "Nope, haven't heard of anyone losing a child. Sorry, kid."

By the time Cade had stopped growing after he reached a fair height, his face quit changing and settled with a soft jaw, golden eyes, lengthy eyelashes, and creamy tan skin. The hair on his head had gone from a light blonde when he was a child in the shabby orphanage to a bark brown with thick curls. Multiple times the women of the husbands he had worked for cut the extensive length of his hair until it was just above his ears. He had stopped bothering to cut the mangled knots and it now fell above his shoulders, tied back with a piece of string. The last time Cade had spent time with another family was years ago, so long that the days had blended together and he forgot exactly when it had been. Hollow, his current residence, was the last stop on his journey for the main reason that it bordered the Dark Forest and all other roads exiting the town went through the dangerous forest; something not yet on Cade's list of things to do.

The small town, if it could even be considered a town and not a cluster of broken down buildings, was settled at the brink of the eerie forest with a leaf-covered cobblestone path disappearing into the woods. Most of the buildings were one story shacks with rotting wood planks and dozens of flies buzzing around the roofs from the stench of decaying animal carcasses inside. A majority of the town consisted of farmers that let their crops grow on half acre farms with more feces as fertilizer than helpful nutrients, but there were some struggling families with scrawny children and wives living in the village. Constantly, the sky remained a dull grey coated in heavy clouds that threatened to rain every hour of every day. It remained a mystery as to how the crops managed to grow in the non-existent sun and malnutrition.

At roughly the age of 14 or 15, Cade had managed to snag a small room at the very edge of town. The top floor- if it could be called a floor- of Buck's tavern became his temporary home paid for with the amount of money he had scavenged over the years. It seemed to be pure luck that Cade was able to persuade the constantly intoxicated tavern owner into letting the toned teenager rent the spare room above the bar, but he would take what he could get. There was a dirty cot in one corner covered with stains that made him question whether another person had slept here and never woken up, and a two tier shelf made of rotting wood in the opposite corner. Cade never bothered to use either and settled for sleeping on a makeshift bed of hay he had "borrowed" from a farmer down the road and kept the few belongings he had in one of the storage crates that held the daily mead delivery. Despite the terrible condition, it had good use and provided some sanctuary to the homeless boy.