Madelaine Lucy Hanson

The Leppingwell Girl

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The slow hum and clatter of a thousand wagons traipsing through the unforgiving heat and raw cold had come to an end, the only sound across the Ocrass Valley the low cry of the wind and the lost call of the gulls. Just an empty forest filled with the fast-mourned dead, shallow graves of hungry, sunken faces forgotten by those who survived to tell the tale on the other side of the Blestemat Crevasse. And that cabin, that decaying old cabin sweet with the scent of rotting wood and the burnt taste of tobacco long since smoked. And that candle. I should tell you about that cabin, I suppose.