Despite the enthusiasm radiating outwards from the inner city as the midterm battles of Anatheon raged on.
The Citadel's underbelly, the Slag, was a maw of despair, its streets lined with the hollow-eyed and the forgotten.
But those who dwelled on the edge of the Slag, lived even worse.
Winter had come like a slow, creeping executioner, its icy fingers tightening around the throats of the destitute.
The slums, already a graveyard of dreams, became a frozen purgatory where rats grew fat on the starving.
Among the wretched was Elara, a woman whose beauty had long been gnawed away by hardship.
It began with frostbite, not hunger.
The walls of her hovel in the Slag wept with condensation, bleeding dampness into the meager hay she and her daughter slept on.
The wind outside howled like some ancient, unseen beast, slipping through every crack, gnawing at skin and breath.
It was the longest winter Halgrith Citadel had seen in decades. But the True Gods did not descend into the Slag.
No divine light warmed these streets. No ration was spared for the forgotten.
Her name had been Elya once.
Now, the Slag knew her as "the Stitcher," a mother who mended scraps for coin too meager to matter. She had sold almost every last item of warmth, then her dignity, and finally her name.
Now, her hands were cracked from cold, her voice a rasp. Beside her, always, was her daughter, Liora—a child of six years, with wide, trusting eyes and a laugh that had once been the only light in their crumbling hovel.
That name echoed with a dying sweetness, each syllable a reminder of something worth saving.
But laughter had died weeks ago.
---
Week One: The Crumbling
The first pangs of hunger were a nuisance, nothing more.
Elya tightened her belt, sold her last good shawl, and bought a loaf of stale bread.
She broke it in half, giving Lilia the larger piece. The child, ever sensible, noticed.
"Mama, you're not eating."
"I had mine earlier," Elya lied, forcing a smile.
Liora frowned but said nothing. She was too young to understand the depths of desperation, yet old enough to know when her mother was lying.
They survived the first week on boiled rat bones and dried moss.
Liora never cried. She asked instead — politely — when food might come again, and if Mama could tell another story about the gods in the city.
She told tales of warmth and valor, of fire-baked bread and fields kissed by sunlight. But she could feel her lips crack deeper with each lie.
---
Week Two: The Bargaining
The bread ran out. The coin ran out.
Elara stood in line at the almshouse, shoulders hunched against the wind, only to be turned away. "No more today," the overseer grunted, not meeting her eyes.
She tried the temples next, kneeling before indifferent altars, whispering prayers to the gods who lived mere miles away. The priests offered blessings, not bread.
That night, she sold the only thing she had left to a merchant whose breath stank of wine.
He paid her in moldy cheese and bruises as he kicked her out.
The ring her husband had left her was gone.
She wept as she watched her daughter chew, not from shame, but because it wasn't enough.
---
Week Three: The Hollowing
Lilia's ribs began to show. She no longer asked why her belly hurt.
She simply curled against her mother at night, small and shivering, as the wind howled through the cracks in the walls.
Elara's milk had dried up years ago, but her body remembered the ache of nurturing something it could no longer sustain.
She dreamed of feasts—roasted meats, dripping with fat, warm bread slathered in butter. She woke with her mouth watering and her stomach clenching like a fist.
Outside, a neighbor's child died. No one had the strength to bury him. The rats came before dawn.
On the fourteenth day, Liora offered her doll to the fire.
"I want you to be warm too, Mama."
The doll, stitched from discarded wool and string, was the last piece of color in their world. Elya took it, hands trembling. She couldn't find the words.
That night, Elya woke to the sound of something breathing inside the walls. But the hovel had no other rooms. The breath stank of salt and rot, like brine-drenched meat left to fester. When she lit the oil shard, nothing was there.
---
Week Four: The Breaking
The hunger was a living thing now, a beast curled inside her, gnawing at her from within. She caught Liora staring at her own fingers, as if considering their worth.
"Don't," Elya whispered, pulling her close. "Never think it."
But she was thinking it too.
She scrounged for scraps in the gutters, fought a dog for a bone, lost. Her vision swam. Her teeth loosened. Her hair fell out in clumps.
Liora no longer spoke. She simply stared, her eyes too large for her sunken face.
The snow fell, relentless, burying the dead where they lay.
Elya's mind frayed. She saw phantoms in the shadows—whispering figures offering banquets that vanished when she reached for them.
One night, she woke to Liora's whimper. The child was chewing on her own wrist, teeth barely breaking the skin. Elara screamed, grabbing her, shaking her.
"No! No, my love, no—"
Liora blinked up at her, confused. "I'm sorry, Mama. I'm just so hungry."
Elya held her and wept.
---
Week five : Hunger
The last candle guttered out. The cold was inside them now, in their bones, in their blood. Lilia's breathing was shallow, her skin gray.
Elya stroked her hair, humming a lullaby she no longer had the voice to sing.
"Mama," Liora whispered. "Will it hurt?"
Elya's heart shattered.
She did not answer.
---
On the thirty-second day, her dreams began to fray. She saw Liora standing in the snow, calling to her from beyond the frost-covered window.
Except Liora had not moved in two days.
There were no tears left in Elya's body. Only tremors.
She began hearing voices whispering in a tongue older than memory.
Sometimes they came from the corners of the room, other times from the shadows of her daughter's still chest. Hunger twisted into something else — a pressure in her skull, a buzzing in her gums, a gnawing at her own self.
And then, on the thirty-fourth day, she heard a knock.
A knock — in the Slag.
She opened the door to nothing but snow. And yet she felt something enter. A weight. An idea.
In the shadow of the doorway stood a cloaked figure with antlers of obsidian, faceless and still. It raised a hand toward her daughter's sleeping body and whispered.
"She need not be lost. Not if you take my gift."
Elya screamed. Not aloud — that was impossible by then — but inwardly, a soul-tear that cracked her mind like frost over glass. She turned away. Refused. The figure vanished.
But the idea stayed.
From then on, her dreams became vivid, too vivid. She saw herself changed — fingers longer, hunger vanished, flesh aglow with new purpose.
A monstrous purpose. In some dreams, she held Liora again, but her arms were claws, her face a mask of bone.
She stopped leaving the hovel.
By the sixth week, the Slag had frozen over. Others perished quietly, curled in corners like abandoned rags. No one came to collect them.
Elya lay beside her daughter, who hadn't moved in a long time. Her breath was shallow, fogging the air like smoke from dying embers.
In that moment, Elya broke.
Not in rage. Not in violence. But in silence.
She screamed again without sound, lips parting only to draw in the smell of decay that now hung everywhere.
She whispered apologies over and over. She wrapped Liora's body in their last remaining cloth and begged the gods for warmth, food, salvation. No god answered.
But the figure did return.
This time, it entered through her dream — through the walls of her sanity. The same antlered shadow with a voice like the scrape of metal across bone.
"You are loved. You are chosen. Hunger is a gate."
Then, at last, despite the pain, she screamed—a sound so raw it silenced even the wind.
But the Citadel did not answer.
The snow kept falling.
Elya did what the hunger demanded.
She no longer remembered her name. Only the hunger that drove her and the soft hum of a lullaby long since buried.
And somewhere far away, in the dark, something laughed.