Woods outside of Windhaven, The Silver Isles
Thwang.
Another arrow was loosed into the frozen silence of the forest.
The girl, Liora, didn’t breathe as she tracked the arrow’s path through the air as it found its mark. The elk staggered forward, the shaft buried deep behind its shoulder. Blood darkened its fur and dripped into the snow below. Feeling the pain like a bolt of lightning, the beast rushed away over a small hill, leaving a trail of bright red in its wake.
She moved quickly, her wooden snowshoes crunched softly in the powdery underbrush as she tracked her fleeing prey. Cresting a rise on a snowbank, she saw the beast stumbling before collapsing near the base of an old fir tree, its legs folded beneath it.
Reaching the dying animal, she drew her knife and placed it at the base of its neck. Uttering a quiet prayer of apology and gratitude, she drove the knife downward, speedily ending the suffering.
It never gets easier, taking the life of another living thing. But out here, in the Silver Isles, survival left no room for waste or sentiment.
She had to ensure that they used everything the elk had to give. The hide would be tanned and stretched by the hearth, turned into warm cloaks or patched into boots. The meat would be dried and smoked to last the rest of the winter— some cooked for tonight’s stew, while the rest carefully stored in the cold cellar. Even every bone would be cleaned and carved into buttons, tools, or barbed tips for fishing spears, in preparation for the short summer fishing season.
On an island like this, tucked far beyond the mainland where the ships only came in summer, nothing could be spared. Every kill had a purpose. Every part had its use.
She bound the elk’s legs with rope, then dragged it to her weathered wooden sled. With practiced hands, she looped the rope through the handlebars, leaned into the harness at her waist, and began the long trudge home. The sled creaked under the weight, carving a slow, deep path through the snow behind her.
The forest had fallen silent once more. Only the distant call of a snowbird and the rhythmic scrape of the sled disturbed the stillness. She knew these woods like the lines of her own hands— every crooked pine, every half-frozen stream, every narrow path where the drifts ran deep.
Her entire life was spent in this remote part of the world, where winters were long, visitors rare, and silence constant. Beyond the forest and cliffs lay nothing but icy sea in all directions. The village was centots away across the ridge, and she and her mother had chosen— or perhaps been forced— to live even farther, where no road reached and no one came unless they had to.
She always suspected it was because she and her mother weren’t quite like the others. While the villagers had dark hair and alabaster skin, theirs was fairer, with a soft rose-tinted porcelain complexion and lighter hair that stood out no matter the season. So, they kept to themselves, and Liora had long suspected they were once outsiders— at least her father must have been.
She’d never known him. Her mother didn’t speak of him, not really. Only once, when she was small, had she dared to ask. Her mother had gone quiet for a long time before vaguely answering, “I think you would’ve liked him.”
That was all. No name. No grave. Just the aching absence of something she was supposed to have had.
Every summer, when the ice broke and the ships returned, her mother would receive two— sometimes three— letters. They came folded in crisp, wax-sealed envelopes, their edges smudged from the long journey across the sea. Always addressed in the same three handwritings. Her mother never opened them right away. She would tuck them into the folds of her apron, make tea, and sit by the window with her hands still and her eyes far away. When she finally read them— slowly, tracing each word with her finger— she would cry. Not loudly. Not brokenly. Just a steady stream of tears, like something inside her had been gently unstitched.
There was never an explanation, and Liora had never asked. She hadn’t tried to read them in secret either, not just because it felt wrong, but because she could barely make out the Imperial language the letters were written in.
Near the end of the summer months, when the fishermen and sailors stopped on the northern shore for the last time until the next year, Liora would sometimes hike the long path to the docks under the pretense of trading game meat or hides. But mostly, she went to listen. She’d linger near crates and sails, ears open as sailors spoke of places she had no context for— cities with buildings taller than the trees, deserts of red sand, rivers that sang beneath bridges of steel and stone.
And something inside her would stir. A tug. A whisper. A restlessness she couldn’t name.
All Liora Windmere could do was stare off into the horizon, to a world that was beyond her grasp.
The island was all she had ever known. But sometimes, when the wind blew just right across the water, she wondered if it was calling to her— if somewhere beyond the waves, there was a life meant for more than snow and silence.
But then she would think of her mother.
Of the way her hands trembled in winter, of the lines deepening around her eyes, of the long pauses between her breaths when she read those letters. Liora didn’t know what her mother had lost or left behind. But whatever it was, it had carved out something hollow in her— something Liora had spent her whole life trying to fill, even if she didn’t understand how.
She wanted nothing more than to leave. To see the cities she heard so much about— Crowngriffin, Danthold and Wester. She wanted to go and explore the hot deserts and know what warm weather would feel like. She wanted to be no one for a while, untethered and free. But the thought of leaving her mother alone in their cabin, the thought of her sitting by that window with no one but memories and unanswered letters— it rooted her like the trees she hunted beneath.
Torn between the world that called to her from across the sea… And the woman who never said a word to make her stay, yet held her there all the same.
And so she decided to stay.
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