Chapter 1 - Frost and Ash

*"Survival in the Barrens requires three skills: hunting, hiding, and knowing which is which."* — Frontier Wisdom (attribution unknown)

The cold bit deep enough to crack bone.

 

Lavender pressed herself against the frost-rimmed boulder, breath shallow, rifle steady against her shoulder. Predawn darkness pooled in the hollows of the Barrens, thick as smoke. Beside her, Brute's bulk radiated warmth through her worn coat. The dog's breathing had gone silent ten minutes ago. He knew the routine.

 

Her fingers ached where they curled around the rifle's stock. She'd wrapped them in strips of canvas torn from an old tarp, but the Hiemal cold didn't care about preparation. It found every gap, every weakness. The sky overhead held no stars. Clouds had moved in during the night, pressing down like a lid on a pot.

 

Something moved in the scrub thirty yards out.

 

Brute's ear twitched. Lavender's pulse kicked up, but she held still. The shape resolved slowly: low to the ground, picking through the skeletal remains of winter brush. Rabbit. Young, maybe eight pounds. Enough meat for three days if she stretched it.

 

She shifted her weight. The rabbit's head came up.

 

Brute launched before she could squeeze the trigger.

 

One hundred pounds of muscle and momentum crashed through the brush. The rabbit bolted left. Brute cut the angle, jaws snapping closed on fur and bone. The crack echoed across the frozen ground. Silence returned in seconds.

 

Lavender lowered the rifle. "Show-off."

 

Brute trotted back with the carcass dangling from his mouth, tail wagging slow and deliberate. The scar across his chest caught the first grey light of dawn, a pale line bisecting brown and copper fur. He dropped the rabbit at her feet and sat, tongue lolling.

 

"Good boy." She checked the kill. Clean bite to the neck. No wasted meat. Her father had taught her to value efficiency above all else. Three years dead, and his lessons still governed her hands.

 

She tied the rabbit to her belt with a length of cord and started the walk home. The Barrens spread out in all directions, a patchwork of frozen dirt and scrub brush broken by occasional stands of skeletal trees. RC3's Hiemal season didn't believe in mercy. Temperatures dropped low enough to kill exposed skin in minutes. The wind carried ash from the old fires, the ones that had burned 216 years ago when the world tore itself apart.

 

Ash and ice. The Barrens' favorite combination.

 

The hut came into view after twenty minutes of walking. Two rooms, beige stucco gone grey with age and weather. Her father had built it before she was born, back when he still believed in permanence. She'd stripped the hunting trophies off the walls after he died. They sat in crates now, gathering dust in the back room. Looking at them hurt in ways she didn't have time to examine.

 

Brute pushed ahead to the door, sniffing at the threshold. She'd sealed the gaps with rags and mud paste before the season turned, but wind always found a way inside. The latch stuck. She put her shoulder into it.

 

The interior smelled like woodsmoke and old leather. A fire still smoldered in the stone hearth, embers glowing dull red. She'd banked it before leaving, packed it with ash to hold the heat. The skill had taken her six months to learn. Six months of wasted fuel and frozen mornings before her hands remembered the right way to layer the coals.

 

She dropped the rabbit on the workbench and hung her rifle on the wall. Brute collapsed in front of the fire with a groan that sounded almost human.

 

The routine took over. Skin the rabbit. Set the pelt aside for later. Portion the meat. One third for today, two thirds into the cold box outside. She worked with the knife her father had made, the handle worn smooth by three generations of hands. The blade never needed sharpening. Pre-war steel, salvaged from something that didn't exist anymore.

 

Blood ran into the grooves of the workbench. She'd scrub it clean later, after she ate.

 

Her stomach cramped. She hadn't eaten since yesterday morning. Hunger was a constant companion in the Barrens, familiar as the cold. You learned to work through it or you didn't survive the first season.

 

She spitted a portion of meat over the fire and settled onto the floor beside Brute. The dog's warmth seeped into her side. His breathing had already gone slow and even. Sleep came easy to him. It used to come easy to her too, before her father died. Before the nights stretched long and empty, broken only by wind and the distant howl of predators.

 

The meat hissed and popped. Fat dripped into the flames, sending up brief flares of light.

 

Heat washed over her face. For a moment, something inside her chest responded, a flicker of warmth that had nothing to do with the fire. She went rigid.

 

Not now.

 

The warmth built, spreading through her ribs like water through cracks in stone. Her pulse hammered. She pressed both hands flat against the floor, forcing her breathing to slow. The warmth hesitated, flickering like a candle in wind.

 

Go away.

 

It retreated. Slowly. Reluctantly. The absence left her hollow and shaking.

 

Brute lifted his head, dark eyes fixed on her face. She met his gaze and forced herself to relax, muscle by muscle. The dog watched her a moment longer, then lowered his head back to his paws.

 

He'd been there the first time it happened. The day she'd buried her father, magic had torn through her like lightning through a tree. Fire had burst from her hands and scorched the ground in a perfect circle around the grave. She'd collapsed in the ash, sobbing and terrified, while Brute pressed against her side and refused to leave.

 

The next morning, he'd brought her a bloodied rabbit.

 

Three years. Three years of burying the heat, strangling it before it could surface. Three years of terror every time it stirred. Magic was death in the Barrens. The Markets whispered about burnings, about mages dragged from their homes and executed in the squares. She didn't know if the stories were true. She didn't want to find out.

 

The meat finished cooking. She ate it slowly, chewing each bite until it dissolved. Flavor had stopped mattering months ago. Food was fuel. Nothing more.

 

Brute got his share, strips of meat tossed onto the floor in front of him. He swallowed them whole, barely pausing to breathe.

 

Outside, the wind picked up. It rattled the door in its frame and found the gaps in the walls, whispering through the cracks. Snow would come soon. The clouds had that weight to them, that pressure that meant the sky was ready to open.

 

Lavender leaned back against Brute's side and stared at the fire. Embers shifted, sending sparks up the chimney. The warmth in her chest stayed buried. For now.

 

Tomorrow she'd check the trapline. Tomorrow she'd haul water from the creek before it froze solid. Tomorrow she'd reinforce the door and hope the hinges lasted another season.

 

Tomorrow she'd survive.

 

Tonight, she had a full belly, a warm fire, and a dog who refused to let her face the dark alone.

 

It would have to be enough.

Reviews

[JayG]

• Frost could always be counted upon during the three months that make up Hiemal

1. Frost could always be counted upon? So, it once could in the past, but now? Not your intent, but it is what you told the reader, based on structure.
2. No one comes to fiction for a history lesson, they want you to begin with story, not a lecture.
3.“The three months that make up Hiemal?” Assuming you mean winter, lots of readers won’t recognize that word, so why not call it winter?
4. The character never reacts to the frost, or notices any. So why tell the reader about what's not there as the story plays out?

• Lavender had heard that the weather that changed with each division of the year here in RC3 wasn’t as dramatic

1. Had heard? Aside from awkward presentation, who cares? We don't know the time-frame, or why/how it relates to the events taking place. every line in any story must either: Move the plot, develop character, or, meaningfully set the scene. Any line that doesn't, serves only to slow the arrival of things meaningful to the story.
2. I give up. Who or what is Lavender? How old is she? What’s her situation? Heard it from who? You know. She knows. The reader? Not a clue.
3. Each division of “the year?” This is meaningless to the reader, who doesn’t know where we are, what’s going on, or, who we are as a person.
4. Where in the pluperfect hells is RC3? Unless the reader has context as-the-words-are-read, the line is meaningless to the reader.

This may seem harsh, but it is how readers will see it, because you’re “flying blind,” so to speak. Not having studied the skills and techniques that were developed over the centuries for avoiding the traps and gotchas, you’ve rediscovered those traps, as does pretty much everyone who turns to fiction—as I did.

The problem is, we learned a skill called writing that worked for every assignment given us in school. So, we assumed that writing-is-writing, and that we have that taken care of. But what we learned are the nonfiction skills that employers need. Professions, like Commercial Fiction Writing are acquired in addition to those school-day skills—even for hobby writing, because *nothing else works.*

So, try the excerpts from some good books on the basics of adding wings to your words, like Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict, or, Jack Bickham’s, Scene and Structure.

I know this was not at all what you hoped to see. And I wish there was a more gentle way to present it. But every successful writer faced and overcame such problems. Why not you?

Jay Greenstein

- - - - - - - - - - - -

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”
~ Alfred Hitchcock

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

[elektrikstar]

I appreciate you taking the time to provide me with feedback. I scrapped an entire intro for similar comments, and now have been reworking all of that information back into my first few chapters.

Some of the things feel like they are meaningless, but they won't be later :).

Again, thank you for taking the time to provide your thoughts on my first chapter :)

[JayG]

• Some of the things feel like they are meaningless, but they won't be later.

But if the reader turns away, saying, "What the hell does this mean?" they'll never see it. Confusion can't be retroactively removed. And a confused read is one who leaves you, right then,

And... Don't just rewrite. Unless you take the time to acquire the skills of fiction, the report-writing skills you now own will make everything read like a report.

To write fiction you need the skills of fiction because nothing else works.

Sample the books I suggested and you'll see why you need what they can give you.