Flesh & Blood

Chapter One

White was everywhere and endless in North Heldal. It covered rooftops and trees, burying bushes and killing the smaller plants. The color made me sick. Not in the way smoking a bad stem or catching a cold did, but the kind of sick I felt any time I caught a whiff of Redcap Rum after the night it left me cradling the toilet in a stranger's bathroom; the kind of sick you could only get by suffering the consequences of partaking in an excess of any one thing.

Mine was a sentiment widely agreed upon by the rest of the town. It was grumbled under the breath of trolls who'd been driven out from the quiet isolation of their damp, dark homes and into the bustling town where they were mocked and ridiculed for adolescent entertainment; it was whispered in the streets from the mouths of demons, imparted by them to anyone who would listen; it was screamed from the skies by harpies that circled the night skies under heavy cloud cover. The whole town could have joined voices and shouted into oblivion how much they hated the white, and the snow, and the town, but there was no use in it. Nothing anybody said would ever change anything about our little black and white town.

The trees that managed to grow within the town were hardy, bore no blossoms, and had dark and reaching branches with jagged ends that grabbed at hair and tore away clothing. There was no relief from the grayscale world we lived in, and it chipped at the already dim spirit of the town as a whole. The denizens of North Heldal were very much the same: dark figures with sharp teeth and claws against stark white surroundings. We had long ago accepted our fate and built a home for ourselves in the unforgiving land of the North. My people didn’t just survive the harsh, eternal winter of the North that had held us captive from the rest of the world for centuries; we had learned to thrive in our cage.

We lived in the same old stone homes that our ancestors had built for themselves before the split that divided Heldal between the North and South. The stone buildings did nothing to fend off the winter chill. Instead, the buildings absorbed that chill until the sheer cold was a part of them; as much a part of the building as a wall, a floor, or a window. My home was the coldest of any in town because of the morgue beneath the kitchen, but the upstairs was lit and heated with wall sconces sporting witchfire.

Meanwhile, the humans of South Heldal basked in the sun daily, played in the rain, watched as flowers bloomed and leaves changed color then fell with the changing of the seasons. I imagined they lazed around their cozy, wooden homes where they were surrounded by modern amenities that you only saw in select shops in North Heldal; like electric lighting, heating and air conditioning, and functioning city vehicles - the only vehicle we had in North Heldal was a single bus whose route circled the town, but it was constantly down for one reason or another.

I sat at the kitchen table viciously chewing on a piece of dried jerky, using it to take out my frustration at the differences between our towns and staring at the witchfire lighting above me as it flickered and tossed shadows around the room. It gave off the faintest aroma of burning caramel - sweet and sweet and too sweet until the aftertaste of smoke overwhelmed the senses. Witchfire had dangerous luring properties, and it had caused the deaths of many monsters and humans alike before it'd been fully understood. Mallory Black, the town witch, had been very thorough in her explanations on using it for lighting and warmth: to be safe, the flame was always to be small and only lit when absolutely necessary, and we were to always extinguish the witchfire before retiring to sleep.

The bag of jerky in our pantry was rarely touched, as meat was rare in North Heldal and we were only supposed to eat it if we hadn't had a chance to feed for one reason or another, because we only got our rations from the Channon pack when they made trips to South Heldal - and their trips out of town were few and far between. It was after a week without feeding that I'd been unable to stave off my hunger any longer and gave in to the urge to dip into it. The jerky wasn't filling the way a real meal would have been, but at the end of the first week of waiting I was officially at the mercy of the familiar grip of hunger that squeezed my insides and the jerky at least took the edge off.