The Blood Thief

Chapter 1

If you were to walk down the streets of Fort Grislock on the cool, windy break of a Sunday afternoon, you would hear the sounds of wind chimes.

The wind chimes ring out through the hollow town every Sunday afternoon when the wind hits the fort walls just right; the crystalized honey-sweet sound licking the air and making a refreshing change from the stinging, bone-dry breath that mauls the inside of your nose and the back of your throat. Snow is never a pure white in Fort Grislock, or any square inch of Kanatika District. For everything that remained still always would feel a dry colourless grey, reminiscent of dusty mummified bones that had been hidden in a concrete basement for two hundred years before their inevitable discovery. Despite the thickness of the snow, the air held no moisture. The snow acted as the foundation for the town.

As uninviting and grey as the town may seem, the borders of the town stretch a far way, and the population is voluminous, and operates just like that of a town you would envision perhaps near your own home. The packed snow becomes roads with the use of busted lumber-trucks and longhaired horses to flatten it. The only hint of modern society is the ivory-white train that connects the entire district that will occasionally rear its smooth, snake-like body across the magnetic monorail that clings to the side of the mountain. Two or three miles away, the ground juts back upwards from underneath the snow as these mountains emerge. The grey of the ground transforms into the black of the coal mines and deep navy of the lumber farms where the people of the town would so often work. After all, the only other option in Fort Grislock is to become a cook.

All of the buildings in the town are dug into deep trenches, but never as deep as the dirt twenty feet below. The houses here look nothing more than shacks with chimneys sticking out from the top of a buried wooden box, a concrete or brick building here and there, and occasionally you would find a building that lay atop the ground, such as the school, supermarket, city hall, or the church. The houses themselves were small shacks painted in worn-down colours—always dark to preserve the heat—and would occasionally have small porches and balconies for hanging the drying meat of the days hunt, or perhaps small silver wind-chimes, like those that hung on the front of the house belonging to the Quailit family.

After the Sunday of nineteen-year-old Liam Quailit's disappearance, the chimes stopped ringing.