Young Writers Society

In which RavenLord and ChieRynn (and maybe Featherstone) make excuses to torture their already suffering characters.

The world has suffered a devastating ice age. Hardly anything is still living, and the few humans that remain have either banded together into small tribes or gone off on their own in search of warmth and steady food.

Gaius Ash has taken his family off to one of the few untouched forests and has established a territory for himself. When his eldest son falls ill, however, he is forced to venture out of the forest with his daughter, Marcella, to seek out medicine.

In other parts, people flock to a mysterious leader who has a seemingly endless supply of food, medicine, and clothing. Gaius hears of this person and resolves to seek them out.

And that's where I'll leave it.



@ChieRynn
@Featherstone this is open to you as well, if you like! Only criteria is you need a tormented character

The Discussion Topic: Welcome to the End Times DT

Food.

It was all anyone thought about these days. With ice and snow abundant, water wasn't an issue. But food. Food was scarce. The animals were starving. The vegetation was almost non existent. There were few to no large creatures left alive. The only animals left were the small scavenging kind that lived under the snow on whatever was left preserved in the earth.

Cassius was hungry. His supply of food from the last group he came upon was dwindling. He had small bits of something frozen -it was either vegetation, meat, or a mixture of the two-, but that was all. He'd been forcing himself to ration what small amount of sustenance he had, but it hadn't done much good. At least it was something to ease the pain in his stomach when he stopped for the night.

Sometimes he wondered if the people he'd stolen it from were still alive. They'd been in pretty terrible shape when he came upon their little camp. Two of the three were ill and the third was one of the noble sort who'd given all of his food to his sick comrades. Consequently, he wasn't able to put up any sort of fight. Oh, he tried though. He barely had enough strength to lift his club but he tried. It was almost heartless to kill him, but at least his sick friends would be spared the sorrow of doing it themselves. For no doubt one of them would have fallen prey to the other two when the food ran out.

Cassius couldn't quite bring himself to the point of cannibalism just yet. This is why he was searching so desperately for a reliable source of food. The last thing he wanted to do was track down the frozen corpses of those who had succumbed to the cold. No. Few things bothered him, but that was one of them. But, as his food situation was becoming more and more dire, the idea had crossed his mind.

As he passed a snow covered frozen pond he stooped to scoop the snow away to see if there was anything trapped near the surface. Nothing. There were scuffs and cracks as if a creature had already dug something from the ice. He sighed and stared at his bleak reflection in the black ice. He was thin. The muscled tone that his jawline once had was completely gone. That, along with his bony hands and stumbling footstep made him seem twenty years older than he really was. To think, years ago, he would still be considered a young man. Now, he was lucky he'd reached his mid-thirties in this harsh and freezing environment.

With a grunt he stood up and looked around. He turned back to the snowy path through the bark-stripped trees, which provided a little shelter from the wind. There was a valley on the other side of those trees, he'd marked it down when he'd come that way a month ago. He had found the remnants of a hideout in a cave there, but no food. It seemed to be a hub for what little traffic existed on the roads of ice and snow. Perhaps there would be someone -or something- there now.

With one tired, angry, and almost hopeless step at a time, Cassius made his way through the trees towards the valley. With any luck, he'd make it there before dark.

(Guessing you already know what Gaius looks like but I'll stick a description in here anyway, along with Marcella's.)



"Any luck today?" Marcella shook her head at her father's query, slumping down onto her makeshift pallet on the other side of the cave.
"Not even so much as a hare," she said ruefully. She and her father were both growing weaker with each passing day. A blizzard had set in a couple weeks after they set out and the pair had been forced to take shelter in what had once been the den of a bear. Marcella and Gaius had both been thin before--it was a well-known trait of the Ash bloodline--but Gaius looked more like a skeleton than a human being now.

They had stayed here for far longer than they should have, but the blizzard raging outside was proving too harsh to travel through. So here they sat, wasting away and picking at whatever emaciated squirrel or rabbit Marcella was able to scrounge up from beneath the snow on a particular day.

Gaius reached out and poked at the dying fire with a stick, sighing. His breath puffed out in front of him, hanging for a moment as if deciding if it should freeze where it was, then gave in to the frigid air around it and disappeared. "We have to move at some point, Marcella. We're doing ourselves more harm than good at this point, and there could be a forest nearby."

Marcella shook her head slightly. "There is, but it's as dead as the others. I walked through it on the third day and there wasn't even a mouse to be found." She opened her pack and took out the bar of honeycomb they had been saving. It was diminishing rapidly as they cut it down bit by bit, but she guessed there were about four nibbles left. Taking her knife to it, she cut off a sliver and passed it across the fire to her father. Gaius took it without a word and put it in his mouth, chewing slowly. Marcella did the same, savoring the sweetness drawn out of the waxy material. She didn't like the look that had begun to enter her father's eyes; it was a look of resignation, but there was also a desperation, a hunger, that she knew well. She had seen it in the prisoners down in their cells before all this happened. Those prisoners would have killed for a scrap to eat.
Marcella knew her father. She knew what he had done.
She had no doubt he would do what was necessary if she did not find sufficient food soon.

"We'll get moving tomorrow," she murmured, gazing at the flickering embers in front of her. "Perhaps find a settlement along the way and see what supplies there are to be had." Gaius nodded slightly, not quite listening.