Chapter 1: Prologue in Snow

The sky was so bright that it hurt her eyes. A searing bright blue color that somehow made the snow around her even more painful to look at. She covered her eyes with her shaking skinny arm while scrunching herself tighter against the fallen tree trunk. The snow crunched under her as she moved to turn around so that she would face the black bark while her arm dropped down into her lap and she looked down at her reddish fingers where the very tips had turned a strange blotchy black color. She flexed the numb digits, frustrated she could not feel them. Her stomach felt like a painful little pebble in her and any time she shifted she thought she felt it scraping around her guts.

She wanted to go to sleep.

She thought about how digging a hole under the tree and curling up to sleep like a rabbit sounded like a good idea.

She would go under the cold earth like her mother had.

The girl felt her shriveled stomach growl which pulled her out of her thoughts.

“Food,” she muttered. “Food.” She had to get something to eat. Eat. This single word was her sole motivation for not laying down and closing her eyes. She scooped up a handful of snow with a trembling hand and pushed it into her mouth. It barely melted but it felt better to have something in her mouth than nothing. Her eyes swept over the ground. She had come with a sharp stick she had found some time earlier and placed it... somewhere. Puzzled she kept looking around as her mind sluggishly recalled where it was. It stuck out from the snowy ground near the tree trunk and she grasped it with both hands to pull it free from the frozen earth. It felt much heavier than she remembered.

With her stick in hand she moved back to the trunk and started hitting at whatever pieces of bark looked weakest. After a few hits she found it too hard to stand and sank down to her knees, the cold leaching into her knees and creeping upwards.

Her mother told her once that bugs would sleep in dead wood during the winter, and that small green shoots under the snow could be eaten. How rabbits could be caught by tying a rope at the entrance of their burrows and thumping on the ground above.

She had found other ways to stay fed. People left food out for the dead. During the night she would sneak in and grab what she could. Even though several times she had been caught by gravekeepers, the worst they would do was hit her. They never took the food out of her hands. Or brought her to her father.

But people had stopped leaving out food. There were no more rabbits to be found. Even the green shoots were gone.

She could not go back to the town. Not with her father there. Even going to graves and crypts had been risky.

Black flakes of bark pattered over her thighs and on the ground as she chipped away at the trunk. As she kept hitting the trunk she grew more frustrated. How long did it take to find bugs in a tree? Was there something else her mother mentioned that she had forgotten? She set down the stick to start picking up the pieces of bark and ate them instead. They tasted like frozen mildew and she retched as her pebble-sized stomach flipped in protest. But she kept shoving them into her mouth, swallowing down the sharp splinters that tore as they moved down her throat. Her stomach roiled and twisted in the hollow of her body and she heaved.

Her hand slapped over her mouth as she fought against the urge to vomit, turning her head away from the trunk. Her eyes focused on the forest instead. Even the living trees cloaked in snow looked thin and ragged. Her chest strained and she laid down in the cold in the hopes it would make the nausea go away.

She began to feel strangely warm. Comfortable even, like she was sleeping in a bed after her mother tucked her in. She smiled at the thought and closed her eyes to enjoy the illusory warmth for just a moment…

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When she opened her eyes the sky was purple and she was covered in snow. Her body felt stiff and she struggled to move. Pale forms moved amongst the trees, pitiless golden eyes staring at her. She managed to finally get to her knees, snow tumbling off of her as four lean wolves trotted slowly from the trees. She stared at them as they gazed back, jaws open with their ribs stuck through their fur. She reached with numb hands and loosely gripped her sharp stick as she forced herself onto her feet.

She pointed the stick at the wolves. She trembled horribly, barely able to keep the stick straight. The wolves continued to slowly move towards her, heedless of the meager threat her stick posed to them. She gritted her teeth and wheezed out a growl, her stubborn heart pounding in her chest as she took a single firm step forward and then collapsed into the snow once more. Get up! She told herself.

Her hands were the color of a deep bruise she realized as she reached again for her stick. She could no longer feel them. She could not feel anything except the cold and her fury at the animals that came closer to her with their yellowed teeth and uneven gait. She glared at them with all the rage her body could muster as she struggled for the stick.

She was not going to die. She would not die. Not on the ground. She would not die. She stretched and reached but her numb hands got no closer to the stick. Snow fell on the worn tattered green sleeves of her tunic. The snout of one wolf was close to her neck, she felt it sniffing her… she gritted her teeth as her hand closed around the stick one last time

 

Real warmth splattered her face.

 

It trickled down her cheek, over her nose, into her red hair. The wolves had not even had time to cry out before their butchered bodies collapsed in the snow which melted beneath their hot blood. She stared at the strange white wearing figure that gazed down at her with dark eyes. Eyes so dark they were a pitiless black. That was all she could see. Her vision was blurring as the figure leaned down to her and said something she could not understand. She blinked and felt her eyelids nearly freeze together.

“Are you Idony?” The voice was dry and flat. As though the person was tired out just by speaking.

Something itched the back of her quieting mind. A memory. Her mother telling her something. What was it? “Yes…” She wheezed.

“My name is Liu Xie. I’ve been looking for you.”

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