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(Or if you’d rather have an overview first: Table of Contents.)

This here is the sixth part in a series:

Chapter 2: Trader’s Coming, Pt.2

[Negotiations]

Everyone forgot about it in the evening, though. And a good thing that was. I’d already been hard-pressed to come up with a plan for the evening, much less the next day. Ma and Da would find me clenching my fist some time soon. I had to eat, after all, and sleep. I could only eat in the inn with the others for so long, Tay paying for us all.

But, as if by some miracle, the traders came that very evening—and that ensured, of course, that no one was looking at me anymore. Everyone was now focused on the little caravan—or rather what, to me, back then, was a very big one—of wagons slowly trailing into the village and setting up show right in the middle of the free space of mud ‘square’ in between the huts, in between the village head’s bigass stone house and the smaller one that framed it from the other side. The one those two Elders owned who were whispered to be Snake believers, with that carved eye on their door.

They were the only ones who rarely even came out for the traders.
Maybe because the husband was rumored to be a trader himself and rarely at home at all. No idea what his wife did the whole time. It wasn’t as if they were important to me at the time, you see, little as they ever showed up in my life. So, I didn’t even ask. The Snake thing… even that is one I only learned later, I think.

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The one thing I had learned rather soon was that I wasn’t supposed to stand at their door for long, trailing the carvings with my grubby little fingers. Had got a good lesson from Ma about that, like I got about other things so often, my butt still remembering for quite a while, so I never went there anymore.

It was how I got stuck with Ferrick, other than his connection to Anur who’d been a friend to me first—if I wanted to trace carvings, there I could. His family didn’t mind a lick if I stuck around for a bit, happy enough that Ferrick brought any friend home at all instead of just running around in the mud with Anur the whole time.

Especially if it meant he showed interest in his family’s main occupation, and carving very much belonged to that. His father was a woodworker and carpenter, after all. He made anything that was made out of wood for the whole village; from huts and the wooden stuff inside the huts right down to helping with the boats. Ferrick’s family were the only ones who could, too, it seemed. So, his father tried rather much to get Ferrick interested in that, which wasn’t always easy. But carving? Carving, Ferrick had always liked well enough, especially when he found it would get him admiration from the other kids if he made little figurines, no matter how badly. Or carved pictures into wooden boards that his father would proudly use for doorways or tables, telling everyone about how his youngest had done that, and didn’t he do it well already? Look bright, he’d make a good carpenter one day, after all.

I think he was a little worried about his son and how Ferrick rather liked mud flinging and blowing up stuff a bit too much. Even going as far as meddling in kitchens—not really to help, but to find out how to make stink bombs…

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As expected, Ferrick was pestering the traders again about anything they might have that one could use for further experiments and tinkering.
He, too, was counting in fish these days. He’d learned from the former years that the traders weren’t much interested in the big stuff his family made that they would’ve had to lug around back through the Deep Forest. Unless it was crates or an additional barrel. They wanted most of their space for the fish barrels and vats, and little else.

Jannai was a bit luckier that way—even the traders could appreciate some of the smith’s stuff. I wondered if there were places full of woodworkers, where carpentry wasn’t as rare as it was in our fishing village. I mean, we were a village mostly full of fishers. The axe people seemed to be all woodcutters, mostly. It stood to reason, there would be more villages focused on other trades, right?

Made me wonder if the traders all came from the same village, too. Had to be a really strange village. Traders had to travel a lot, after all. It would mean they were rarely ever at home. So was their village a ghost town, most of the year?

Bern had a few stories about ghosts that weren’t too bad. Though Uhland had better ones, of course. I wondered if Bern wanted to apprentice to Uhland. Though I don’t think his father would ever let him. He expected his sons to take over fishing, once he got too old. Feed the family. It was a bit of a conundrum.

Theoretically, we were all free to choose whatever interested us, and what we could find a teacher for. The latter was more of a problem.

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I myself had basically given up on learning anything but fishing in my life at the ripe age of four. There was no one who would even teach me cooking, you see. I had tried once. Ma never let me near the kitchen again after that, rattling on about what a mess I had made, whenever Da brought it back up. These days, he didn’t even try anymore either. So I was squarely stuck with nets.

Truth be told, I wasn’t really that much interested in working a household anyway. The stuff Ma did looked rather boring. The one good thing was that she rarely seemed as busy as anyone else. Had a lot more time fiddling her thumbs, other than carrying around Feréll, it seemed to me, what with all the things she had us others do. But what did I know… Anyway, if it meant having to do the cleaning, too, I wasn’t sure that was a good trade at all. I hated cleaning.

It was the one thing she sometimes made me do, despite the mess I made and no matter how I coughed. Clean out the fireplace. I guess she just didn’t like doing it herself, either. Well, there was one thing I couldn’t blame her for.

Though I quietly very much grumbled about having to do it in her stead, even though I hated seeing anything of Ma in myself, like the grumbling. But I grumbled more in my head. That didn’t quite count, did it? I never grumbled out loud at people. Not since I’d seen what reactions that caused.
So, I didn’t grumble about the nets either, though I had come to hate those, too, ever since the big one broke apart and I had to sit with it for days, bleeding fingers or not. But Ma was now slowly starting to hand responsibility for my little brother over to me, too, sometimes. The one good thing about that was that it got me away from our hut. Ma didn’t care much where I took him, long as she got her hands free.

Less nets. Yay!
But I always had to get back to them soon enough. Not yay so much.

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Bern and his older brother Bertram on the other hand could very well have gotten into the woodcutters’ trade, if you asked me. They were only a few years older than us, but already really strong. I could imagine them apprenticing to Jannai’s father, too. Didn’t think he’d be loath about some more help in the smithy. He always had a lot to do and rarely even came around for the axe people’s visits—though he didn’t need to either.

They all came to him in the evenings anyway, you see. Because he had one more passion besides smithing: He brewed a very strong, dark beer.

Cutting Ale, people had come to call it, and sometimes Hackney. What they meant was that it hacked the feet right out from under people, sooner or later—mostly sooner—even the woodcutters’, as if someone had made one clean cut. Somehow, they still loved it despite that. Praised it a lot, did the axe people. Maybe because it helped ‘em get funny. They liked being funny. And since none of them got mad when they drank, like some of ours did, why not?

We’d snuck away some of the Cutting last year for ourselves, or rather Jannai and Tay did. Tay, of all people! Can you imagine?

I have no idea how Jannai talked him into that, but she did. If anyone could talk someone into stuff it was Jannai. Even when it came to our almost prissily virtuous Tay. That had been one of the few times he didn’t take responsibility for what we’d done afterwards. Couldn’t, you see. He’d been happily snoring in a corner at that point, while most of us others were… in varying states of disarray or outright violently sick, like I’d been. Jannai’s Da had just shook his head and softly laughed when he found us like that.

“Hope that’ll be a lesson to y’all,” was all he’d said.
Implication obvious: Keep your grubby hands away from adults’ stuff.

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I’d sworn back then that I would NEVER drink beer again. Not ever.

Anur had joined me in that, back then. But he’d violated the vow almost right away, when Ferrick had started teasing him about it just a few days later, slowly sipping from the milder beer his mum had at the inn.

They also seemed to have forgotten all about last year’s incident by now, because I’d caught them planning another trip into the smithy’s basement just yesterday.
They apparently went through with it, too. I don’t know if Bern or Bert or some of the woodcutters had set them up to do it, but Anur still looked quite green today whenever he saw someone waving around a likely tankard or horn—some of the axe people used the horns of the animals some of their village kept at home, according to rumors Jannai had brought to us, as drinking tools; made me wonder how they were carved out, or if they were naturally hollow once cut off, but even Ferrick didn’t know.

Ferrick wasn’t all too talkative today, either. And later than he’d ever been to a Traders’ Coming, not even counting that he hadn’t been all too enthusiastic about the latest mud flinging; which probably saved me from some harm, considering, what with my own little problem.
Wasn’t as green around the nose and all queasy as Anur was either, surprisingly—since I’d wager Ferrick must’ve drunk more than the other boy; he always tried to out-do anyone in just about everything, if a wager was involved, after all. Maybe there hadn’t been; though it was hard to think there hadn’t, since if Jannai didn’t put one up, it was usually Ferrick who did, and more so wherever Anur was involved.
It was a whole thing with them. Seemed to be their way of expressing friendship, I guess, as strange as that seemed to me.

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It seemed they had either not invited Tay this time around—because Tay was already ruffling through the traders’ stock with a vengeance, as if he meant to empty his father’s coffers in revenge for the latest slight—or Tay had politely declined.

But since Jannai had said nothing of it… She’d usually have invited me, no matter my vow, if that had been the case. She invited me to just about anything.
So I guess they’d kept it between the two of them this time.

Jannai was currently busy debating with Tay about some of the things they’d spotted. Though I already knew she’d go for sweets with whatever amount to barter her Da had given her this time—he always did, just like she always went for sweets in the end, despite how she always ogled most everything else before going there. And there was a lot to ogle this time. True to Ommá’s words, there were a whole three of the merchants who’d apparently joined forces—a rather sensible thing to do for the hazardous journey through the Deep Woods. Though each set up their own stall, putting them spread out next to each other in a kind of semicircle right in the middle of our village ‘square’ that was actually no square at all. A thing I often puzzled about whenever I saw it at other times, but not now.

Usually, I should’ve liked to join my friends in exploring all the things the traders had brought this year.

Especially with there being so much more to see and explore than usual. Yarin, our very own sole shopkeeper—more of a general store selling hawker’s goods—ever a practical man, had even started to sell cloth and colors and small, flexible reeds for crafting lanterns back to our people at the chance, telling them “we need to celebrate this occasion, show the merchants our city is cultured, so they’ll come back next time”. Opened a workshop for those who didn’t yet know how to do it, too, sending his long-suffering assisstant Earnest running back and forth with materials. Like near always, he made a face befitting his name. But he’d somehow still succeeded at rallying people and roping seemingly half the village into that lampion business.

So, by now we had cloth lanterns hanging at every second house, to make a proper festival out of the arrival of the traders since they’d been spotted by some enterprising souls—likely some of the Youngsters hanging out where the Olders and Elders couldn’t see—some hours earlier. I still wondered how Earnest succeeded in talking so many Olders into it. He’d even convinced some—probably Tay’s father Warmun most of all, but possibly also Anur’s mom or even some of the fishers—to put up some scenting oils and scented potpourri of dried flowers and acorns and those porous wood things that could keep scents for months here and there, “to make the village more inviting” and “present our best face to the merchants, so they might come back more often”.

Seemingly he had just as much of a ‘silver tongue’ as his mentor. Yet another figure of speech that puzzled me, though not as much since Yannai had told me it referred to his tongue bringing in silver, not the tongue being silver. He did have a better mind for numbers than Yarin, far as I knew. Or at least some of the neighbors said so, a bit sad about it. Making me wonder if they’d cheated Yarin in years past. Normally, the merchants were supposed to be the one ripping people of. So had Yarin been especially bad at that… or was Earnest just helping him do it even better?

It seemed a disloyal thing to do to the fishers for someone who’d been one of theirs before, in any case, or so those same neighbors sometimes grumbled, but then again, I guess he didn’t have much of a choice. He couldn’t afford Yarin kicking him out. Whatever the case, the seller’s house sure did look far nicer by now than it had done before he acquired Earnest’s help; despite the amount of his many endeavors not having been less before. Though, when it came to beauty, I had to admit, the lanterns definitely did make our village look nicer. The soft light painted even the oldest wooden hut in joyous and flattering colors, seeming rather effective at hiding any rough spots and flaws, where the wood had aged badly and splintered. Nice for looking at, if not so nice for avoiding splinters. Hopefully the merchants wouldn’t try leaning on some rickety planks that weren’t quite trustworthy, or I guess the effect could turn out rather badly for all of us. For now, though, they stayed safely with their wagons and the improvised stalls made from foldout tables at their sides.

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And what all the merchants had assembled there! They had indeed brought much more than usual, and a greater variety, too.

My eyes bulged at seeing all the wares laid out, even from afar, a riot of colors that wasn’t solely due to the lampions: Whole bolts of cloth this time, along with the more usual wares of spices we we’d rarely ever get otherwise, and vegetables that either didn’t spoil fast, were preserved in some way, or still fresh, picked up from the villages closest to us and spread out along the way. There were also gayous stripes meant for festivities and hairbands this time; a vast array of leather—much to my luck—and even some bright stones of various colors. Different kinds of metals, evident in different colors to the tools they’d brought along; tools more than ready to rival those of our blacksmith. Much finer workings, too: some kind of clasps and … special needles? Combs, too, though those seemed made of horn and different kinds of wood. Scrimshaw, even, along with bone and horn carvings, for handles to knives and tools, but also as clasps and knobs and … was that a pipe? Wouldn’t that just break?

The combs especially, worse than even the slender pipe stem, or whatever that was. Maybe it was a handle for some painting tool, after all, though I didn’t know why someone would use something as delicate as that for a tool used all too often. It all looked like things most people would keep as a family treasure, in some sturdy box and stuffed away in a cupboard to only show to the occasional visitor or bring out on feast days. Might be they were supposed to be. Marriage gifts, maybe? Something to hand your children when they left the house, to remember you by? Though not everyone did that. Not all could afford to. And the children here never went far anyway. So what was the use of gifting them some precious heirloom that had no real use, when they lived just next door or around the corner, ready to visit you every day?

Whatever the case with that: Those were certainly not our usual traders come to visit. Maybe they’d gotten lost along the way, took the wrong turn? Most all of their wares were fine as I’d rarely ever seen other than at the Snake lovers’ door, what with how rarely Ferrick’s dad and older siblings had time for that. And Ferrick wasn’t yet old enough to be any good at it, or maybe he would’ve made some, if ever he became good enough at carving to make the finer stuff.

He sure seemed to be staring at those rather intently, for once not only interested in whatever powders and other curious materials the traders had that might be used as ingredients for new inventions, like the pepper blasts he’d made last year—much to the scolding of his Mum, once she learned how much he’d paid for that. And more so when she learned what it actually was that he’d blasted into people’s eyes and noses by flinging small sacks that burst open on landing. Maybe more so because not all of them had even landed where they should, though I had some doubt about that.

She hadn’t seemed all too happy for some reason to see one of her neighbors fleeing to the healer’s hut with reddened eyes, cussing all the way where anyone might hear, even though it was someone I knew she very much didn’t like. At least not for long, and not afterwards. She’d been giggling about it before the other Older came back, too, along with her children. But then they talked a few words, and her face ‘grew long’. I mean not really, it rather scrunched up, but… well.

It’s just what people said, when someone looked like that. It still bugged me, but I was slowly starting to give up on asking after every little thing I didn’t understand. It was no use, and too much scolding, unless I had Jannai to pester.

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But for one, she was deep in conversation with Tay still, not even seeming to notice me, and for another… That was just as well, because it meant no one was watching me when I did my own bit of ogling—the more necessary part first, eyeing the leathers the traders had brought. Even going as far as asking them which was the sturdiest. They eyed me a bit skeptically at that.

No big wonder.
I didn’t usually buy much of anything from the traders—in my mind they were all connected somehow; so obviously the new ones here would already know that, just like our neighbors always knew all about what my Mum had had to scold about this time—and certainly didn’t look the part of someone holding silver in their fist either.

But I did.
And I absolutely needed some strong leather into which to put whatever would be left over after buying the leather.

I hoped Ommá was right and they wouldn’t take too much. I don’t know that they would cheat a little kid, but who knew? Ma always claimed the traders were all cheats, and when even Da wouldn’t speak up against something Ma said… well. There was at least some chance she was right about it for once.

It made me clutch the strange silver piece even harder. I still had no idea what to do with it, but… I just knew I had to take good care of it, and that included not wasting it. Waste not, want not, Ma always said. A wastrel will go to waste, and real quick, too.

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And if I knew one thing it was that… maybe I’d need some way out some day.

Maybe this was it. Though probably not.
I doubted the thing would get me taken with the traders all the way to the city. Or at least some other village. I could’ve asked the woodcutters, of course. They seemed nice enough. But what the hell was I supposed to do once there?
I still didn’t know quite enough about the actual fishing yet. Mostly just how to piece together a broken net again. And gut and scale fish. Badly. I didn’t know much about anything else either. Most people didn’t seem to appreciate much about how I was good at finding nice stones or feathers or other shiny, glittering things. They often even claimed they didn’t glitter. Only Ommá never said anything bad about it.

Though she did sometimes call me her little fox. Or her little crow.
I wasn’t too sure about those endearments, truth be told. Was that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing? I never knew if it was a scolding, though it didn’t sound like one. I guess… foxes and crows collected beautiful things, too? I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know much about foxes and crows, other than that they rarely seemed to grace our village with a visit. And that people complained about them, too, anyway… So… likely not the best thing to be? But I didn’t yet know how to be anything else. I did, however, already know that food would have to come from somewhere.

Yet another conundrum.

I had a lot of those, the older I got.
And I was only five. I didn’t wanna know how many I’d have at fifty.
Better not to think of it.

Focus on the matter at hand, Lill. Leather. Good, strong, sturdy leather.
I guess I should’ve asked the hunter. Maybe. Surely he’d have leather, from the hunting? And it likely would be cheaper than the traders’. No one said he was a crook, either. But people didn’t… well, you just didn’t.

So, I was stuck with the traders. And no matter how they gave me those looks I probably didn’t get half of, and that the other half I couldn’t quite parse, other than that they didn’t seem all too happy about me being there—Elders never seemed quite happy about me being anywhere; my own included, so that was nothing new—or at least not so sure I’d be able to even buy it anyway, they did at least answer my questions. So, I knew rather soon what kind of leather I wanted.

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“How much?” I asked. Probably too timid.

The first just laughed and shook his head. The second gave me one of those sad looks that were probably meant to be kind. Or maybe not? It was a bit down his nose, after all, from what I could glimpse. But told me:

“You won’t be able to afford that, kid. Whaddya want with that anyway? Little kids got no reason for something like that.”

“Here”, he tapped on a different one, “if ya need shoe leather” —I had shown him my good ole trusty soles, you see, as example for what I needed; I guess he took it for me meaning I needed new soles, and that was just as well, for the moment— “you’d do better with that one.” And that was the end of that attempt.

Which meant I was kinda stuck with the third as my last hope, unless I meant to take the shoe leather after all, because that was the last of em.
I dunno, maybe I should’ve taken the shoe leather, anyway. My soles had been good enough so far. Wouldn’t that suffice? But something in my brain was now stuck on what they’d pointed out as the best one. Ommá’s gift kinda called for that. Don’t judge me, I can’t tell you why, it just did.

Not the best chances for bartering, though, if you knew someone was the only one you could get something from. I should’ve sent Anur.

Or at least Jannai. But…

I know. I know. They were my friends, but still… I didn’t know how they’d react to what I carried. I most definitely didn’t trust them to keep their mouth shut about it, and that was the biggest problem of all.

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It made me tiptoe around her stall for a while, unsure of how to proceed.

Getting lost in all the things on offer yet again, when I set out to mimic someone unsure of what they wanted, as if I had given up on what I truly needed. Maybe she’d forget what I’d asked the others while she was occupied with other customers, and I could get my request in sideways, somehow. One could hope, right?

And there was so much to watch still.

Small hand lanterns and oil lamps for one, not just candles and torches and their respective holders. A few other metal and pottery items, too. A metal teapot more beautiful than any I had ever seen, with three tiny feet shaped like claws, where the others were either the more usual glazed pottery or crafted from wood like most of what we used here. There was some kind of… small figurine whose use I couldn’t quite identify that seemed nearly translucent; made from some material I couldn’t name.
Small boxes and cases and even one bigger bowl made of something shimmering and glittering, too, that seemed like very fine stone to me, either as whole material or set into wood or pottery—shells and nacre, I would learn later, from the far-off sea I had never heard of yet and still wouldn’t hear of for some years at the time. Some boxes were decorated with tiny stones, glimmering in the light of the torches and lampions—which made it sadly hard to see which was the material’s true color and which only leant to it by the light softened and colored by the cloths that softly swung in the wind.

Good thing it wasn’t stronger… or we might’ve found ourselves dealing with a fire. That would’ve rather ruined the fun. But nothing like that happened.

The merchants had even brought fruits and sweets, not just nuts—I had no idea how they’d preserved that so well it didn’t spoil along the way, wondering about it while I nervously fingered the soft metal in my grubby little hand. Jerking back with a hot cold flash when I noticed what I was doing. What if I bent it out of shape? Would they still take it then? What if I made it all useful? Bad, bad Lili. Stop that immediately!

I forced my eyes back to the table, careful not to clutch the coin so hard, while still keeping it cradled with iron will to not lose it. This merchant had the more usual jam and marmalade out, too. And sugar for making it, though that was behind her, still on the wagon in large sacks, along with the salt in big caskets the merchants obviously wanted emptied, not needing quite as much for their brine. The fishers were all too happy to buy it as well, which seemed to make both sides happy—the merchants had probably picked it up in Mistwall as by-catch in droves, possibly even already loaded with brine (not that I could’ve guessed that at the time, but I can tell you today), which was why it was cheap enough for our fishers to rally to it. These merchants most definitely were not the usual ones, or they would’ve known to sell it for more.

Then again… maybe they were trying to drive out the usual ones, offering dumping prices because they had finally learned the secret of where the Tears came from. None of us was wise enough to understand that yet; least of all us kids. Least of all me. I could only taste the greed on both sides, along with the happy feelings everywhere.

There were even some children’s toys none of us had ever seen or thought of before. And a small assortment of instruments that brought out even Uhland for once, as if he could sniff it—though probably some neighbor had told him—even some curious rocks and salts and powders that didn’t seem to belong into the spices category, judging by the way they were laid aside, and, much more interesting for us kids as well as Anur’s family: a large pot of honey to dole out smaller portions from for good measure. The only thing missing were the more usual fare of bread and meat along with the plump, fluffy buns and the sticky sweet rolls Jannai had been eyeing and alternatively slinking around since the start, on one of the tables opposite the merchant group: not Yarin’s, but the one quickly set up by Anur’s sisters on the orders of his mum, who was no less industrious than our shopkeeper when and if she put her mind to it. There weren’t just pastries either, but all kinds of baked and cooked things, even Adelaide’s famous honey candies.

She had probably recruited help from the neighbors to achieve that specific feat.
I couldn’t imagine how she and her two daughters would’ve made all that in just one night and the last few hours, even if they’d worked all night through. Because most of that hadn’t been here the day before. Had she gotten even earlier notice about the traders than our seller had? Maybe she’d just been stacking her bets, not even expecting the traders at all, what with the woodspeople and charburners all here already, sure she’d be able to sell it off.

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But speaking of sales… it was high time to attempt my own purchase, or I’d never dare ask anymore. So I waved to the merchant until she finally noticed me again, obviously truly already having looked past me. At least that side of my bet had paid off.

“Bisuar,” I told her, in dim hopes of any likely answer being what I wanted. “Just need a scrap, really. Got any scraps you can’t use for sumthin’ else?”

Sadly, she gave me a good long look at that, and when she finally opened her mouth to speak, she seemed like to hand me a similar answer as the last one, judging by the looks of it. But at that very moment Anur piped up from the side, interrupting her.

“Bisuar leather? What the hell you need Bisuar for?”

Stopping the woman’s words dead in her throat. Probably wanted to ask the same.

But Anur didn’t sound judgy. He never did. He just sounded curious.
He only turned his head for a sideways glance, though, when he stuck his head into our ‘conversation’, and then his whole demeanor changed.

“Oh,” he said, pronouncing it like some revelation I had no fucking clue where he was taking it from. “Oh. You mean for that.” As if it were some secret he suddenly shared.
As if he’d seen me pocket Ommá’s coin and seen something more than just that. As if he could somehow intuit what it meant to me, even when I myself wasn’t sure about that. At all. I couldn’t have put into words why it was so important to keep safe. Or why it had to be Bisuar leather now, and good sole leather just wouldn’t do.

His head snapped around to the trader woman again, and he seemed to grow two heads taller, the way he pumped his chest up.

“Well, it’s definitely gotta be Bisuar. Nothing else will do.”

She eyed him, too, if somehow far less skeptically than me. Maybe it was the way his clothes were better, though I didn’t understand that back then.

“Surely you’ve got some scrap you can throw in with all the stuff our inn is buying from you?” he asked, all innocently, though with something in his tone that… seemed to imply things beyond my ken.

The trader woman seemed to get what he meant, though, her arms falling down out of the crossed hold over her bosom she’d maintained so far. “Guess I can give it a look,” she replied, with that hesitation that seemed to be part of the bartering. “I won’t promise anything, though.”

“That’s alright,” Anur piped, all jolly. “We’ll just ask one of the others then.”

As if he hadn’t heard or seen me just talking to the other two already and being sent away. Although, in all truth, he actually might not have. In hindsight, though… I guess it wouldn’t have changed much if he hadn’t.
Anur was already a very good actor back then, though little did I realize it.

The demeanor of the woman, somehow, miraculously, changed as well now. “No, no. Let me have a look out back. I’m sure I can scrounge something up.”

I gave Anur a quizzical glance when she proceeded to turn back and scramble up into one of the wagons they’d all half-formed into impromptu stalls by letting down the boards on the side and back meant just for that. How the hell? I mean… she’d just said she wasn’t sure she even had any scraps. And she’d meant that. Why did she now lie about being sure she did have some? It was clear she wasn’t sure about that at all. Did she mean to take some from one of the others? I had no idea anymore what was going on. The way Anur smirked and winked at me didn’t help either.

“Just trust me,” he whispered.

Well. I guess I had to. I just hoped he wouldn’t look too closely when it was time to exchange goods… because I wasn’t buying in fish. I couldn’t.

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“What’s going on with you two?” another voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Found something interesting?”

Oh noes. My muscles clamped down instantly, making me want to duck. I normally very much appreciated my milk brother being around; Tay was a good sort, after all, but… right now I needed nothing less than him there.

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You’ve been reading an excerpt of
the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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You might wanna start here instead:

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(Or if you’d rather have an overview first: Table of Contents.)

This here is the fifth part in a series:

Chapter 2: Trader’s Coming, Pt.1

[An unexpected gift]

There was one thing that cut up the eternal sameness of our days though:

Traders’ Coming.

Or, more appropriately, already when the axe people came.
The woods people from the next village over -days away- I mean, those brave souls who had carved out a living from the fringes of the Deep Forest everyone feared. Still adjacent to the road, sure. No one was crazy enough to venture any deeper—no one but the very rare hunter at least, who sometimes ventured inside and might or might not come back after months.
We only had a single one, if the rumors were true.
That we had one at all, I mean. I’d never seen them yet.

Even the woods people had none. Though maybe that was to be expected—they were already deeper in than anyone else, living by the roadside, that dangerous stretch right through the wild country no one willingly set foot in unless you absolutely had to. Unless what you got from doing so was so vastly precious it was worth risking your neck for. Or unless they were very, very stupid.

The axe people were already more courageous than most -and maybe just a little more stupid, as our Elders would whisper behind hands covering their mouths sometimes- for coming here, braving the trip. Lucky for us, though. Everyone knew the road wasn’t safe. Less than a dirt track in places. Yet, they still came.

And a good thing that was, because they were very needed.

None of our fishing people would venture into even the fringes of the woods, further than even the mill and the old herbalist’s hut. They had no place there, no reason to be there. Even when they still needed firewood. They gathered those from the wild tree copses in the surrounding fields, before the Deep Forest ever truly started. The people here were all sensible, not mad. At least that’s what our Elders always said.

People didn’t belong in that forest, and the forest didn’t belong here, and it was all well and good that we kept well away from each other.

.

But they were still all very happy when the woods people came.

Because axe people meant they brought wood, and they also brought the charburner, and we needed them desperately, those rare few who knew how to build those little hills to make coals and could turn the fish into smoked fish much more easily than what our huts were like when the fishers tried to do it themselves, by stoking the hearth and hanging the fish along the ceiling. My parents sometimes did that, and let me tell you, it was absolute misery, choking our lungs out. At least I did. And Da also had that rasp for weeks afterwards. Though they no longer did ever since Feréll came around, because of course it was worse for the little one.

Everything was worse for my little brother, built so frail one might think he’d not been made for living, a half-thing that came out almost an afterbirth, the real child dead. But there was none other than him, and the healer had said there never would be, after that. He was the last. And he was the only one Mamma accepted as real, so… in her mind, he was her only child. I didn’t count.

I never did. Not for her, anyway. He got the songs and the cuddles, the warm blankets and the worry, and I got the nets and the coughing. If you listened to Mum, that was all fair and well, because being what I was, I should be grateful getting even that much. After all she fed me, gave me a roof above my head, a place even to sleep in, and something to do for learning a trade that might keep me later when I was grown. And that was already more than could be asked of her, because I was not hers. Only he was.

.

Traders’ coming and those days when the axe people and the charburner were here were some of the few times when that didn’t matter a lick.
’Cause that was when our Elders were too occupied to mind any of us children much. Freedom at last! Freedom, and fun, too. Because if the Elders got it, why not we?

When the axe people came, they didn’t just come to exchange wood against varying amounts of fish, depending on how good each side could haggle, and against the charburners, too, of course, who wanted their cut as well—of either—for what they offered. And they always took more than the woods people; even I knew that and learned it early. Because they guarded their secrets well, and Da grumbled a lot about how much they demanded ever since we were more dependent on them than others; because the hearth in our hut would no longer serve even sometimes now, what with Feréll, so contrary to others, we were now entirely dependent on them. He never pointed to Feréll as the cause, though. None of them did. Funny, that. They were always quick to point out when something was my mistake.

But even Da forgot about the grumbling in the evenings and around the games the axe people brought with them when they brought in the wood; days before the charburners ever came, because of course the wood had to be already there for them to set to work right away, soon as a trade had been agreed on. They never had much time to waste, the charburners, or so it seemed. The axe people, however, they were much more generous with their time. More joyous, too. Guess they were happy to be out of the dangerous woods for a while, for as long as they could get away with sticking around near our lake, hacking away at the Deep Forest’s fringes, driving it back so it never grew into the fields around, keeping us safe—and getting us all that wood in the first place.

They used the same river the mill ran on, for that purpose. Of bringing the trunks here, I mean, wholesale, sometimes with the crowns still attached, long as the wood wasn’t big enough to clog up the river. Those parts which did they had to cut away and send on by their own. But it all went in the river.

The miller’s reservoir and levees doubled as the catcher then.
I’d wondered a lot how the hell he knew when the axe people would come. It was part of why there were rumors he was a hex of some kind in the first place, ones he never managed to quell, even back then. The axe people never sent anyone ahead, you know. They just started packing the wood into the river, sending it along, when they had enough. Maybe we should’ve rather suspected the axe people of being hexes. How did they know when the miller would close his levees?

And yet our suspicions fell only ever on the miller.
He didn’t seem like someone who would bend his neck to anyone, back then, you see. And it very much seemed like magic from the fairytales and horror stories that we’d exchange—or that our village bard would occasionally tell, if we got lucky enough—how the miller always knew when the woodcutters came and closed his flood gates in time so the trunks wouldn’t leave his basin.

He opened and closed them every few days, anyway, true—but how was it that those two things went together so neatly? It wasn’t like he seemed to have a fixed schedule for it. At least, we never succeeded in working one out.

It had to be magic.

No matter that all the Olders, and Elders too, insisted magic wasn’t real and we were full of shit.

.

We tried hard, I’ll have you know.
Liked to play with the spring flood that the miller caused in the lower river when opening the flood gates for a rush to get the mill going , you see. A whole lot, too. While dipping so much as a toe into that basin was a test of courage, playing in the lower river was something we weren’t afraid of. Far enough from the miller no one would complain. Far enough to be safe that he wouldn’t catch us, too. It was not like he owned the whole river. The lower part belonged to the village.

But the flood reached it just the same when he started it, of course—perfect time to get ourselves drenched, have it crashing and rushing over us if only we noticed. Sometimes we’d get in ahead, in hopes of it coming, speculative-like. Sometimes we’d get lucky. Sometimes not. But we never just sat in there waiting for hours, anyway.

The river was a good place for play, even if our biggest water parties–and battles–all happened down in the lake, of course. The river was for jumping across and racing around, and to see who would go down with a splash—sometimes pushed by another, most always ending in the whole crowd of us drenched and wet to the bones from jumping around and swimming and dunking each other in the water.

Even if the dunking didn’t work quite as well as in the lake when we got older—when we were this young? We were small enough yet; the river was still very much more than deep enough to dunk a child. It petered out a bit, down the hill, growing wider and more shallow than above, where the miller’s big wheel was churning the water up—when it was running, that is, obviously—but it never got so shallow you couldn’t dunk a youngling who barely went up to an Older’s knee yet.

That’s what we called the ones who weren’t yet of age to be called an Elder, in case you were wondering, but not quite younglings and not even youngsters anymore either. It’s a real word.

Youngsters? Young adults, or teenagers, you would probably say. The ones between younglings like us and Olders. And we were all such younglings back then.

Anyway.
On top of that, even when there wasn’t a flood, there was still enough current in the river of its own that we could set up whole regattas of little self-made boats, scraped together from sticks and leaves and whatever else we could find. Sometimes we even had cloth scraps for sails, when one of us got especially lucky, but that was rare.

.

We stole quite a few feathers from the hens and geese down in the inn’s yard, however.

Not the live ones, no—what’re you thinking? No, no, the ones they’d dropped on the ground and in the stalls quite naturally. We’d learned rather soon not to bother the birds themselves—at least until we got old enough the birds were more bothered by us than we by them, that is. If you bother hens, they’re bound to peck your hands—and feet, too—you know?

And the geese? Oh, don’t get me started on those honking terrors.
Even as a whole group, we’d had trouble enough getting that one goose off Anur and hiding him away that one day he’d tried to grab one of its tail feathers, more so without getting bitten ourselves. And he was basically family to them, since his family owned them. Didn’t seem to bother the goose much. Had no trouble at all trying to bite his fingers off for trying, did she.

Yes dears, geese don’t just peck—they’re gonna bite you good right away, and hard enough you’ll think they mean to eat your fingers whole, bloody meat-hungry beasts. Don’t get near geese, would be my advice.
No better alarm system in the world than a mean pack of geese. Better than any dog that might be bribed into silence and even wagging its tails by a good piece of meat or other things it likes, going as far as welcoming you, if you make it a regular thing. But geese? Much better to play in the river.

There was enough to do there, more than just pretending to angle for fish—or actually doing it, since it held some small fish, too, even if the bigger carps didn’t go up that way—or wait for the flood days. It was a good place to be. There was a copse nearby, too, that we sometimes used for climbing. Tried to jump into the river from the branches hanging down closest to it, too. Got wiser when we got older and added a swing.
That made it much easier to actually succeed in that than come home with bruises as was more often the case when we were this young. Oh, we sometimes made it into the river—but it was more by rolling down the bankside we’d hit, to much laughter. Ours, too, if we’d got lucky and landed on the bigger clusters of hill grass that had big clumps of soft moss inside and went higher than our heads, cushioning some of the fall. A bit less when you hit a hidden rock pebble and worse if you almost made it and hit the reeds instead. The reeds could be bad. Like, really bad.

Could slice your skin open without problem if you hit it wrong. That one day Ferrick hit it real bad, we had to take him to the Elders to deal with the cuts. No one was laughing that day. I think Anur’s mum even brought him to Dankrun in the end?

.

Our village healer, living in a hut nearer by the woods, outside the village. Spooky, that one. None of us ever went there, not this young.
I seem to have a vague recollection of that; though mostly of waiting in the inn, all hushed-wise until we’d waited so long one of the others suggested raiding the larder and we almost forgot about Ferrick. Almost.
He came back looking like half a mummy—not that I knew what that was, back then—stinking of a bitter herbal salve and something much, much worse in there, but laughing and triumphant again already, making jokes about it. Though I noticed he very much avoided anything that could get him into the reeds again, from then on.

Oh, he still jumped with us, make no mistake. But he chose different branches and was always a little light around the nose when we did, if you looked closely, even if he didn’t act like it. And sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he had that look on his face. Hesitated a moment too long—until Anur would say something and he’d invariably rib back with something worse, all bluster again, and jump anyway. Thankfully, no one else got cut up as bad by the reeds as all that anymore.

It couldn’t hold us away from playing there, either. The place was just too enticing and full of things to explore and use for play, from small animals to try to catch and run after to the waterplays possible there.
So on the days when the flood came, we’d wait for it downstream, all standing with our backs turned, sneaking glances over our shoulders despite the game’s rules we’d made up, jostling and elbowing each other about it, all part of the fun, until we heard the roar and firmed down to let it crash over our heads, see who remained standing.
Other days, we’d bet on which ones of our self-made boats could withstand the test or drowned, putting the extra set we’d made in advance—stashed in a likely place for when the flood happened—in our places. Sometimes with a lot of jostling and sabotage, and cries going up, too. Floods were always a little chaos, but a whole big lot of fun, too. Sometimes we even made boats in a hurry, a different kind of competition: See who would finish one before the flood came, to let it race. If we caught the flood happening early enough, that is. More often, though, we simply raced premade boats, betting on whose would last the longest or go down first.

Jannai once made one with actual nails she’d pilfered from her father’s smithy, if you’ll believe it—I’ll never forget the day; I laughed so hard.

Of course it drowned right away, much to Ferrick’s jeering. It was the one day I didn’t unite with Jannai against the boys—Anur always joined Ferrick when someone else was attacking him, verbally or otherwise; no matter that they always riled each other, if you left them unattended—something I couldn’t even see as betrayal of our kinship, since it was just impossible to not see her idea of putting something as heavy as iron on water and expecting it not to sink as a little stupid and rather worthy, if not of ridicule, then at least of a little laugh. I just couldn’t help myself. I yapped along with the others when I couldn’t dissuade her from using that one for the incoming race. I had tried to dissuade her. So, I’d done my part. The rest she’d brought down on herself.

.

But I can see now how it was a rather non-sensible thought to think the miller would’ve left the levee open to get his mill smashed by incoming trunks just to get in the axe people’s faces. It would’ve been much like Jannai and her nails, right? Wouldn’t have hurt them much, now, would it? But him? Very.
Unless he could somehow make them pay for repairs and maybe emotional damages on top. He just seemed a likely enough sort to succeed in even something like that. Logically, though, there must’ve been some kind of agreement about it—or he’d surely have brought it up with our village head and made an official complaint of it, turning it into a whole quarrel; maybe one of those that might spark a family feud even.

I guess, the miller knew some roundabout time—the axe people did always come during the same seasons, come to think of it, if most certainly not always the same day; neither our calendar nor seasons were even predictable enough that way—and had one of his sons watching for the happening, like we had Tay or Anur, and sometimes Ferrick, watching for the miller opening his levees.
Come to think of it, the miller probably sent Runa—his daughter—to watch for the wood coming in on those days; since the sons were needed in the mill itself, lugging around the heavy sacks and whatnot. I didn’t know all too much about how a mill works, but I knew that much: It was heavy work. And the miller had a cane, so it goes to reason he let most of the work be done by his sons ever since they were grown enough. Just like Mamma used me, and how everyone else gave tasks to their kids, too. He was also one of those people who always went wherever they did with that slowness that speaks of gravity instead of just girth, though he had some of that. It was hard to imagine him lumbering around in the mill, carrying sacks.

Anyway. However he did it, he obviously always knew when the axe people would come before the wood crashed through the open gates and into the mill those big fat trunks could’ve easily clogged up. Or simply the sheer amount of the wood, even had they just sent the cut-off branches ahead at first.

Which they didn’t. They just jugged anything of worth into the river all ajumble. Or at least I couldn’t see any order to it. The wood seemed to come along however the river wanted, in heaps and clumps, until it clogged up the miller’s whole basin the woods people would then take it from when they finally came down to the village. When the wood dammed up so much it started accumulating up the way the river came from.

.

The miller’s basin, of course, was up on the hill, or I guess the pressure could’ve gotten too much, shredding the levee by pushing the wood against it or something. So the axe people still had to bring the wood down the hill into our village.

They had a very neat trick for that: They didn’t just take the wood out of the basin and carried it the last part. Although… I think they did with the more stubborn branches that got packed up into packages to carry after all. They mostly weren’t so lazy that the charburners set up shop on the hill, and the fishers would’ve had to roll all the barrels of fish up the hillside or carry them there in packs. They were kind enough to always bring it down. And, as I said, the charburners often trailed after them, unless they wanted to spend days waiting by coming directly with them.

The more timid ones did. Guess they didn’t wanna brave the Forest alone, even on the road. I didn’t see too much of the charburners, truth the be told; was too young back then. And didn’t see ‘em much later either, for different reasons, but we’ll get to that.
Stick with me for a bit, eh?

As I was saying, the axe people had a very nice method to bring the trunks down to us: They made games of it. Races. Rolling the trunks down the hill. Using them like sleds. Pushing them over and even tossing them.

Yes, you heard me right. The woods people were all strong, no matter their sex or gender. They tossed whole trunks. Measured how far each toss was before it slid down the hill on its own. The ones who tossed the farthest, rolled down the fastest, could stay on the trunks the longest were the ones who got prizes. Though the prize was most often that the others would buy em rounds and food in the inn.

.

It was a bit like a big festival suddenly erupting, every time.

We could never quite predict when they’d come, unless someone was fetching flour at the mill, of course, or delivering grain—though I think, the fetching and bringing was mostly done by the miller’s sons? Which was part of the whole mystery and the hex rumors—so it always seemed to happen all of a sudden, when the big cheer went up and the first trunks came down the hill with a big boohay—obviously a hill a bit outside the village; where no one had any business standing to be rolled over by a trunk. And then the first people would come running. Both hither and tither—letting the fishers know, too, so they’d row back to take part; unless they’d been especially unlucky and needed to stay out to get as much fish as they still could until the charburners would come along, which sometimes happened, though rarely.

Mostly, the whole village joined in at one point or another.

Even fishers need breaks, you see. And this was as good an excuse as any.
They’d even join the woods people in their races, to the mirth of everyone, though of course they didn’t ever try to toss the trunks. Ferrick’s and Jannai’s fathers were the only ones who ever did, to my knowledge. They were the strongmen of our village, you see, one lugging around big chunks of metal and the other doing woodwork, anyway, so it was kinda expected of him, as a kindred spirit to the woods people, if a different kind. They never managed to toss as far as any of the axe people, though. And for the longest time, their champion was a woman, too!

Had the best technique, the axe people claimed.

It’s what got up high hopes for our Jannai; the smith’s daughter, who’d taken up smithing and now got pressured into tossing stuff by our boys. Ferrick got a big laugh out of how she couldn’t toss nearly as far as the champion did, even with much lighter stuff. But really, what do you expect at the ripe age of five? She wasn’t grown yet.

I gave Ferrick a good boxing in the side for that.
He really deserved a clap on the noggin’, but I didn’t do noggins. I’d already heard some of the Elders say that wasn’t good for your head, and could make you dumb, after all. No one should be dumber than they must; and Ferrick was already acting rather dumb sometimes, in my opinion, so…

He didn’t laugh quite as much anymore when Jannai riled him into competing with her, though. He couldn’t toss half as far as Jannai—okay, maybe half, but definitely not as far as she could; I had to stick with my blood sister on that—so we all got a good laugh out of it, and he went sulking; Anur trailing him for consolation like he always did, soon bringing him back for more games—because of course the two won the racing again, which consoled Ferrick more than anything else could’ve—and watching the adults’ games once we were too spent to have more of our own. That and listening to the songs that would spontaneously break out once they’d had more drink. Sometimes the bard would join in as well, though Uhland seemed to dislike crowds. Strange thing for a bard, if you ask me, but there it was. He just was that way.

Got sensitive ears or something, my Ma would say, with that frown in her tone.
I chose rather not to listen too much when she got that way. Grumbled about dad going to the games, too, she did. I chose not to get involved in that, either. I’d much rather join my friends and have some fun. When Feréll was still very little, that had worked quite well. When Feréll was still very little, that worked quite well. She wouldn’t hand him over, anyway, so she was rather occupied and couldn’t do more than grumble, which was quite fine with me. Especially as long as Ommá could still come along, sitting herself in some quiet corner to ‘watch over the kids’—though that often meant she’d simply take a nap, away from Ma’s incessant complaints.
She’d sometimes buy us sweets or other things, though.

Something she couldn’t have done with Mamma around. Ma would’ve scolded that we couldn’t afford it. Though in reality, I’m rather sure that it was often Tay who ended up taking over the bill in quiet; that is, made his father pay. After all, it had to be good for something that he was the son of the village head, right?

And that one could sure afford a lot. He was a noble, after all. They had one of those fancy stone houses, too. We had only three houses in the village like that, and the only one that was bigger was the inn, and that one only had a stone base, the rest was wood. He also seemed to get some small cut of basically anything, so… It seemed rather fair that Tay made sure the bill for us kids was paid otherwise.

.

Though Ommá did seem to have some secret stock of coins she never told Ma about.

I know because this time, when the traders came after the whole hullabaloo going on before they ever arrived—the fish smoked in advance; for the ones they wouldn’t just take along pickled in the brine they brought with them in large vats and barrels just for that reason, most of their wagons filled with that, and not stuff to actually trade—Ommá gave me one of those big round metal things and told me to get something nice.

Insisted I take it, too, when I looked at it with big eyes, disbelieving what I found so unexpectedly in my hands even as I could feel the metal and the tiny bumps on it, from whatever was on it—some kind of face, some strange things that looked like someone had very badly tried to draw some kind of vines trailing the outer edge.

No one had ever given me a coin before.

.

Most fishers didn’t even have any. They exchanged everything in fish, you see. Though I was much too small to carry one of the big Mist’s Tears, those massive carps from our lake that went for the most. I could’ve taken some of the smaller silver fish, I guess, though I suspect the traders wouldn’t have given me a whole lot for those. They were all here after the ‘Tears of Mist’, as they preferred to call ‘em, rather poetically. Just like we dubbed our fishing grounds Mistlake, not that highborn ‘Lake of Mist’ dung, the Mist-Tears were just the Tears or sometimes even the Misties. I didn’t quite understand how the tears could be so precious you’d risk your life for it, traveling all that way through the Deep Forest, and not just from the last village, but all the way from Mistwall, the big city I’d only ever heard rumors of. Supposedly, it was bigger than ten times our village, stacked one right against the other.

That was as much as I had fingers! Can you imagine?

Well, I had trouble imagining that. Couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it.

I had seen some of the Elders exchange the occasional fish at the inn for coin, though; or the other way around, getting food and drink for coins. Seen some from Anur as well. As the innkeep’s son, he of course knew more about that than any of us—bar Tay, that is; of course, the village head’s son had also held coins in his hands before—since the inn was one of the few places were sometimes exchanges happened against coin, especially when the traders came.

So I knew what coins were. That you could trade them.
Even knew that the dull silvery ones were worth less than even the copper ones and the copper ones were less than the shiny silver ones, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of how much what I held just now was really worth. I did what I’d seen a trader do once then: Bit down on the shiny thing, experimentally. Not much, just a little. Wondering what that was all about.

.

It was surprisingly… soft. In fact, I was rather worried about it holding a tooth mark now, a very clear, spiky indentation. But Ommá just laughed. Told me that I should get back a handful of coppers, though, unless I were buying whole baskets of sweets to feed all my friends for days.

I gave her an even more puzzled look at that.

If we had that kind of money at home, why was Ma always worried about not making ends meet? Why was my belly sometimes growling because she let me have too little? I had never complained about it, seeing how Ma was always going on about how we needed the fish for trade as much as we could, and I had to be grateful for what I did get. I’d never once told Ommá about the grumbles in my belly. They seemed shameful, after all. Ma’s portions didn’t look all that bigger, and she was bigger than me, and hers didn’t grumble. I wondered now, if I should have. Told Ommá, that is.

“But–“ I started.

She shushed me with a finger on her lips. “No, Lill.”

She always made a play of ‘little’ on my name. I liked that far more than being called by the full name Ma had assigned me. Liliana always held that scolding undertone, you see. “Just don’t show her.”

Then she proceeded to pat my head. “Got more where that came from, you see.”

“But–“ I tried again.

Why was she giving this to me? Why now? Why the hell hadn’t she used it to get a cure for Feréll then? Surely there was one? Surely if we’d paid the healer enough, she wouldn’t have insisted on giving him that badly costly stuff which he had to take too much of, according to Ma? At least Ma was always going on about how Dankrun wouldn’t do enough to actually cure Feréll. How, surely, she was keeping him sick on purpose, so she could get more out of it. So, if she wanted more out of it—we could’ve just given her more, if we had that, right?

But Ommá just shook her head.
“No, Lill. Don’t tell. Don’t show. This is yours. I won’t always be there.”

Was something wrong with it? It did look the wrong color to me… Was Ommá making her own coin somehow? Hoping the traders would accept it anyway? She had that sad look in her eyes that made me shush, though, no matter the questions ghosting around in my head. But she also winked at me, a twinkle in her eyes, trying to cover it with a smile, telling me: “Traders got some really nice things this time, I heard.”

.

I didn’t even ask where the hell she was supposed to have heard that, before they ever got here. This was one of the things Elders said that didn’t mean quite what they said. That were said for other reasons, even though I often couldn’t guess right. This time, though… I thought I knew why. And I could feel it, too. Had felt it for quite some time now. She didn’t have all that long before she needed to leave. I knew that.

It still didn’t sit right that she’d give that to me. But I guess if she had more… she was just making sure I got my cut; would give the rest to Da and Ma, right? Tell ‘em to keep some for Feréll. Maybe use it to finally cure him. I hoped they’d do that. Surely they would? Mamma was going on a lot about Feréll’s sickness. And she loved him dearly. Surely, she would rather have him healthy, so we’d have one more pair of hands than use it for something else? And here I was. Being told to use that for something… that was all frills. Ma could go on about those for hours.
I still hadn’t found out what ‘frills’ actually were. Somehow all the things she deemed bad and stupid or… things that were too costly.

It didn’t feel right.

So, I closed my hand tightly on it, even if I didn’t know what to do with it.
I’d need some kind of bag, that much I knew. Something to hold it in where I couldn’t lose it. I was too good at losing stuff.

.

Me losing some of the shiny, sparkly, glittering, and colored stones I liked to collect was how Jannai had come up with our little tradition: Leaving stuff for others in “secret spots”. The very same one Ferrick and Anur now wrongfully claimed as their own invention. But it was us, me and Jannai, who did it first, just so you know.

Secret spots were… sometimes simply where someone could find them.
They were meant to be found, after all. But Jannai sometimes actually stashed them so well no one would ever find it, even searching for hours. Then again, she also sometimes had hiding places that were no good at all. She seemed to be a person of extremes, that way. I’d spotted the one where she’d made the world’s tiniest stone cairn from three pebbles almost instantly. The feather she’d stuck in there had also been visibly sticking out in parts. Would’ve looked rather sorry after the rain, I’d wager. So now my secret stash under the bed had another addition.

Maybe I should stuff the coin in there.

No one but me and Feréll were still small enough to get under there, anyway. Though sometimes the speed of his growth made me think he’d end up being unable to go there before I ever did.

.

None of which made this any easier. He could still go there. And he was a toddler who wouldn’t be able to tell this from a random stone, either. He could take it somewhere else and lose it in the mud. No, I needed some better place. Some place I would find again, but no one else. Bollocks. Nothing came to mind right now. I needed a bag. Something small, something I could wear around my neck maybe, but sturdy enough to not rip and not get ripped off, no matter what we did in our adventures and plays; not in water, not in the trees, and not by anything that might make Ma find it either.

Was this enough to make Dankrun heal my little brother?

Probably not. It almost made me want to find Ommá’s stash, seeing how she said there was more. But I knew that wouldn’t be right either. Even if Feréll badly needed more health, I couldn’t make Ommá part with something she herself might need.

Ommá badly needed more health, too, you see.

Before I had made up my mind to try and ask her again, she’d gone to sleep, her hand flopping away from my head, and I could hear her snoring. No surprise there, when I looked back up and her mouth was open, her head dropped back to the neighboring hut’s wood where she sat on one of the trunks that were currently everywhere still, people not yet having cut them up or decided what to make of them.

There was no getting anything out of her now.

Bag. Don’t lose it. Don’t fucking lose, it Lill. Don’t lose it. Don’t open that fist for anything until you can stuff it in a good bag with a good thong around your head. Leather.

I’d need leather. Some of the good stuff. The one that always cost too much, even for just the soles of our shoes, not the whole shoe. Never the whole shoe.
I still had the same old pair. It had just gotten widened again and again by Ma’s tireless hands, stitching more cloth to it. The leather hadn’t given yet. Not in five years. That was the kind I’d need.

The rest of this afternoon was agony, with my fist cramped up like that. Even Jannai was starting to give me strange looks by the end of it, especially since I wouldn’t answer any questions about what I was keeping there. Even during the mud flinging, I didn’t open it. Couldn’t. Not even if it meant more of Ferrick’s clods hitting me, and that I could throw back less—and less well, too—than usually. Can’t lose it. Can’t lose it.

***

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You’ve been reading an excerpt of
the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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You might wanna start here instead:

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(Or if you’d rather have an overview first: Table of Contents.)

This here is the fourth part in a series:

Chapter 1: Stories from inside the Mist

[Stories of Mist]

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***

Mist’s Ford –in its original size back then– was a rather placid village of about three hundred souls, give or take. Or, depending on who you asked, a little townlet; despite malicious gossip claiming that the true number of its inhabitants was likely closer to only two hundred. Lying to the left side of the Mountains of Mist –a mountain range also called Mistwall– and surrounded by deep, green forest and lush meadows. A committed community, not yet overly big, where everybody still knew anybody—and where your neighbors knew things about you which you most certainly wouldn’t want them to know.

Hillbillies and ridge runners, people from the larger towns and cities would probably have called them. Despite how Mist’s Ford wasn’t even the smallest backwater, least of all in this region. Then again, opinions about such things are always a matter of heated debate. One likes the big, bustling city—the other swears by their small, but infinitely more peaceful village.

The people of Mist’s Ford, in any case, were proud of their little hometown and their tight-knit community. A real community, they would have retorted.

Even if one couldn’t always recount the whole life story of every single inhabitant and sometimes forgot a name or two. A snug little spot to call home, which by now had all the essentials one could wish for. Even two manors could be pointed out all casually, and proud as a peacock, to any strangers.

One was occupied by the village head—of noble, ancient lineage, as any long-time inhabitant of Mist’s Ford would declare, chin held high and eyes gleaming with pride. And yet of a very friendly, almost companionable manner at that. Warmun was more village patriarch than strict warden. Meaning one didn‘t exactly notice the nobility in everyday life, which made for much better quality of living. ‘One of us’, that Mist Forder would likely have thought at that, a joyful sparkle to their eyes, whenever they saw him walking past; someone to acknowledge with a polite tilt of the head.

The other, bigger house was that of an older couple, one that lived rather secluded—as strange as that may sound for someone whose house prominently occupied a place halfway down the village center.

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However… there were a few discrepancies.

Things that just didn’t add up.

And by that I don’t mean that the latter two kept to themselves so much that people had started rumor-mongering after all and hawked about all kinds of speculations because nobody really knew who or what they were or had been. Or that any closer look would yield a strange eye as the motif central to their richly decorated front door: old, good wood covered in all kinds of intricately carved symbols.

A central motif that more than allowed speculation that the both of them were religious. Followers of Set. Snake believers. Prayed to some eye that was somehow supposed to be a snake as well; and a god, too. What a load of nonsense.
Any true and established Orilian might happily leave others to their private beliefs, but they themselves weren’t religious. Which painted the two as the outsiders they were: likely some foreign merchant and his wife, who had settled here to enjoy their golden years of retirement. Which fit especially well since no one in the whole village ever saw them do any real work. Sure, the man sometimes went away and came back with a sack full of books. Which was probably the source of the assumption that he was a trader. Yet I never saw him sell so much as even one of the books. As for what he supposedly offered in exchange for them? No one knew.

.

But the kind of discrepancies I mean, those were found elsewhere.

For one, the very name was misleading.

Mist’s Ford was not, as a stranger might assume, situated by a river, stretching across a ford on both sides as would be the normal case for any village of that type of name. No, it was sitting right on the edge of a vast lake. There was indeed a tributary feeding the lake on our side, true—but it was barely more than a brook, just enough to power the single mill that had stood there for a while by now, much to the village’s pride. And inferring the origins of the village via its layout would lead you to the conclusion that it had grown outward from the banks of the lake towards this stream, not the other way around. Mist Forders, in any case, attributed the name of their residence back to the lake: The so-called Lake of Mist.

That at least deserved its name well. From spring to winter, the whole winter through, and each day and every night, veils of mist drifted over its surface.

The very mist that had made it famous far beyond its shores and inspired a handful of haunting folk ballads, being at least occasionally sung, and sometimes even performed, across the whole of Oril since decades, if not centuries. Though when it came to more practical endeavors, few could’ve pinpointed the lake’s actual location.

Growing ever more dense and opaque, the mist grew thicker the further out one rowed on the lake, until it eventually resembled an impenetrable wall. It was so thick that no one who hadn’t circumnavigated the lake had ever seen the opposite shore. And that, likely none of the villagers had ever done.

And to be honest? No one even knew any outsider who’d ever done that. There certainly weren’t any reports about it that had ever reached any of the villagers’ ears. And surely, you’d think they would have heard something like that, wouldn’t you?

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No, the villagers had better things to do than run around the lake’s shores for days.
With a lake that size, it could’ve easily taken weeks to reach the other side.

But there were fish traps to lay out and check, to haul in and sometimes even to patch up when needed. Likewise, the nets needed maintenance that took up even more precious hours of daylight. As for the occasional truly big catch—once you’d caught enough of the day’s more usual haul—there was the carefully well-kept fishing rod, likely handed down by old Gran. After that, someone had to clean and gut all those fish; and prepare them for storage or transport to the nearest market as well. Which usually meant the one of the closest true city—Mistwall, sharing its name with the nearby mountain range; a journey of several days’ travel to the northeast. Around two full weeks, actually. Through the forest...

Most folks, therefore, tried to sell directly whenever possible.
Which meant the village inn—the second, far older-established institution after the mill and by far the more respected—if they had capacity for buying, or, as the last option: when the lumberjacks or farmers from the next two villages came by to trade.

Now that was a real treat, let me tell you!
On those days, the whole village would be abuzz as if it were a festival.

Some especially daring people would even venture there themselves; to the next village, where the loggers lived in the woods.

Or what went for ‘in the woods’ among us fishers. The woods people, as we called them, would likely have roared with laughter at the idea.

However, anyone who wanted to sell their haul before anyone else this way had to go the extra mile of preserving the entire haul of fish on their own. Yet hardly anyone had a smokehouse for that purpose. Or even just a suitable attic—which meant smoke filling the whole hut, everywhere and unbearably thick. Assuming you had enough spare wood to begin with.

The vast majority, thus, had no choice but to wait for the charcoal burner, who always accompanied the woods people and farmers for this very reason. Or else pay the owner of a smokehouse for the privilege. Around here, that meant giving a cut—to be paid by either the buyers or the sellers of the fish, depending on each individual negotiation—and in accordingly different currency.

In rarer cases, a merchant might brave the long—and quite dangerous—route through the deep forests to reach Mist’s Ford, intent on collecting a whole wagonload of fish; but also to drop off goods to the village head, the blacksmith, and the inn, ensuring the wagon was fully emptied before loading it back up.

Though, more often than not, it wasn’t all that full by the time they arrived.
I suppose if you’re going to such lengths for a trip, you might as well conduct business along the way. And since we were the last hearth on that route not only figuratively, but literally… Those merchants were usually already stripped pretty bare by the time they reached us, other than whatever goods had been ordered in advance for the express purpose of getting delivered to us and no one else.

Even though the wagon never looked like it at first glance; since one thing the merchant always carted along in abundance on the wagon, making it full of barrels: brine.

For the fish they intended to take back, of course, not for us.
Thus, except for the brine, all those barrels were usually quite empty. The goods the merchants sold or traded in Mist’s Ford, in exchange for all the fish, mostly came in a few crates and smaller boxes concealed by the barrels.

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Nevertheless, such a day was an especially joyous cause for celebration, almost a holiday—at least for us children.

After all, merchants came even more rarely than the woods people.

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You’ve been reading an excerpt of
the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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You might wanna start here instead:

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(Or if you’d rather have an overview first: Table of Contents.)

This here is the third part in a series:

Prologue: Light’s Feast - Pt.3

[Memento]

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”… you can’t seriously demand that…”

“… this THING! I want it to …”

“How you can even … …a child. Our child! ….an’t possibly…”

“… and what about ME?! You’re such a …“

„…, please! Please knock it off, already, you …“

“I HATE …”

“This is crazy! Can you even hear yourself!? How crazy you…”

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***

They’re arguing again. Deafeningly. I’m scared they’re gonna wake Feréll.

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Feréll is my little brother. He’s all new. Didn’t think I would ever get one, but he’s really here. A real proper little brother, just for me! Oh, I love him. He’s so tiny. Like a doll. And just as fragile. But he’s pretty. Like a ray of light through leaves. Or one of Ommá’s fire salamanders. The ones I can sometimes find when they’re sun-bathing. But only rarely. Not like normal lizards. Fire salamanders are rare.

My brother is just as rare. I need to take good care of him. He needs his rest. He’s still very tired from coming into this world.

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Strictly speaking, it should be Ommá watching him. But Ommá is snoring.
Wish she would wake up. Ommá always makes all that super-loud fighting go away. You would think all the noisy racket would wake her up.

But Ommá is very, very tired.
Ever since I know her, she’s tired. And it’s only becoming more. Her bones hurt, she says. And:

“My eyes are not as good as they once were, dearie.”

But she can hear just fine.
When she’s awake, I can whisper with her, about everything I want to know. If Ommá knows it, she will tell me. Mamma gets upset about it either way, no matter if we whisper or talk loudly. But Ommá likes to have me close.

Maybe it’s because of her bad eyes?

The people everyone else says are my elders —what are elders even? I don’t understand the difference; the others are all olders as well, so what is going on there?— would rather have me far, far away; at least that is what it seems like sometimes, to me. Honestly… many times. I don’t know if that’s my fault or because they feel about each other in a way that… makes no one else fit in there at all, like, not anyone else, no matter who.

Not even for my dear Ommá—despite how she’s getting ever more tired and won’t be able to stay for long anymore. That fact is clear to me even back then. Even when I can’t say how I know that. I do know that she will have to go. And that it won’t be long now.
But my elders don’t seem to notice that. They even forget her medicine.

.

I never forget her medicine.

Ommá always pets my hair then and praises me when I bring her the agarit; dug out the root and scrubbed it clean, so she can cut it into super-fine pieces.
But sometimes her hands are shaking so much that she’s gotta put away the knife. Then she jokes: “My blood is really wild today,” and laughs.

—Her heart, she means. Her heart is pumping too hard and not doing what it should.—

Ommá’s laughter is beautiful. It could be bitter, but it is very, very friendly.
Ommá always makes the best of everything. I hope I will learn that someday.
But the knife, that she puts away, when that happens.

Then I take the knife.

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Tay says his father says that I am way too small for someone to give me a knife.
But I only laugh when Tay says that. Who else is supposed to do it? Mamma and Da certainly won’t. They are busy fighting. And busy with everything else. Although I sometimes don’t quite know what ‘everything else’ even is.

And then I get ashamed because Tay doesn’t deserve to be laughed at.

Tay is my best friend.
The neighbors always claim we are “like siblings—because they are”. Milk siblings, is what they mean. Because if Tay’s father has the right of it, he is two years older than I am. And of course he has different elders. But our amma, our wet nurse, is—was—the same. Therefore, Tay has about carried me around as much as I do Feréll.

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I think Tay is happy about having company.

He sometimes seems very lonely, without me. His mother’s said to have died during his birth, the neighbors claim. But they always say it in a very odd way, when they do. Mine simply had no milk.
I sometimes wish it were the other way around. I think it would be better for Tay. Tay’s Da is… there’s a reason why he is “father” for Tay and not Da. I think Tay’s Mamma didn’t die fast. And somehow Tay’s Da is angry at him because of it. There’s a lot of times he doesn’t want Tay around.
In truth, most of them.

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Just as little as Mamma and Da do with me. So that seems to be normal.
Maybe I should call my Da “father” as well… but somehow he only gets all the more angry when I do. Olders are all strange.

Tay’s father, for example, seems to be just as angry at himself as with Tay; maybe even more so. —How do I even know that?—
I don’t understand why. Maybe because there is no Mamma he could be angry with? My elders are much angrier with one another, I think. Well. That, and with me. At least I understand that much. Even though I don’t always understand why.

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Unless it’s about knotting the nets.
When it comes to that, I know what the matter is. At least by and large. Somehow dad doesn’t like what I’m doing, is what’s going on. I think? It’s probably because I’m doing so much wrong. Even though my fingers fit a lot better because they’re small. Da thinks that’s Mamma’s job.

But Mamma…

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Mother has no time for that.

I don’t know why. I mean, cooking doesn’t take that long? Maybe she should let me cook. Maybe we would both be happier then.

But she insists I do the knotting; the whole time. When she does, she always says stuff like “at least the brat is well in hands there” or “at least the little monster is making itself useful then”. But afterwards she’s only scolding me anyway. Sometimes even during. Yet another thing I don’t quite understand.

But hey—I understand very little anyway. I mean, I can hear their words, those of my elders… but they might as well be talking in a different language.

.

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“… only three. You cannot seriously…”

“The little monster is anything but…”

“…ou must be deranged! Seriously, what is wrong wi…”

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DONG.
Something is clanking and banging so loudly it drowns out even their screaming voices. Probably mother throwing something in father’s direction.

She seems to like doing that back then…

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They’re talking about… my age? And… I don’t know.

Something that Mamma should forget because she’s only imagined it.
And dad claims she’s an “old spinster”. But Mamma can’t spin at all. That’s what the neighbors do, those who have spindles, and the one who has a spinning wheel and even a loom. She hasn’t ranged anywhere either, not since a long time.

There’s just as much fog in my head as there is outside our door, on the water. A whole lake of mist as far as anyone can see.

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Except on the village side, of course. There’s the village, and behind it, the woods. Our cottage is right on the shoreline. Mamma and Da are fishers, you see. Well, Da, first and foremost. Mamma cooks and… sweeps the floor sometimes? I don’t know if she helped with the fishing in the past, before me. I guess she must’ve.

But these days, everything is different. She should be looking after Ommá, I think. But Ommá and her only end up arguing as well.

That is, Mamma argues with Ommá, mainly.
Ommá mostly just suffers through it and then looks sad. But I know that she’s mighty angry with Mamma inside. She just doesn’t say it.
Unless she finds Mamma scolding me—then she takes me behind her skirts and gives Mamma whole lectures, so Mamma is shrinking until she seems stooped.

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—Maybe that’s why mother doesn’t like me.
After all, who likes being small and getting yelled at?—

Besides, Ommá never sings anything for Mamma, like she does for me. She also doesn’t read anything to her. And she doesn’t take her into her arms.
Maybe she should do that for once.
At least I believe, Mamma is somehow jealous of me. Because Ommá, when she’s awake at all, is only ever doing all those things with me. And not with her.

But then, why is she so mean to Ommá?
I bet if she were nicer, Ommá would read her a story, too.
But Mamma rather screams all day, at anyone and everyone, if she gets the chance. And “rants and raves, the whole blessed day long”.

Like she does now.

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I don’t understand why. Not… what do you call it when you mean the whole time? Always. And also, not right now.
I probably don’t have the words to understand it.

—I am always lacking words back then.—

For finding out what I want, too, even just inside my own head.
I have all these feelings and don’t know how to let them out.
Or what else I am supposed to do with them.

I only know that I am simply still too small. I need to grow a lot yet, if I’m to understand more. Even more for being able to do anything.

I only know that Da is mad and Mamma, too, like almost always.

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Both at each other, and somehow at me as well. Somehow because of me.
What did I do wrong this time? But I did the nets today until my fingers hurt!
And then some.

In the end, there was this strange red stuff coming out. That was funny. A bit at least.
It’s a really pretty red, too. I tried painting my dress with it.
Well, that got Mamma into a rant! Probably because I forgot about the nets because of it… Are they still arguing about that?

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I’m a wicked child and a bad person, that’s for sure.

I even made Tay angry lately—and Tay is the nicest person I know.
Besides Ommá, of course. But Ommá’s not the like the others, you see.

Anyhow, Tay is a little lamb. At least that’s what Ommá thinks. Just like me, she says. But then she looks at me and starts laughing. And patting my head. It’s a laughter that says she doesn’t truly mean that. Cannot mean it. Because I’m way too different from a little lamb, so much so that the comparison turns too funny by half. For Tay, it still works. At least that’s how Ommá sees it; the way she looks when she says it.

But I still got Tay angry.

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All I did was try and comfort him.
Told him he “need not fret”.

—That’s a word I learned from Ommá; I was really proud of it, too,
of having remembered the word correctly;
but it was no use anyway—

Because he’s got no Mamma, you see, and because his da doesn’t expect much of him. I put my arm around him and told him:

“You know, it’s better that way”.

Because it is.

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But all Tay did was laugh. One of those short, mean laughs that aren’t real laughs at all. —As bitter as Ommá should be, but isn’t at all.—

And then he said:

“Count yourself lucky you have Elders.”

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So I tried telling him what Olders who are actually there are like.

That they argue the whole time and scold you and want you to keep doing things the whole day long that are horribly boring and most of all want you to not be in the way of their feet. That he’s lucky to have that much time just to himself.

Tay can go and search for salamanders whenever he wants to—and look at them for however long he wants, too. I always get jerked away and scolded, if I do that. Even by da. If da has an especially bad mood or has been arguing a lot with Mamma again, then you’ll even get a knuckle sandwich. Real proper ones, too.
The really whistling ones, I mean. That’s why they’re called whistlers over here. Because they whistle if you do it right.

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But Tay didn’t wanna hear a single word of all that.

Instead, he screamed. Really at the top of his lungs and from the bottom of his heart. Not with words; but him I understood anyway. Not like Mamma and da with all their many words that I never understand.

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“You should be happy,” is what his voice screamed.

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And if Tay says something like that, then it’s gotta be true.

Seems it truly is normal that Elders are like that.
And somehow you are supposed to be happy about that.

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I don’t know how everyone else manages that.
I’m trying. I really am. I never said anything about it to Tay ever again. He is older than me and he is Tay. He knows better. Ever since, I’m holding my trap like they all want me to. And try to get my lips to form that stupid smile they all want; even when I don’t feel like smiling at all. But it hurts.
It feels like a scoop of glacier ice in my belly. An icicle that’s striking roots throughout my whole body; just as quickly as the small snakes in the Lake of Mist dart off if they get scared. A glaring pain in my ears, more piercing than even Mamma’s screaming. Similar to how my ears hurt when the both of them scream like they’re doing now.

I don’t know how the others all do that. Does it not hurt when they do it?
Mamma’s probably right and I’m just the sensitive plant she says I am. Good for nothing. Can’t even do the simplest things, much less do them right.

But everyone else seems to get it quite right! Just not me.
It even seems to be easy for them.
Just not for me.

The others are all stronger.
Even Feréll, that little worm, can do it better than me.

If someone is leaning over the cradle, looking in, anyone, then he’s beaming; a smile so wide you start to fear his face will soon rip in two. No matter who it is.
He even does it for Mother.

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At first, I was a bit jealous because of that.
Blockhead that I am, I thought he is doing that only for me.

Until I saw how he did it for her, too.

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What’s more, she’s scolding him, too, if he cries when things get too loud in our hut. Or if he’s hungry. Or needs to wee-wee. Or… worse.

And he still smiles. No biggie. He can do it alright.

I don’t know how Feréll does it, but sometimes… sometimes she even laughs when he burps some of the milk onto her chest.
She would never do that with me, of that I’m sure. Certainly never did. Much less if I were to fart at her—while she’s pressing her nose right up to the little worm and nudging his nose with hers. I cannot even imagine she ever did that with me.

But around him, she only laughs.

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I wish I could do what Feréll can. If I could make her laugh, it would be way easier to hold my trap and always pull my lips wide and rounded.

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But when I bring her flowers, she scolds that I wasted time.

When I try to help her with the cooking, she’s shooing me out, “keep your grubby little fingers off my things, you only do everything wrong anyway”.

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It doesn’t matter how hard I try; I will never be like the others.

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I’m not as strong as they are. I’m not as smart as they are. Or as witty or pretty or…

… or whatever it is that Mother likes about the others and thinks is good and pretty and right about them. And horrible and wrong and dumb about me.

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I can’t please anyone anyway.
So why should I even try any longer?

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I tried to break up the fight, like Ommá does. Instead, I got whistlers, from both of them. Got told I should “stay out of matters belonging to adults”. All I wanted was to remind them that we did not make the damn candle boats yet.
Feréll is supposed to get his first candle today! Today is Light’s Feast; did they entirely forget about all that?

Okay, alright… and maybe ask about the stories…

All the others are allowed to go to the storyteller on the day of Light’s Feast.
And I want to take Feréll with me; he just learned to walk. That means he’s old enough to listen to stories. I mean, surely I can go and watch him there then?

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Someone has to. And Ommá is sleeping.
She’s sleeping the whole day already.

—I believe it won’t be long now until she doesn’t wake up aymore.—

And these two will not even notice when it happens.

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Great.
Now I feel like crying again.

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But who’s gonna make the damn boats for the candle then? Dumb, oversensitive me.

Why do I still hear Mamma?

And not even in my ears. Seems Mamma can even talk inside heads.
I wish I could just not listen, like all the other times.
But I don’t know how to close a head.

Ears at least work.

Candles and boats.

Candles and boats.

Candles and boats.

Candles and boats!

Concentrate!

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All children get a candle come Light’s Feast. Our trader is giving them away, just this once. He never gives anything away for free.

But the little flower boats, those we need to make on our own. —Boats because they will carry the candles. Flowers because people fold them to look like flowers.— Normally, that’s something the Elders do. But ours seem to have forgotten all about it. Again.

I can’t remember them ever doing it, in truth. I always got my boats from Ommá.

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But I don’t wanna wake Ommá when she’s this tired.
I don’t even know if that would work at all.

Somehow I thought Mamma would make Feréll’s boat. I mean, what with her being all happy with him, if she makes time for him, that is.
But right now, she even forgot Feréll again.

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Who’s laying on our bed and cooing. Woke after all by now, did he.
He’s not crying—yet. But he’ll soon start if no one goes to look after him. I’m scared to go outside again and ask if we can go to Uhland. My cheeks still burn. All four of them. I hate having to feel this body like this. It feels just as wrong as everything else.

So I rub my hurting behind all stealthily and look over at Feréll.

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“Guess it’s just us then, eh dear baby brother?”

—Well. At least that’s what I wanted to say.—

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The words don’t come out right, once again, like they do so often. Shitty words. They’re as hard to make as if my throat weren’t made for that.

Throat is a word of Uhland’s.

That one was real easy to memorize. It’s from the story where he talks about the throat cutter, you see. How is anyone supposed to not remember that? Not even I am that dumb. —Fear is a good teacher.— I have no idea where I got that quote from.
But Elders seem to absolutely believe in that.

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Maybe they’re even right about it.
I know exactly what I’m supposed to do, and what not to do.

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This here, for example? That’s a what not to do.

But I don’t care. They can go where the sun don’t shine, for all I care. They won’t notice anyway; as much as they forget themselves as well as anything else in their nuts and bonkers, much-too-loud bickering.

And I can already see Feréll doing that face. The one he makes just before he starts screaming. If Feréll starts blaring now, then the best I can expect is them coming in and starting to scold me about what I did this time to make him scream.

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So what I’m doing is to quickly cross over to Feréll with a few big steps, as big as I can make them. And I can make pretty big ones if I have to. Especially if no one’s looking. No one but the great Patpat in our hut.
The one that always has me wondering how the hell no one but me and Ommá can see it—and even more how they even manage to get past it.

But I think they might not actually have to.
Namely, ‘cause I know it can just go through the wall.

As it does right now, when I swoop for Feréll. —I lift him up like Ommá always does, of course.— Caress his little head to get his attention, stretch out my arms so he knows what’s coming. Lift him up carefully. Prop up his head before I climb through the window. And talk to him all calm and quiet like all the while.

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“Mamma and da are still a bit busy. But today is Light’s Feast, Feréll.
That’s when all the children are allowed to go to the storyteller. Even the little ones.”

—That’s the feeling I try to get across, anyway.—

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And it’s not a lie either.

Everyone else is allowed to go there. On other days, Uhland often shoos the little ones like us away, at least after a while. But not on Light’s Feast.

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“Would you like to hear some stories, hm?”

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Whatever leaves my mouth is a lot more mumbly. I still have problems to form the thrice-darned words. The same words all the others manage to do just right long since.

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But, oh well. Feréll heard me anyway. He understands.

At least the most important part:

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You’ve been reading a part of
the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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Book 1: Origin

• Prologue & Part 1 [Chapters 0-10]

• Part 2 [Chapters 11-24] (upcoming)

• Part 3 [Chapters 25-34] (upcoming)

• Part 4 [Chapters 35-47] (upcoming)

• Part 5 & Epilogue [Chapters 48-55] (upcoming)

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Book 2: Slow Dread (upcoming)

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Author’s Note

Ways to subscribe and support

What follows is the prettier “in-world” version ;)

Welcome, fellow Ravens.

For your ease of use, here is an overview of content available at your rank that Ravens before you have collected. As of now, your access is limited — you are still in training after all, not yet the Raven. Your access will be updated as you progress along in your training and unlock additional content.

You know how this goes: Progress, access, new perks.

( Unless you fail and drop off the wagon, of course. I do not recommend that. Falls hurt. But that’s your choice to make, not mine. I just advise: Better come prepped, either way. )

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[ Für die deutsche Version bitte hier klicken:
// For the German version please click here:
—> Klick mich, ich bin ein Schmetterling (Link zur Übersicht). ]

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Book 1: “Origin”

“Origin”

... is a story of childhood trauma and found family.

The slow beginning of a saga that will eventually spread out across a multinational tableau, uncover hidden mysteries and ancient conflicts hidden in the shadows of the world and reach a potentially world-shattering conclusion.

But here… here we begin small, with the mysteries of childhood and and a world that may be shattering, but only in the personal sense. The first step on a long, long path. Encountering the first few people that might become much more later on—or just sink forgotten into the sands of time, their spotlight winking out, mere nostalgia. Some will stay. Some won’t. Just like they always do.

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So tell me—which is which? Can you guess already?

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( Yes, we’re starting with the easy questions here. This is, after all, an introduction, let’s not forget. Now don’t try to be the class clown about it and keep your wits about you and senses wide, this is only the first run of many. We’ll see how many of you have their metaphorical third eye wide open, or not. Or maybe I’m just lying to you and testing the new recruits. Take your best guess and remember:

Keep your eyes open and always step lightly in the shadows.
They might just come alive around you. )

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LIST OF CHAPTERS

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Free tip: Be careful of your own mind’s tricks even more than anyone else’s. Other people’s tricks you can unveil and unravel. Your own blind spots? Not quite as easy to step around.

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Prologue: “Light’s Feast”

• Pt.1/3: Memory

• Pt.2/3: Resistance

• Pt.3/3: Memento

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Here’s a real easy one for you if you paid any attention in your history class or on the streets:
Who said that?

Bonus question for our specialists: How trustworthy would you rank that person?
One could write whole essays about that one.

Do NOT hand me an essay.

I swear, I’ll let you fail just for that if anyone else starts handing in essays. I’ve burnt the last one—you don’t wanna go there and find out what else I’m willing to do. Read enough personal musings for whole lifetimes, and the worst thing is I still have to as long as none of you are there yet. I do not need your drivel on top of it all; your actions will tell me more than enough. This is for your mind’s exercise, not mine.
I know exactly what my answer is to that. This will be yours. So be as thorough as you hope your time of life to be long, and keep it close. Always keep it close.

Silence is the most valuable resource you’ll ever have.

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Chapter 1: Stories from inside the Mist

• Pt.1/1: Stories of Mist

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Chapter 2: Traders’ Coming

• Pt.1/2: An unexpected gift

• Pt. 2/3: Negotiations

• Pt. 3/3: Friends will be friends [upcoming]

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Chapter 3: The Black Tower

• [upcoming]

  .

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  [New parts are planned to come out each weekend]

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Book 2: “Slow Dread”

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In which the story will start to increase its pace a little and our dear apprentice is falling headlong into an international plot no one had been planning for. Or rather, none of the kids. Because let’s face it: They may be 30 years of age, but in the face of history, that is just about nothing, a generation a mere blink. They think themselves heroes already. I assure you, they are not. Thus, I am naming this:

A cautionary tale.

( Remember: Do NOT count on luck. Because if that’s all you have, you’ll be fucked soon enough. And no, I don’t mean that way. Well, maybe. But no one says it’ll be a good one.
Spoiler alert: It most likely won’t. Not if you’re going at it like this. Because:

Luck always runs out.

And in most cases, it does so just in the nick of time to bite you in the ass. Thus, a proper agent has simple plans and a hell of a lot of contingencies and fallbacks. )

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[ Jokes and personas aside: ]

This is a romantic fantasy series steeped deeply in trauma awareness/healing, neurodiversity, and queerness (or just general weirdness, if you like that better =P). The planned scope is about 10+ books with ~ 300-500k words per book. You’re in for the long haul here. This overview gets updated as the story drops go public.

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The first book will be free forever
as long as I have any say about it.

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The rest of the series will work a little differently. But don’t concern yourself with that yet, we’re far from there yet. And Book 1 is very much readable standalone.

I am currently editing Book 2 & working on Book 3 while translating Book 1 for you.

The story in its broad strokes has been outlined all the way to the end already, so don’t fret about this being yet another WiP that just runs out before it’s finished—unless I end up dying in some horrible freak accident.

And that is rather unlikely since I am an AuDHD writer mainly stuck at home and I don’t do those kinds of DIY (mine are all art projects (#) and some plants that keep dying on me despite my best intentions because I somehow seem to be the Lord of Flies in real life—only I don’t command them at all, they just annoy me to no end, forever drawn to eat up my precious lovelies, be they be damned! (the flies, not the plants…obviously)) despite my propensity for small-time accidents, collecting bruises of unknown origin, and the occasional run-in with the neighbor’s crazy cat (I’m inoculated, so don’t worry; as long as it doesn’t acquire actual rabies, not the metaphorical ones, I am safe from anything worse but a few small scratches or bites). I’ll also have you know that I am an excellent stumbler.

As my gran used to say:

“Once you mastered stumbling, you’ll never truly fall.”

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In that sense:

Cheerio and have fun with the series. If you find some eye-openers along the way, I’m very happy to have been of service.

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Yours truly,

your forever fan Luciel

(not really the Raven, only playing at it, because it’s damned fuuuun—for me, anyway)

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(#) My kind of DIY is stuff like these pieces, for example—stone work, moss aggregates, short-lived mini-sculptures from plants scrounged in the nearby forest, mini-creatures made of marzipan, 3D modeling and texturing, drawings and colored pictures on a tablet or on walls with paint from DIY markets, nothing to die from (unless you think the color explosion is killing you, but I don’t think that counts) :

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Cover Art disclaimer for Book 1:

My own art was the basis for the current (hopefully placeholder) Cover Art for book 1. That being said, there are literally hundreds of AI’s attempts to turn my own work into what I actually wanted according to my prompt & make it what it is at the moment.

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( I made a longer sidenote article explaining the why and how did it come to this, but basically it comes down to two things:
1) I suck at drawing/painting people.
2) I am currently sadly not in any situation to pay someone.
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No, I could not find anything else that satisfied my AuDHD brain (which had/has a very clear image for this specific character in mind) — and that’s with a deep dive done over a year and literally days or even weeks of accummulated real-time hours that went into searching any free databanks I could find.

I always try my best to use ANYTHING else, use free art, do my own etc. — it just wasn’t working for this one here.

My brain had a pre-existent picture. It is VERY specific about it.
(It nearly always does since I have hyperphantasia = I get a 4K movie that I am trying to keep up with when writing; a full virtual reality that I can wander around in, picking up things to look at as closely as I could in reality; I do not choose it, it is simply there.)
Try fighting that on my brain and its limitations and obsessiveness about things like that for even a week before you want to execute me for it…

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This is a PLACEHOLDER until I can either MAKE the real thing on my own — or find someone who can and would be willing to swap art or something. (#)

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(#) Or unless I somehow get lucky in the lottery or (probably more likely? hopefully) one day find enough paid subs (currently zero, I’m just starting) to hire someone to do it the normal way, because, believe it or not, I am money- and resources-poor.

Anything I have, including this internet access, comes from other people or, in the case of the PC I’m working on, the time when I was still able to work and earn money the “normal” way. I am living on disability / welfare (so-called “Grundsicherung”, which is barely enough to subsist on since it IGNORES most any of my medical issues and the extra nutritional demands that come with those; it’s a “bug in the system”, though I sadly think that one is rather intentional…).

(My capacity is sadly rather limited, too, brain-wise as well as energy-wise. I need to work hard to even balance those every day. It’s a daily struggle to get anything done.)

So far, none of my work is paid in any way. Sum zero.

Ways to support me

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The one thing I use AI for when it comes to writing is breaking down my own outlines into some halfway understandable, only-mostly “concise” list in reverse.

Being asked to write anything “concise” has been my mortal enemy since birth; my mind is a sprawling dreamscape (or hellscape, depending on your definition) of associative web workings that explode ever outwards forever.

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The only other thing I use AI for is to calm and soothe me in shut- and meltdowns, because most of the times, there is no human available to coregulate (with) me.

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In short: I’m the doing the best I can in a very difficult situation with a very “difficult” brain already screaming at me every day. I don’t need someone else to do it for me. If you lack understanding or mercy for that… this is not the pub for you. Take your ableism somewhere else, please. I wish you well and that you never end up disabled. No, seriously. It is a blessing if you can remain ignorant. All it takes is ONE accident.

You might wanna start here instead:

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(Or if you’d rather have an overview first: Table of Contents.)

This here is the second part in a series:

Prologue: Light’s Feast - Pt.2

[Resistance]

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If you wanna tell a specific version of a story; if you have a specific goal in mind, something you want teach someone, something you want to keep them away from? You better take care you don’t accidentally let slip the wrong pieces; ones that might convey the wrong impression.

That’s one thing I learned from Uhland as I became smarter:
starting to notice when he accidentally stumbled like that.

Which means I know exactly what we need to pay attention to; or they will start to notice, too.

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But gods, this is a mess. I mean, look at that.

I didn’t expect just what kind of chaos would be going on in here.
Thought I’d left all of that behind, after everything. Yet, it very much looks like I’ll have to start at the very beginning again. But where do I start?

For a moment, the Mists fill with countless renditions
of two people I’d thought nearly forgotten.

The same old hut. Clear-cut and vivid in the vibrant colors of my childhood, all of them. Soundless yet, for which I’m thankful. In most of those, their faces don’t look much happy, after all.

In most of them, even their hands are raised in argument, just like their voices would be. Not the one I had been aiming for—my dear Ommá, dear as she was at the time, at least; not the other two, a much more complicated relationship. And one I never learned to repair, before the end… But these are all early. At least some of Ommá are in there, too. But these two people predominate. Early childhood, when they were still close. Much closer than I’d have liked them to, many times, truth be told.

My ears tighten against the expectation of the memory growing loud before the sound even hits—and the Mist . . .

Distorts.
Looses cohesion.

Tumbles into a sudden chaos of other faces, other people, entirely different timelines and places. The sharp detail lost for a blurry sludge of images almost too fast to follow.

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What?

What is happening? I’ve never lost control like this before. Not since…

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Images flash by, the Mist refusing to settle into any one scene for long. Vague, shadowy outlines coalesce in the gray surrounding me, then flow back into nothingness, like soldiers in retreat.

Glimpses of a sleepy fishing village, trees—the big grandfather kind with their long beards I remember so well but also a lot more colorful ones; different sizes and shapes to their trunks and crowns, their branches and leaves, the scattered memories of a lifetime and several continents—people.

Friends. My brother. Foes.

Turncoats and other surprises—I push them away in irritation.
Wild campfires—way too far ahead.

No. Again. Deeper.

I need Oril. I need Mist’s Ford.

The fortress. Closer. Concentrate on the region, not what happened there. Fishing huts and cottages, that is what I need.

A stray bamboo shelf, startlingly clear, but unrelated to everything else. Though I think I know that one, full of everyday knickknacks that hid—

. . . aand, it’s gone.

Just as well. I know too well that was later.

Replaced by a cot I know even better.

But flames now lick at the edges, live shadows flitting by, barely seen out of the corner of an eye, and then there’s a glint in the dark, flashing like—

No. No. Stop that shit! I’m meant to be moving deeper, not further ahead.

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Ugh. Damnation.

The Mist has never behaved like this before. Not even when I just started out with it.

Why is it doing that?

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It’s the memories intruding, isn’t it. You bet.

Because I’m not purely a visitor here. Because I come in carrying something already, when what I should be is empty.

Metado. And trying to focus on those isn’t helping at all either.

They should come in orderly structures, neat circles, branching out, but very much at my command, like my memories usually do. Not this… mess.

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What is going on here?

Why are my memories getting so jumbled when I try to drag up the early ones?

For a moment I let go entirely, exasperated, letting the Mist float and well up around me however it wants. Breathe. Breathe.

Slow down. Listen to my heartbeat.

Slower.

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A small squeeze to my hand.

I’m here. I’m not leaving.

You’ve got this. I will drag you out if necessary. You’re safe.

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I sigh, one long exhale.
Try to focus on nothing but our shared breath. My heartbeat slowing down.

Maybe there are more reasons than one, why the Mist resists me these days.
Things… have changed, after all. We are neither of us who we were anymore. And very much not in the same place. The rules are different here.
But Dream is still Dream. And Dream is the domain of Dreamers.

And yet. What are We, these days?

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Then again… There were no problems diving into the past of the others yet.
Only with this one, my own. It’s gotta have to do with what I was more than what We are. It’s the memory itself that’s fragmented and scattered, I think.

But normally, that should not lead to fragments here.

Not before I even fully dive in. This is stepping outside yet.

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Maybe I should travel backwards. Maybe this is the wrong method. Maybe I should unspool from the end, not…

But no. I need the true memory.
I can’t risk the end slipping in again. That interference would be worse.

And what came later… I don’t think that would be any easier. It can’t be.

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Besides.

We don’t have that time.

I know how long it takes to unspool everything from the end right back to the start. No. I need to start early right away. It’s already spreading too fast. We need to combat it now, as soon as possible. This cannot wait a whole lifetime. And we need time to prepare, too. To extract, to change, to fuse. That won’t be easy work either. I need to do this right the first time. Stop stumbling like a novice.

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I breathe out again, slow, measured.

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Open my eyes to the fragments the Mists show now.
Closer, this time. Definitely Mist’s Ford now. I can glimpse the inn, Anur and Ferrick running around. Catch a whiff of the smithy instead of other fires; no war drums this time. There’s the clickety-clack of the mill in the background. The soft splash of a Mist’s Tear leaping out of the lake and plunging back down. Seems it didn’t get the dragonfly this time. Somehow that makes me smile. But the cottages and houses still shimmer and move as if in a heatwave, as if they were mere mirages; different times flowing into each other. People grow and shrink as they move around.

But there is one who doesn’t.

One who is always the same here, whenever he shows up.
Ironic, really. He wasn’t, in real life. So many faces. So many masks.

But the imprint is strong. So that’s what I focus on, for the moment.
I know he is close to the beginning. Not quite. But close.

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The images grow more vivid now.
They also arise and dissolve, emerge and shatter faster; become more, a whole kaleidoscope now, making it hard to focus on any one thing, as fast as it’s all spinning.

..

Say, is it the same for you?

Such utter chaos in some places; especially the early ones?

Do you even remember those years? When you were very small?

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That’s one thing I don’t have a problem with, even after everything else.
Remembering at all, I mean.
It’s all there. There’s nothing missing. Not a single snippet.

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But they’re all chaos yet. And I will need the first of them, won’t I?

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I should just decide on one. Go back from there. Follow the thread. But even that… seems splintered. Unstable. How strange. Although… maybe not. Maybe it is normal that it would do that, with every step closer to my creation. The urge to go elsewhere is strong. The pull to…

You know… I could just look for my little brother. Follow his towards mine. He is close. So very close. Seeing him again, like this, so small, so frail, and so, so bright—

There.

There he is. My little sunshine.

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Thin, like a stalk of grass. Trapped in diaphanous light. A sheer crystal that could splinter at the merest touch.
There is darkness all around him, trying to get in. Trying to suck out his very marrow.

I couldn’t see it back then. I can see it now.
My eyes close involuntarily, but the thread remains. That small, his leads back to the cradle; not the herbs, not the sharp tang of the affliction, and the hut in the woods.

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Doing so finally lets me find Ommá.

Ommá, who is way harder to find than she should be, and not quite for the reasons one would assume, if one knew her better; Ommá—and the people they called my parents. Finally a stable thread, even if it is not my own quite yet.
But it lets me locate the right cottage, even as our very home is still splintering and spiraling around me, refusing to stand quite still, if less like the village did.

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Now. How to find the very start?
Not quite the first spark but… the first spark of true memory. That first sense of actual being. Consciousness. One that remains.

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There’s the melody again.

I can’t make out who it is that’s singing. Ommá––or her? Or was that me? The smoke in my nostrils is near unbearable. There’s an urge to cough in my very throat already. Slickness—sweat, something more sinister, or simply water, I cannot tell. Not yet.

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Dis-moi. What is your first memory?

I mean, at least the first one you still remember?

Is it this fuzzy, too?

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I wonder what it usually is, for normal people. A scent, maybe? A sound? Something they saw and absolutely wanted? Or is it normally something entirely random? When do other people start to remember? How early can it even be?

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Honeylips.

The vague feeling of soft pressure to the back of my hand, already harder to perceive as I enter deeper into the mists. More like reverberations of what might be either past or present.
It is getting harder to tell.

Focus.

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Right. Right, you’re right. I’m procrastinating.

There’s somewhere I still don’t wanna go yet, isn’t there?

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Despite how prominent it is. Maybe because it is?
Yet another swirl of flashing memories. All in the fishing cottage now.

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The hearth. A shawl or blanket. The nets. The fish being gutted. The reeking mattress and the creak of the cradle. The big people moving around, waving their hands about, opening their mouths wide. The expressions on their faces that should tell me something but don’t. The way I only perceive what is behind them, inside of them. The things they don’t want to tell. How angry it makes them, all the things I can’t do.

What is wrong with that child?!

The one sentence that turns into sound hits me like a stone against my temple. For a second, I can only see Ommá’s skirts.

Then the shadows under the bed, the frame rising above my head.

Incongruously, I can hear the singing again.

Feel the rocking and the warmth of the fire, the softness of the blanket muffling everything. Shhh. Shhhh. The wind is whistling through the slats, the cracks in between the wood. The water is seeping in through the very floor it seems, the beaten earth muddy under my bare feet.

I calm. Remembering myself.

Remembering the present for a moment. Where I truly am. Which is, not there. It cannot reach me here.

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Seriously, though. Any suggestions? What am I looking for?

I feel as if I’m pulling all the wrong threads here. Making that whole tangle worse instead of clearing it up. How do I know which one’s the actual start, not just a later one? I can’t make sense of this right now. It could be any of them. Logically, there’s an argument to be made for each single one of all those memories I’m wading in and sifting through as to what started it all. But I need the one that works for our story. And that’s not even what I’m looking for yet. I wanted the original first.

Simple chronology.

I’ve never had to follow a thread back to this early in childhood, though. Maybe that’s the real problem. The point where consciousness unravels when you go backwards because it hasn’t even quite formed yet.

Maybe I should look at this from outside, then? Step into someone else’s memories? I could try the others’. But… No. That feels like a violation.

Besides, not only is this our story and not theirs, despite how many books I could write about them—it also wouldn’t help us much, now would it? They were kids back then, too. Even Tay wasn’t much older than me. I’d have to take one of the adults around back then. Probably Ommá… Gods, I don’t want to go into hers.

I guess I’m afraid what I’d find there. There are things one simply doesn’t want to know. Memories one just wants to lay to rest. There’s gotta be a way I can do this without going there. I don’t need to go that far back, do I? This is not a story about what lead to my creation. No, way too early. This would only be the opposite mistake. Just like others are too far ahead. So…

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What would you look for, to determine that?

Which one’s the earliest, the very start?

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Maybe how large everything is, in relation to yourself? Your eye level?

Hmmm... Now, there’s a thought. Maybe I just found a solution for how to sort all that tangle that has felt like a dozen big balls of yarn so far, heinously snarled by a whole horde of cats. Glad we talked about it.

The bed.

It’s the bed, isn’t it?

That wretched affair of a bed I’m hiding under. I still remember just how low it actually was; as if all of that had happened just yesterday.

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The very fact that I still fit under it makes it rather obvious just how early this memory must be, don’t you think?

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Sure, there are others, all tatters-like, snatches that I’m unable to fully sort into any one specific place along the timeline. A stray ray of light sneaking its way into the room, turning the dust mites into golden dancers. Someone laughing. The warmth of fire and snuggling into a cozy blanket on top of a big, soft body. The tender voice of a woman in song.

Huh. I still can’t tell if that’s the voice of my mother or Ommá’s singing.

What I do know is that it makes me strangely sad, this specific song, every time it’s in my ear, like a wriggling bug someone put in there. But these recurring shreds of memories… they’re not important anyway, are they? Not for this; not even for settling the mayhem in my head. No. No, I think I know now where I need to start. What is likely to be the earliest memory and which must be later ones. It’s just… does it have to be this one?

Eh. Tonto loco. What a fool I am. Of course it is that one.

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… still haven’t processed everything, have I?

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Mh. One ought to think it wouldn’t have taken me this long to realize why some memories seem basically burned in and others are all but faded. I mean, it’s really obvious, isn’t it…

Maybe some things are still upside-down. But a lot of that is probably simply just how much befuddlement is going on in that head of mine, the I at that specific time. The chaos not just in the surroundings of that child, but its very brain. It’s an attempt to hide from what is going on, isn’t it? Anything but being in this present.

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Do brains do this on purpose, that chaos inside yourself?

So you don’t understand whatever they think you rather shouldn’t?

It’s probably simply the dissociation back then, which is making it so hard to fathom what is going on there, isn’t it. Why everything is such a jumble.

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I probably should sort that for myself alone before I even attempt to rehash these parts of the story for someone else. Otherwise, we might just actually end up with mistakes. Mistakes we can’t afford.

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… hmmm… There.

Can you see that one? That’s what I mean.

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The last parts of subliminal perception of my present surroundings fade. The hidden glade we’re in, with all its vibrant green and subdued violet, the shimmering shades of gold and bronze and the iridescence of silver; the soft bird voices, the quiet gurgle of water and the buzz of insects. All its sultry warmth; even the faint wind on my skin.

In place of either of that, the vivid picture of a much wider open space emerges. The giant woods. The even grander mountain range that coils in a wide arc around everything both of them hide. The dew-covered meadows around the lake that is, in reality, an inland sea. The mists surrounding it. An impenetrable wall on the lake itself, hiding the other shore; and, of course, also what is situated roughly in the middle of the lake, what is only ever mentioned in whispers back then. As ground fog in the meadows and often also the small village that wasn’t a village anymore, past a certain time. But right now, it still is.

Fishers‘ cottages predominate the view: brittle, skewed buildings of oftentimes warped wood, scrappy and haphazardly extended here and there, whichever way was handy at the time, that don’t hold the heat out enough in summer and lose it all too fast in winter, only saved by the proximity to the thermal effect of the lake that covers and permeates everything.

The moisture is everywhere. Including my skin, even now, in the furthest, lowest corner of the hut in which I cower.

Hidden under a bed, which many others wouldn’t even call by that name. A couch for the whole family, a miserable affair constructed by stringing together smooth, round timber along with dried reed and tree leaf fibers. A mattress barely deserving its name; mostly a giant coarse sack, stuffed with dried grass that smells eternally moldy because one can get never rid of the humidity anywhere. The same dampness that necessitates renewing the huts in parts again and again, inside, outside, roof to wall, from the shelves to your clothes.

We’re missing the firewood to heat the cottage enough, especially in winter when it gets cold on top and the incessant battle against the irrevocably appearing mildew and lichen joins the room. In summer, it is the lack of will, because it is simply too hot already. The moisture would probably only drip from the walls anyway—and who would that help?

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But that thought is too new, one of the I that is watching out of the Now and a kind of bird perspective. This is not why this scene is so relevant.

This specific evening, this specific fight from which the small child is hiding, desperately covering its ears with its hands, making itself small in an attempt to not be there at all, its head full of chaos and scattered memories tumbling around—anything, anything to not be in the here and now.

It hardly feels the moisture on its skin anymore that I can see.

Even the sounds are muffled to its hearing—which is probably the sense and purpose of this whole exercise. It barely witnesses its surroundings anymore. Drowns in a mayhem of confused thoughts and a mist instead that hasn’t got anything to do with the mist from the lake that isn’t a lake and spreads its humidity everywhere—as well as its warmth. This child doesn’t feel any warmth. Not even in summer. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel anything at all, and yet it always feels too much. The child is a walking paradox itself. A child knowing too much and understanding way too little.

Something that shouldn’t exist, and yet, does it anyway. Something that lives—and yet doesn’t. Not quite. Not yet.

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Some of the things in this image, in the head of this child, the feelings that only I can put into words feel, in hindsight, as if I had only thought of them much later. Can I truly have seen this clearly as a small child, even when I had no words for it? Or is that simply that I am viewing this out of the present, when I am reminiscing, trying to remember what it was like? Does something of me slip into these old images? As I am now? My reasoning?

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But every time I think of it, it feels like… now. Direct, and immediate. All I need to do is close my eyes. Sometimes even without that. As if it were happening again, right now. And for just a moment I feel entirely convinced that it was like this, exactly like this, just so. Never different.

The words, though. The words for all of this? Those are mine, from today; the largest part of it anyway. Some though, some are clearly of that time—when words have been burned in instead of just a feeling, or what everything looked like.

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And yet… My memories are a strange, fickle thing. Especially the early ones.
They are all underwater images: things that I perceive as if through a thick layer of mist. Or, just like I said—as if I were underwater and everything else above.
Blurred. Subdued. Distorted.

I know exactly where that’s coming from. You told me often enough. These days, I get it. But back then?

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Gods, how often we talked past each other… it’s really sad, isn’t it?

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Back then, I understood insanely little. I still remember as if it had been just yesterday, when the memories drop in on me unexpectedly once more; or when I am specifically searching for them, like now.

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It’s odd how the earliest ones remain so very stubbornly.

Is that what happened to Uhland back then?

Hm. Do you think he had a happy childhood? If so, maybe it was more of a mercy. Downright wonderful. He seemed so happy at the end.

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Hell of a lotta different from me… Gods, I hope I never end up like he did.

It’s as if I’m right back in the thick of it. Without even having to grasp for it to ease in, as with all the others.

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Oh. Look. See that?

Yes. I think I now know exactly where we need to start, to begin unraveling this.

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It’s about time, isn’t it. All those years we never truly found time for this… We should’ve done this by now one way or another. Even when it doesn’t seem as acute anymore today as it did back then. We should get rid of this, even without everything else. It will do us good to release this.

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Here. Right… here.

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Oh.

Wait, wait, what?

That was a Light’s Feast? World.
I’d never have imagined. I only ever remembered those as small festivals.

But this…

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You’ve been reading an excerpt of
the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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Cover Art: Placeholder done via AI re-doing my own drawing (*)

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Prologue: Light’s Feast

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I never thought bringing order to my own memories would be this hard.

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The selection, the choice, finding out which parts to leave in and which to take out, what to hide and what not, which story to tell? That, I had expected.

But not this. Finding myself troubled by mere chronology. Stunted by something so simple as the fact and order of actual history.
It’s laughable. Especially if you consider who, or more accurately in this case, what I am. I am used to diving into this and feeling right at home like a fish in water. It’s what we do. So why does my own confound me like this?

I thought we’d extinguished any traces.

For a moment the old fear flares bright. Did we miss something after all? Despite everything? Is there yet another layer to it that we— but no. No. I think this is… just me. Just the way it was back then. The confusion. The chaos.
There’s nothing external to it, is there.

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Here I am, surrounded by the highest beauty you could possibly imagine:

Ears filled by the ethereal sounds of melodies at home in such a temple of nature. Beautiful enough to make you cry. A concert sung by a choir of birds, chiming flowers and soft petals, the gentle susurration of rustling leaves. At my side, the one who makes me whole; on my skin, the gentle caress of the wind in the trees, the soothing warmth of sunlight and the deeper one of his hand—but all I can perceive is an entirely different place.

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One surrounded by the continuous backdrop of an immense lake, filled by the incessant fog of my youth and the deeper darkness of the deep forest all around. The mist is everywhere—in the village, in the woods, in my head.

On the surface of the lake, on the other side, it is as impenetrable as it is in my own head. A wall, towering at a giant’s height and covering up the whole of the lake in all its immensity for miles, as if a rampart of mist, hiding the other side.
The other side—as well as what lies deep within and on the lake.
The hidden island deep in the void, the gate to the Elsewhere; a place where something lurks that one might call my fate or my ruin.

Even that I can barely intuit, my head filled with memories of childhood and sheer chaos. Laughter and screams, and a darkness that is not my problem but my hiding place.

And what I’m doing is huddling in a corner.

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Someone carrying power others would kill for; who has done and lived through things that would make someone else wish they’d be killed—or had never been born at all—if only it would let them avoid that fate. And I am huddling in a fucking corner.

Well, that just goes to show, doesn’t it?

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I was never chosen. Least of all ‘the chosen one’.
I chose my fate on my own, from start to finish; created it, no matter what others might claim. This, here? I chose it myself. Made it my own. Not because someone else wanted me to, but because I deemed it right. Necessary.
And then I went ahead with it, right to the bitter end.

Despite everything it cost me, and others. Despite the blood on my hands. Ours, theirs… the blood of a whole world. I did what I could to save it.

I didn’t always win. I knew that before I even started. That the likeliest outcome was that I’d lose. That I might just lose everything. I always knew I wouldn’t be able to save them all. There was even a time, when I thought I couldn’t save anyone at all, not a single one. But I always came back to it. Hell-fucking-bent on saving others. Found no other choice that even remotely seemed to make sense. I’ve never been someone to just lie down and take it. Drown myself in despair. Though there was one time I was close… Even then… my rage was always bigger. I could never witness injustice and just shut my trap about it, even when it would’ve been better for myself.

But why? Why did I even do all of that?

Because I couldn’t save myself? Because they wanted me to? Because I desperately wanted to be a hero, a savior? Is that why?

… did I, want that? Did they even want me to?

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By now, I know I did a lot of things in my life that I had never wanted. World, I even realize that many times the others, too, did not want me to. Much less demand what I thought was being asked of me. I’ve always asked more of myself than anyone else ever did. Well. That is, if you disregard the ones who never cared for the well-being of anyone, not even their own.

Anyway. How could that be what is holding me back right now?
I’m far past the moment of choice. Made my choices years ago. My own. With eyes wide open, no longer blind. No longer what others wanted or supposedly wanted, but determined by a single question and that alone: What world do I, personally, want to live in. And what am I willing to do to get it? What am I willing to sacrifice?

And then I did just that.

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So how can something like this be that hard for me?

I am no longer the child I was. For better as well as worse. I have everything that child could never even have dreamed of, could never have believed possible. I know, and can do, things that would sound like a bad joke to that child.
For example, find the right moment, the right person across the span of a whole world and several centuries. Just an example.

All I need to find, here and now, is myself. A lesson I believed to have conquered an age ago. Even easier than that: Myself and those closest to my most private little heart; in spite of everything I could never do for them.

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And yet, for just one moment, it is almost as if I could, of all things, not do that: Simply finding us. The I of that time.

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You’ve been reading an excerpt

of the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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A general note about updates:

I aim to publish a new piece of this translation once per week, hoping the publishing helps me get it done consistently.

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However, I am publishing this “hot from the oven” (i.e., the book already exists in full (if maybe not in the ultimate-final draft)—but in a different language). I am doing the translation on my own, in realtime. Thumbs crossed!

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(*) You can find a more extensive explanation as its own article in my general pub stuff, if AI (and how to spot it) is a topic of interest to you.