Depredations, Blame

[catch]

Every scrap of flesh is precious. Every bit of food is needed. The isolated farmsteads struggle against the winter, but they, in their isolation, was everything that made Myrken a core of iron, a heart of steel. Rhaena's rule had done nothing but driven in deeper the wedge between town-folk and farm-folk, so that the contempt was a thin, walking line. The town was a target. The town was full of fools. Half-human fools, and who would be surprised? The ilk that ran there, the decadence. Who knew who was half-elf, full-elf, drow and unmentionables all swirled together? And the town-folk still looked down their noses. They whispered of inbreeding, of marrying girls off early to a life of breeding. Life was hard. The town-folk did not know, they only took and consumed what took blood and sweat and tears to produce.

The farm-folk hunted their woods. They husbanded their animals. They fished their streams and rivers. They had their stores, and they guarded them jealously.

Wolves, it could be. Wolves, or hungry dogs. That was the bitter growl that would come at the sight of a bullock, his blood and innards strewn on the ice, or the sheep torn to shreds and half-devoured. What meat could be salvaged, was. Foxes, too, for only that clever creature could so skillfully rob traps, gnawing the head of the rabbits free, or pulling up fish-traps to smash and devour.

It caused them little trouble. Irritating, but they had known what the locusts had meant, and were more than eager - after Rhaena and her ilk's behavior - to withhold from the town, to see to their own comfort and needs. They had food in plenty, if they were careful.

Livestock was brought in, and locked up tight. As the beasts and fish dwindled, fled, or hibernated, so to did the traps.

Then the real killing began.

[catch]

The chickens had been locked up tight. Every night, they were, in the winter-coop that was attached to the house so that they might be kept warm, might keep producing enough eggs for breakfast, at least. The only way into it was through the house -

And that is what had happened.

The door had been opened. Silently, the thieves had entered. Without waking the family, they had unlatched the coop, and had taken every last chicken, so that only droppings and feathers remained. In this case, there could be no question of foxes or wolves. In all cases to follow, there could be no question. Doors were opened; if they were locked, somehow the keys would be found, taken, unlocked. It was not just chickens that began to be stolen, but sheep from the barred barns. Food-stores were picked over, everything but the pickle-jars and flour carried away, unless it was hidden well indeed.

And as the winter wore on, some of the farm-folk went into town, to complain, to demand. Those were the fools. Who would send Constables to isolated farms when they were needed in town? To quell rioters, to quell dissent caused by Rhaena's Summer and the Governor's silence, caused by the absence or scarcity of food.

"It's them Derry-folk," the man would growl in their barns, idle with the winter and frustrated with the thefts. They were desperate, were they not? Refugees, coming where they weren't wanted - and when they felt the pinch of hunger, they preyed on honest, hard-working folk. Hadn't they had much, during Rhaena's Summer? Hadn't they been spared whatever wrath took her, given houses and food? Such thoughts - the worthless Governement, the slug-like town-folk, the gypsy-Derry - were easy to hold onto in the grey, silent winter.

Such thoughts were easy to recall when a Derry-man was caught, sneaking about Farmer Gen's land. His boys knew what he said to be lies of desperation. They didn't say how they knew. Looking for food, for his family - wasn't the Refugees the Government's highest priority? Weren't they getting all the best, they way they had during Rhaena's Summer? Looking to steal. Looking to take that which wasn't his.

They left the man still alive, but their iron-headed clubs had not been gentle. Alive is all they could leave him with, and with a threat that the same would be given to anyone else trying to take what wasn't theirs. They dragged the man within sight of Derry Row, and left him to be discovered by his thieving mates -

But when the man was discovered, he was yards distant. His body had been half-heartedly hidden, wedged in the spokes of a birch-tree - discovered, because the blood had run down before it could freeze, staining the white bark and white snow red.

The meat had been carefully carved from his body, buttocks and thigh, arm and shoulder, leaving only a thin skeleton of skin, bone, and sinew behind.

[catch]

It had to have been beasts. That is what the Constables reasoned, for once they had been called out, the remains worked out from the tree, the evidence of gnawing was clear to see - down to the bone, it went, and either the Derry-man had died from his wounds and been picked clean by scavengers, or hungry wolves - even stray dogs - had found him before help could. Still, they did their work. From questioning they drew reluctant admittance from his widow and his friends, who said that he had gone up to Gen's land to see if there was anything to glean from the fields - or, yes, to possibly take a ewe or ram, were any to be left wandering. Fresh meat was wanting. Food, sometimes, hardly touched the refugees in their sturdy shacks and make-shift streets, once it had trickled from Government and Strangers alike, down through Myrkenwood proper, and the man had seen two children die on their journey to Myrken.

The questioning of Gen and his sons was more vitriolic. They were, or fancied themselves, honest men, the blunt kind that had little or no tact. Yes, they had caught the man skulking about. Yes, they had given him something to think about, like not stealing from them again. Farmer Gen himself railed against the constables, who let good, honest, hard-working folk have food stolen straight out of Myrken mouths, yet threw their all into some feckless foreigner that had been worth nothing more than a thief.

Not even the news that the man had been eaten could bring much sympathy. It took some of the bluster from them, and injected a bit of cautious courtesy. No, the man had been quite alive when they'd left him. Nothing worse than blood and bruise, broken fingers. The remains had said as much, and there was an honesty there. Nose broken, a few fingers snapped. The man appeared to have been coming to, moving about and groaning, so they had left him with their threat, and well within sight of his home. That, too, was true; quite easy to see where the body had been left, snow melted around the warm thing.

Beasts. It had to have been.

A heavy fine was clapped on Gen and his sons, a sullen promise given of hard labor in the spring to atone. It was an unfortunate incident, and Gen's sons had been only a part of it, a perfect storm. It could, almost, be forgotten.

Until it happened again.

[catch]

This time it was not a Derry-man. It was a farmer's lad. The winter was at a time when one tires of meat salted and dried, when stores began to dwindle down, and Patriarchs clapped a lock upon the food-stores, refusing entrance to any but himself, and doled out what may be eaten over the day to the women. In this, the farmers still fared better than the townspeople, who were too hungry to fight, to hang those they felt responsible for it all, and went along what tasks they could with sullen faces and angry hearts.

They could have left out traps. But the boys wanted venison, or maybe even a bit of wild boar or pheasant, and Mother thought of all the wild wrestling and fighting, pent up by winter and the cold, and with idle hands, and she could not shoo the out of the house fast enough. All of them had hunted before. They agreed to a meeting-place, and went off by ones or twos, a day spent in exertion and failures, and some, small triumphs. As early evening fell, they came to their meeting-place, rabbits and pheasants in their hands, stories on their tongue. They waited, but one cousin did not return.

He was an older fellow, so they did not fear for him. Likely he had struck upon some trail, or found his kill, and it was too late to return. Better a night in the cold - and he had done so before - than risking a broken leg on the uncertain ice and snow. So they went home, certain, reveling in their meal. And at first light, they struck out to meet him.

They found him in the middle of a far field.

Tracks told a story, though the boys were not as expert as the wild-woods men. There were the bounding tracks of deer, the silent step of a man. There was the carcass of a deer at the end of a trail of brown blood pocking the snow, arrows and the empty shape of a hunting-knife neatly laid out beside it. No telling how far in the butchering the cousin had gotten; It had been gnawed over, a few bones scattered, and something with powerful jaws had cracked the bones - bones missing - shattered to nothingness, or else devoured, along with the marrow. No wolf could have done such a deed. And while they milled over the site, one of the younger brothers tripped over the remains of the cousin, and what they found caused a few stomachs to be emptied, hot and steaming, into the air.

He had been buried. There was no other way to describe it. Something had carefully dug a hole, and placed the body in it, and then packed the snow in a hard tomb around it. Cool as the body had been, the snow had only melted a little, and it was only found because something had already upset it, causing a hand, a rock-hard finger, to curl free. Just as the Derry-man had been, he had been butchered, as if he were nothing more than a hog. Unlike the Derry-man, he had not been gnawed that way, but carved, carefully and thoroughly.

The cousin's hunting-knife was missing.

As they cast about, it became clear that the site had also been swept clean, so that no real tracks remained save for that of man and deer. There had been no need for that at Derry Row; the snow had yet been sparse, and great patches of old, wet, springy needles had hidden what tracks there may have been. But whoever had swept it had not thought the men and boys to cast their nets so far, underestimated their resolution. What they found was this: the great, powerful spread of large wolf-pads, and the thick, booted tracks of a smaller man.

[Rance]

When the acuity of the Constables' proclamation -- It had to have been beasts -- found its way to the Inquisitory on a thin slip of parchment, another line was added:

May be worthie of Inquisitorey interist. Unexplaned inexplickables. Body and marks at Crant farm.

May be connected to Gen's insidint. See: missing cocks, missing meat, man flayed.

The humming conversation through the Inquisitory was, of a mind, wholly uninterested. Beasts ought to be matters for me with swords and club, perhaps for a Detective Constable with clever eyes and deductive tact, and

no, no, that one Constable is oft too drunk to put together a string of words, and

Another is a beast himself, bullish and imposing, and

without Tolleson, delegation here is questionable at best, better we don't put too many of our good brains in the way of danger, and

Confounded Constabulary is tangled up in all matters of the city, and we don't have anyone--

Maxwell. What about Maxwell, we could--...or, no, I've a better idea.

I bet you one beer.

I bet you two.

At the behest of several fellow Inquisitors enjoying their quiet relief from Giuseppe or Genny Tolleson's leadership, bets were made regarding remaining limbs after-the-fact when the slip found its way to the cluttered desk of one Junior Inquisitor Gloria Wynsee.

* * * *

Caliir was displeased with the ride through the snow. He occasionally stopped and stood as though he might root himself through the earth, refusing to take another stride through the powdery dust. But the seamstress' heels were unforgiving, driving like needles -- each time with a bleated apology -- against the soft meat between the flat-faced beast's tender ribs. She'd bathed that morning until the chilled Lake-water was black and filmy. Her faded red schooling-dress was her only vestment suitable for business, and it was while wearing this that she led her fidgeting, grunting, braying steed toward the Crant farmstead.

Once arrived, she lashed him to a pole that stood out of the ground, likely the bottom-half of a scarecrow whose hay had been long since picked-clean by crows too smart to be frightened by its silhouette. "I'll not be long," she assured him, but the beast's cataract-boggled eyes stared elsewhere, unconvinced.

She was several feet away -- much to the appreciation of her newly-bathed skin -- before Caliir, in protest, ejected a noisy spatter of brown across the crisp snow behind him.

With a roll of parchments bulging against the inner-lining of her moth-eaten cloak, the girl traced her way along the footpaths that wound toward the mouth of the Crant cottage. When she reached the door, she blew out a billow of steamy air, raised a cloth-wrapped series of knuckles, and knocked once, twice, three times against the planks.

[Guppy]

It was said that an extraordinary beast was hunting men.

It was picking off loners - both locals and foreign - and butchering them. It was something that she could understand from feral creatures. Desperation drove predators. More and more often, she would venture out and find that the once prolific prey had moved elsewhere. There were too many hunters, not enough food. The herds had moved to greener pastures, other lands. The groan of empty bellies were not restricted to humans alone.

This time, however, there were doubts. There were whispers. There was an investigation.

Gloria had written to her, requesting her help. Noura was a tracker of no small skill and she might see things that the seamstress did not. She might be able to speculate on typical behavior of the animal suspected in these crimes. She made a promise to meet the other young woman here. Despite the fear and suspicion slowly taking hold, she ignored the cultivated paths. Her booted feet carried her through the forest surrounding the farms distant from Myrken Town. The wildling slipped from the treeline surrounding the farm with a crunch of snow underfoot. She gave a cursory glance around the area, far less trusting of the civilized folk than the thing terrorizing them. The underbrush tugged at her cloaked form as if it were loathe for her to leave. Impatient hands batted at the clinging nettles, ever green with their wicked thorns, even in the dead of winter. She appreciated the sentiment, but she had commitments to keep.

Her path carried her across the fields and she pulled her collar tighter about her neck as the wind howled, unbroken by protective trees. Her pace quickened as she noted the irked creature tied to a sad-looking scarecrow. She paused, offering a cluck of her tongue at her approach to the near-blind Caliir. Her gloved hands attempted to lift his heavy head, one under his thick jaw and the other smoothing over his flat nose. Her head dropped to press a warm kiss to the softer skin on his nose. A small piece of dried apple was pressed to his muzzle for him to nibble on before she continued past, delicately picking her way past the evidence of his protest.

By the time she arrived, those inside would have had considerable time to answer the call of Gloria's insistent knock. She would hover at the base of the steps as they spoke, arms crossed over her chest and toe tapping impatiently. Noura's patience was a rather finite resource these days, inactivity fouling her mood.

[catch]

There were still sharp memories of the Baie. And other memories, as well, of creatures that lingered and hunted, or slaked their thirst for blood on one or two bodies before moving on - mystery creatures, never identified, never seen. The Crants sent a boy into town, of course. A brief letter of what they had found. And they kept the body. They knew the necessity for burning, but the wierdling-Gods they worshiped did not hold to such conventions, and they always felt uneasy about it. Besides, if any clue were to be found, they wished it found. The death of a cousin, a man, meant one less pair of hands come planting and harvest, and all the children he could have sired for the same. It was a dynasty-end, a loss of labor, and it was a glum woman in mourning-black who shoved back the door at Gloria's knocking, dousing her hands against her apron.

"AIn't got no 'and-outs 'ere!" she rasps, her voice rough and imperious. Her eyes were small, suspicious, and they flickered between Gloria and Noura both with an air of distinct disdain.

"Go back an' starve in Town, an' let us be with our sorrows."

[Rance]

There was no ease in confronting a woman in black. Black was a wall; black was impenetrable, a proclamation, and it strangled whatever words the girl had prepared right out of her throat. She turned her head to Noura, grimacing a smile of greeting -- her eyes danced with relief, one concealed by the rest of her soil-colored face.

But as she turned back to the Crant woman who stood within the threshold like a stolid guardian, the seamstress scrambled about within the breast of her cloak until her fingers could the rolled leaflets of paper that had been warmed by her ribs. She extracted them, cleared her throat, and sniffed in a defiant sliver of snot that the cold kept trying to wheedle out of her left nostril.

"No hand-outs," she said, trying to flatten the parchment against her skirt-thigh before offering it out to the woman. Her credentials, a confirmation of her status as an official member of the Inquisitory. Proof of her words rattling uneasy in her grip. "My name is Gloria Wynsee. I'm here on behalf of the Inquisitory -- the Myrken Wood Inquisitory -- to look into--"

(The death, the tracks, the unexplaned inexplickables)

"--the peculiar things that have befallen your family. I'm a friend; I'd like to ask a few questions. Might I," she asked.

Stiffly, as if her elbows had turned to stone and her shoulders had become oak, she quartered and motioned to Noura.

"My friend. She has got very good eyes, very good eyes for -- for this sort of sorrow, and--"

She managed an insecure smile, a few flecks of green between her teeth from the dried mint-leaves she'd chewed at sunrise.

"May we speak, Miss...?"

And because she hadn't a name, the question faded out, guttering like the flames on a candle's last bit of wick.

[Guppy]

The door was thrown open and an unpleasant woman answered, clad in all black and glowering at them for disturbing her grief. Her hands cleaned themselves upon the front of her apron and for a moment, Noura wondered if they shouldn't have brought something to eat. Isn't that what people did when someone suffered a loss? She could not help but squirm where she stood with discomfort.

In the end, it was the disdain upon those features and sharp words that cleansed Noura of her disquiet and caused her to scowl in turn. Gloria, who cast a glance backwards, would note the wildling's sour expression as she looked upon the farmer's wife. Defensive. Defiant. She did not meet the gaze of her friend, so distracted was she. The girl was nothing if not protective of her seamstress friend. "We wouldn't starve," she snapped in turn, content with earning that small victory against the woman whose broken heart led her to lash out at those who came to help solve the murder. It was petty, but it smoothed a balm over her hurt feelings. And it was all the safer, for Gloria commanded the majority of attention.

Gloria attempted to smooth things over and Noura was momentarily distracted as she thought on her friend's new-found wealth of patience. The appropriate papers were handed to the waiting woman, introductions were made. When attention was drawn to her, a distinctly sheepish expression stole over her features, caught in her posturing. Her arms, formerly crossed, dropped to her sides and she gave a short, sharp nod of acceptance before her eyes stole away. They settled firmly upon a nearby fencepost, but still she listened.

"We may have been sent by the town," her soft voice rose suddenly, "But we are not from the town." They were outsiders, same as the farming community. Wildling. Foreigner. And she knew that the distinction would matter.

[catch]

Papers were thrust forth. Explanations were stammered. Madam Crant knew there were those in town who thought she and hers couldn't read. The men may let their learning slide, but she, herself, was quite proud of her own, cramped script, and had her children - nephews, nieces, and the entire, extended brood - at their letters when they were busy with nothing else. Her severe eyes passed over the parchments, reading of investeds and by authorities.

"Missus Crant," she answered, drawling out her title. Matron, perhaps, was a better term, but such a name had unfortunate implications nowadays. "Aye, ye be furriners, that's plain enough," she goes on, her voice once more sharp and testy, just barely constraining a sneer for Noura's words. "Seems t'Bloody Gov'nor ain't keen on smarts in farmer's broods, ratherin' t'attractin' all sorts to 'is side."

A quick, jerk of her head towards an out-barn, too small for livestock, but a storage-shed. "Body's in there," she says. The marm thrusts Gloria's papers back to her. "We 'eld off t'burnin'. I'll spare a boy 'long when y'wants 'im, show ye t'place."

Without much further ceremony, she moved to slam the door in their faces.

[Rance]

Noura's words were smoother, more sure than hers -- and no matter what direction Duquesne had given, no matter the care he'd instructed her to have over her words, they were tattered, accent-laden stammers; the black had put her off, the clear and present raiments of mourning and loss. What could she say that could entice comfort, reason--

And furriners, the woman said, invective tangled in disgust. There was a twitch that hankered beneath the edge of her lip, a click in her jaw, an explanation that was never given sound. For while the dark-skinned girl wanted nothing more than to correct, to redirect the displeasure, the looked to Noura from around the corner of her bonnet, a glance from dull eyes that smoldered with a fire she smothered as quickly as it had come. Harnessed. Careful. I want nothing more than to say something I ought not.

"We're not the Governor's people," she corrected. "Do you think, Missus Crant, that following the speech the Councilwoman gave--"

(She is just a scared little farm-girl; I forgive her, I forgive her)

"--furriners like Noura and I would have sense to stand blindly beside him?"

It was not a question meant to intrigue or redirect, but to inform. Her heel slipped over the lip of the stoop when her eyes followed the woman's motion.

Body's in there.

Her breath quickened. She retrieved her crumpled paperwork as if accepting some longhand curse, stuffed it into an inner cloak-pocket. She never tried to interrupt the door. Instead, the seamstress turned and tried to catch the hook of Noura's elbow with her bandage-wound palm, meaning to usher her compatriot toward the leaning out-building. Gloria's newfound patience was ephemeral and skeletal at best -- and she could feel a lack of the same thing in the tightness of the whelp's tongue.

"Death is -- is hard for some people, Noura," Gloria whispered. "Harder when they already hurt."

[Guppy]

The sneer was felt, all the same. Noted, despite the tentative restraint the woman placed upon it. Noura's pale eyes narrowed with ire, mouth opening to respond. The door shut with a thump that threatened to upset the heavy snow, thawing and freezing in constant cycle, upon the rooftop. Her chin lifted as her gaze rose to eye the mounds of white warily, but nothing happened and the tension in her shoulders soon eased.

Gloria collected her papers, tucked them away neatly, and turned to start down the stairs. Noura's elbow was captured and the two girls huddled together against the furious gusts of wind, arm in arm. She offered her careful words, soothing words meant to temper the wildling. Where Gloria was learning patience, Noura was practicing agitation. She made a rude noise at the back of her throat.

"There is always an excuse, Gloria. We are the only ones who are giving them aid. The only ones who care about their boy's death and they do their very best to alienate us," she offered in response, sullen.

The two of them made their arduous way across the lawn, boots kicking up fine puffs of snow, towards the barn the woman had indicated. Noura pulled the edges of her cloak more tightly around herself and there was a low chirp of protest. It appeared the hatchling had joined them.

"However," she began, her features brightening considerably, "I am glad that you asked me along. It has been some time since I have spoken with the spirits. First, the body. Then, the field?," she asked, hopeful that they would be allowed to examine the area where the body had been found. Perhaps the boy's ghost would have lingered.

[catch]

The shed was not locked. It should have been, perhaps, but with so many coming and going, it would be impractical. The body was laid out between two chairs, as was the custom; frozen solid, and stiff with rigormortis, it floated between them, a sad and twisted corpse. Sweet-candles burned to ward off the thick smell of decay, set around it as if it were an altar, the tongues licking hungrily, stretching upwards for the body that the flames knew was their right. First, this observation. The Crants followed that a man must not be buried, but entombed, so that the strength of stone, and not the fickle weakness of dirt and clay, would protect.

A few days more of this, and the body would be burned, a small cairn built for the ashes. The Crants knew the necessity.

His clothes had been ripped from him, leaving only cuffs and collar. The body was naked, and it was so much smaller than a man should be, for half the flesh was gone, peeled from bone with a flayer's flair. Thighs, buttocks, and shoudler had been carved down entirely, while the belly had been slit open - not all the organs taken, but a few - and a gaping spread of ribs where the heart had been removed, by main strength alone.

If there was a mercy, there was this; the face was too blurred and discolored to make out any expression, and his head hung so from his neck that the cause of death could be easily determined. He had been dead before such butchery could begin.

[Rance]

"Everyone alienates. They do," she said. "You do. I do. It's -- it's how we protect ourselves from things we don't understand."

They stood outside of the decrepit shack, and the seamstress hesitated in reaching for the iron handle of the door. There was a body within; there was a thing devoid of life just beyond the wood and nails. Though she'd grown up in Jernoah, where it was all too common to step around coagulated spots of blood in the sand, all too natural to awaken to the sounds of lessers being beaten and torn by whip in the streets. Those stimulations had done nothing to separate her from the chill, the emptiness that clogged the air when one shared it with a corpse--

It has been some time since I have spoken with the spirits.

"We don't do these things alone," she said, her chapped and cracked lips forming a reticent smile. "Maybe they picked the wrong girl to be a Junior Inquisitor between the two of us. But I'm glad you came -- strange things are easier together, and we--"

--can manage anything, she'd intended to say, but she'd pushed open the door in the process, and the display before the two of them froze her blood just within the doorway.

The candlesmoke suffocated her. Or maybe it was the smell that lingered under it, the indomitable aroma of the mess that lay beneath living skin and heartbeat, the red slush that, like a magical concoction, gave life to beings that bore it. But this, this had not been alive before, this body, this cadaver, this tortured twist of flayed skin, with crimson icicles hanging from the silently-screaming mouth that had been torn by vicious hands in the stomach and chest, and

(how she regretted a good breakfast of bread and stock, how she despised believing that a hearty meal in the morning would give her brain suitable fuel for examination)

the white tips of ribs winked at them, dermis stretched by an invader's hands until it was wrinkled like cheap fabric; no, it could have never been a living man, for the face bore a patchwork of

(you weren't always like this, Glour'eya; you could watch them pour a man's blood off the altar in the jerethedrals, couldn't you? All you needed to do was sing while they gave him the glass, and it made you feel better, it made you feel in control, and--)

black and yellow bruises, and one of the eyes had been burst like a pustule while the other, now, was hardened like lake-ice beneath the bulging, battered eyelids. Where was the

heart, where was it, she wondered, looking into the bottomless cavern of the chest.

"Nameless," she said, a whisper, before her eyebrows lanced high and she looked inquisitively to Noura. Her teeth were gritted, prepared to say something, but there weren't any other words -- she coughed into her sleeve, crushed the cloth against her nose and mouth, stifled a choking belch behind little winding-vine embroideries on her black-stained cuff. And all she could wonder first, because she was a seamstress, was what strength there must have been in the stitches of his shirt, that bloody collars and work-dirtied cuffs would remain instead of, like his heart, just pulling free.

"If you find him," she said. "If you speak to him, if you commune with him, Noura, ask his name so -- so I can sing."

[Guppy]

Gloria's words of wisdom were noted, but the stubborn set of her jaw revealed just how little care she had for them. The two trudged through the snowy banks quietly, after that. Not a word passed between them. They came to a stop before the small shack and Noura took a moment before she noticed how Gloria had faltered. Pale eyes observed the seamstress' hand that lingered upon the handle. In that moment, the wildling recalled just how squeamish others could be about death and she resolved to allow her whatever time she needed. Despite her own eagerness to enter.

"They made the appropriate choice," she assured the other, no trace of doubt in her voice. Surely, Noura's talents numbered many, but they came with an added cost. It would always be a liability.

Finally, finally, the door was tugged ajar. The smell of sweetened candles hit them like a wall of sensation. While Gloria attempted to steel herself against the horror of the boy's corpse beyond, Noura released her friend's arm and pushed inside. She scampered in like an eager child, waving a hand in front of her nose to waft the sickly sweet away. While Gloria stood, paralyzed, within the frame of the door, Noura leaned over the body with roving gaze. Her spine was bent at the waist, hands clasped behind her back, mere inches away. Her nose almost touched him as she leaned in close to peer at the damage done by hunter's knife. Fascinated. Suddenly, she stooped and peered under the body, suspended as it was with two chairs. A hand waved underneath his frame and an index finger reached out to poke at his thigh for reasons unknown.

Nameless. She cast a glance back towards Gloria, startled at the sudden noise. It was almost as if she had forgotten that she was not alone. "What?," she asked, eyes wide and uncertain. She struggled to comprehend.

"Sometimes, they do not remain. Sometimes they hide, fearful of seeing their own corpse. And sometimes, they stay where they died. I do not see him here," she cast a brief glance around the room as if to seek out the sullen ghost the boy might leave behind. "What would you sing?," she asked, her voice distracted.

She rose to her feet and circled around, fingers probing the wound at his throat. "This was his death." Her gaze flickered upwards to meet Gloria's. She folded her fingers and made a slash to her own throat, ear to ear, with a jutting thumb. A gesture to the rest of him. "All this. Probably after. Butchered like a pig. Maybe for food? We are in famine."