Frost (eBook)

Chapter One

“My name is Frost. I am a Sorrow, daughter of a Sorrow, and a descendant of hundreds more Sorrows.” I whispered the lines to myself like a comforting poem. It should have been a comfort. It was a fact. What I was, what I had always been, and what everyone in the Otherplace would always be. I had learned those regulation lines before almost anything else. They were always there, playing on repeat in the back of my mind. My name is Frost. I am a Sorrow, daughter of a Sorrow, and a descendant of hundreds more Sorrows.

The road stretched on before my feet, cold and rough and quiet. Actually, that was a lie. The Otherplace was never quiet. The walls whispered secrets of all that had happened behind them that no one had seen. The ground cried out from all the evil that trod across it. The air laughed at all the suffering it never tried to choke. It was suffocating when eyes seemed to watch you from every shadow, tracing your movements and waiting for you to trip and become another piece of history. Not that there was anyone to keep track of history in here. This was a prison, not a library.

My half-brother, Hail, checked on me every second as we walked as if he was also waiting for me to trip. But I was always there, just off his shoulder. He shrugged his coat higher up his neck and led me dutifully around the corner, heading to our usual spot, where we would carry out our day’s mission.

Despite us being half-siblings, one would never know by looking at us. Probably because he hadn’t inherited our mother’s curse or looks, as I had. Maybe the walls knew our relation, having watched Hail raise me from age four to sixteen, but that was all. He had inherited the curse of his father, whom I had never met, and hence I never really knew what Hail’s curse was. But mine always felt obvious. I possessed the touch-of-death.

What had mother called it again?

Overkill. Everything living shriveled and died at the faintest brush of my skin. All for some crime of an ancestor centuries ago, whom I’d never known. And now I was that unlucky ancestor’s final flesh and blood. The last with this overkill, deadly curse.

Every Sorrow was the spawn of a Dwimmer of Ergon’s cruelty. The dwimmers ruled all of Tyra, the outside world I was shielded from in the depths of the Otherplace. Thirteen dwimmers, called the Dwimmers of Ergon, were the supreme rulers. Thirteen beings with unmatchable craft, capable of countless curses potent enough to be passed down for generations. Thirteen monsters behind every cursed Sorrow in the Otherplace prison, who were dying every day, just to be replaced and forgotten.

Dwimmercraft was an unparalleled power and the very embodiment of fear for any Sorrow. A dwimmer could alter something’s state of being with their craft, changing something for worse or, supposedly, better. They were what fabricated nightmares.

It was common knowledge inside the Otherplace that everyone hated the dwimmers, especially the Dwimmers of Ergon and everything they stood for. Their pictures brought into the Otherplace via smugglers or delivery carts were defaced, publicly burned, or used for mundane purposes as petty revenge.

Everything in the Otherplace was petty, it seemed. Petty vendettas just to pass the time, petty grudges just to have someone to hate, someone to fight. But no one could fight the Dwimmers of Ergon. The monsters.

But yet… we lived. On and on we lived. Sorrows cursed never to speak beneath a shriek, never to see blue, or to live crippled and deformed forever all lived together, on and on, encased in a prison that some dared to call a town, even if the Otherplace was just a waste bin where dwimmers threw us like garbage, never to mix with ordinary people. We suffered and licked scraps from the bottoms of barrels, fought tooth and nail for our lives every other day, and yet… we lived. On and on.

I didn’t realize I’d gone on autopilot until my brother snapped me out of it, bringing me out of my head and into our mission. “Hey, Frost!” Hail hissed, his breath jarringly hot against my ear. “Move!”

I snapped back into focus. Delivery carts. I was supposed to be paying attention.

I dropped to the ground and rolled sideways beneath the rubble of a recently toppled building. The old structure looked halfway to crumbling into nothing, but it shielded our bodies as we hid from the new commotion passing by. Delivery carts just steps from our hiding place jerked over the uneven ground in a string of mystery, lurching with the plodding of somber steeds. They looked on death’s door, heads hanging low, hooves clinking the occasional pebble. The drivers didn’t look much better, with vacant holes in their skulls for eyes, seeing no farther than their work boots propped in front of them. Blocky pipes curled with wispy smoke were wedged in the drivers’ teeth, further hazing their faces.

I felt Hail stretched out beside me, his breathing low and silent. He was six years older than me but hardly any larger. He made the most of it, making up for his lack of height with enviable nimbleness.

My heart was beating at the same rate as the horse’s hooves pulling the cart, slow and unenthused. That made sense, since robbery was a typical pastime for me, which sounded a lot worse than it was. We had performed this particular escapade countless times, refining it to run smoothly and efficiently. After practice, it was as simple as breathing.

Slowly, stirring in my most controlled movement, I adjusted into a crouch. The carts were approaching at anything but a steady pace, lurching on weak wheels over the uneven ground. I could feel my blood pump faster at the prospect of what might reside inside.

I lost count of the wooden beasts as they rolled past in deplorable succession. Tarps flapped sluggishly in the sour air like the wooden beasts’ grimy tongues, shielding my eager eyes from the goods resting inside.

When I squinted, I could make out the faintest wisps of purple haze coating the skyline and the carts passing through it, becoming visible as soon as they crossed the threshold. They made it look so easy to pass through the haze of purple dwimmercraft, the shield blocking us off from the rest of Tyra. Tyra, a land of freedom, the country that shunned people like me.

“You ready?” I flinched away as Hail’s breath tickled against my neck again, shifting sideways to look at him. He was positioned identically to me, ghost pale skin in stark contrast with our dark surroundings.

“Now?” I asked, not caring to whisper. It wasn’t as if the deliverymen would be paying enough attention to their surroundings to hear us.

Hail shook his head. “Not yet.”

My pulse seemed to thrum with strengthened resilience as the final cart entered the barrier. The very one we would steal from. If we attempted to heist any of the others, we ran the risk of the deliveryman behind us seeing our exit and entry. Even with laws forbidding Sorrows from taking supplies and food from carts before they were unloaded, when there wasn’t enough to go around, no one cared about following the laws. That was an unspoken rule among Sorrows. Laws in the Otherplace were made to be broken. If you chose to follow them, there was nothing there for you.

“Now?” I whispered.

“Almost,”

“But he’s really close,”

“Not yet, Frosty Brains.”

I rolled my eyes. My fingers tapped out an anxious melody against the dusty ground. At the same time, my eyes darted over every detail I could spy, squinting through the dim light, not daring to blink.

Right then seemed like a good time to pounce to me, but I kept my trust in Hail. Finally, just as the back of the final cart was exiting my sight, Hail hissed in my ear again.

“Go!”

Moving as one, my half-brother and I slunk from our hiding place and pounced onto the back of the cart, balancing weightlessly on the tips of our bare feet. The driver didn’t make any move to stop and kick us off, so I assumed we had gone unnoticed. Still in fluid sync, Hail and I folded back the rough burlap covering. We went to work, snatching from rickety crates and half-empty bags, taking whatever fit in our hands.

The two of us had only just begun to loot when something small jumped to its feet at the front of the cramped space. In the dim light, I could just make out the shape of a short boy. A surge of panic jolted my body, so I did the first thing that came to mind.

As the kid’s eyes bulged, I slammed my body into his. The breath flew from his lungs in a wet cough pointed straight at my face, and I had to focus hard not to gag at his bad breath. We sprawled in a tangle on the floor with a mild thump I hoped the clomping of horse hooves muffled. I slapped a hand over his mouth. That simple movement could have killed him had I opted out of wearing gloves that day, but I was covered, luckily for the kid.

He wriggled under my weight, though he couldn’t manage to get very far since he was half my size. The kid looked six or seven, and I almost took pity on his situation. I internally whipped the feeling out of myself. There was no room for pity in the heart of a Sorrow, especially toward someone like the young boy beneath me, whose collarbone, unlike mine, was blank.

“You see this, kid?” I snarled, using the forceful tone Hail had spent hours helping me perfect. I yanked down the top of my shirt from its place, just far enough for him to see the marking on my collarbone. “You know what this is?”

He obviously did. The boy froze beneath me at the...