A Song of Beasts

There are two rules in Hamelin.
1) Don't mention the missing children
2) Never play music after dark

Two years ago, a strange man came to Hamelin at night, and played away twenty firstborn children, luring them to the Hill and vanishing with them in a surge of light. Each morning, the bones of the children he'd taken the night before appeared at the top of the Hill, neatly tied in a sack made of the skin of a creature that had never been seen on Earth. But the night that he came for Sophia, something changed. The Piper took her little brother instead.

For two years, Sophia's been trying to find a way to make up for that mistake, going up to the top of the Hill every day, and looking for Giso's bones so she can bury him properly, and truly grieve his death. But when she finds a ragged girl stumbling around the top of the Hill, injured and babbling about the Piper, a place called Wyld, and her brother being alive, Sophia decides to find a way to bring Giso home.

~ ~ ~
Giso saved his sister's life. The Piper would have killed her, just like he did all the others; Giso could hear it in the music he played for her. But he never expected that the Piper would steal him instead. Now, he's trapped in a horrible world known only as Wyld, where monsters called Beasts roam and the Piper is the only living human besides Giso himself. It's a game of kill or be killed in his new home, and Giso isn't sure how long he's going to be able to play. After all, the Wyld is a place filled with monsters, and there's only so long you can live among monsters without becoming one yourself.

~~~
(Formerly titled The Piper)