Prologue: It Just Gets Worse

The white-haired boy of sixteen glanced up and sighed.

I guess it’s official; I’m a slave now.

The sky was a bright blue, cloudless, with a high sun.

On any other occasion, this would be considered a perfect day, but there were no perfect days in North Holt.

No warmth, no ridiculous heatwave to complain about or small talk with.

Here in the north, it was eternally cold, where the snow and ice ran to the rocky terrain, broken up by mountain ranges.

The climate was harsh, the terrain unforgiving, and living was tough but manageable thanks to the stony passes linking the walled-off principality to other enclaves hidden in the valleys and mountains.

In short, if you weren’t wearing furs, your lifespan was cut short by ninety per cent.

Something Eitr Monksfoot was all too keenly aware of.

Lining up with the other pitiful and pitiable strangers unlucky enough to be captured by the invading army, he stood on the end, shivering in the bitter cold; a potato sack barely passing for suitable attire.

It was only when he heard the voices did he raise his head.

Long white hair -the colour of snow - hid the dirt and muck of his face.

The voices in the crowd were relentlessly cruel, laughing and jeering, and mocking the human auction, like it was some sort of show put on for the wealthy.

Oh, these nobles were terrible.

Ghastly people with malformed faces; the men with reptilian stares and slick Van Dykes that made them look like a puppet devil, (their personalities certainly matched).

The women were all wrapped in expensive furs, their faces pulled back to reveal two rows of yellowing teeth like sales on a cash register. The flesh was saggy, making them appear as if they were wearing a skin suit, with makeup that seemed to have been applied by a blind honey badger.

It disgusted Eitr to his core.

This crowd were the same kind of phoney, crass whales who made performative niceness into an art form, something he had witnessed first-hand back at his home town.

To look upon them made him think of an oil painting left out in the rain.

The comfort of disdain soon fell away when the slave auctioneer started the bidding.

‘Pathetic!’ Someone called out. ‘Where are the strong bodies? No one wants these stray vermin stinking up their estate!’ Laughter followed, the kind that belonged to torturers and the ignorant. ‘Give us your best stock, not the leftovers!’ ‘Even the wolves wouldn’t touch them, they still have standards!’ More laughter peeled out like a detuned orchestra.

Eitr felt disgust boil inside, his body a dormant volcano slowly awakening. Faces flashed, individuals twisted in greasy laughter, like a mockery of the human form.

The men: exaggerated features last found in nightmares.

The women: a child’s drawing of a clown.

More bitter than the cold that goosefleshed his skin, Eitr stood poker-faced, his dead eyes concealed by the white curtain of hair.

In that moment, three words entered his mind: So be it.

It started slow.

One or two members of the crowd felt a mild headache and dizziness, which then spread, affecting five, ten, twenty, and more, all swaying with an unknown nausea.

The hallucination soon followed it; one member of the crowd saw their neighbour as a giant maggot, but that person in turn, saw the other person as a giant maggot. This, too, spread to the whole crowd, where every person screamed and clutched their heads, believing they were surrounded by giant maggots, writhing and shiny under the afternoon sun.

The guards looked on in confusion as the auctioneer could only scratch his head. None of the slaves said a word, just watched as the crowd descended into tear-streaked madness and chaos.

This was no magic, but a glandular secretion, concentrated through the pores after years of laborious experimentation. Directed, invisible as sin, through the floorboard and out toward the crowd. 

The slaves were innocent, the guards just doing their jobs, that is why they remained untouched.

Spacing out, Eitr became nostalgic for his own people; they were no phonies, just hard-working folk trying to make it in the hard-scrabble enclave of Polka, deep inside a mountainous valley..

He remembers the town kept behind high walls, protecting it from avalanches and ‘Those who travelled’.

He would like to go back one day, run barefoot on cobbled streets like days of old.