Sorry I've been away for a while, mid-year exams are coming up so I'll give you guys a ten parter that'll be released over a random period of time.
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In the year when the rats outnumbered the children, and smoke curled from chimneys like the breath of sick old men, a girl was sold.
Her name had once been Adela. Or so she thought. Names were strange things, in this place. They stuck to you like scabs, but peeled away at the first rain. She remembered being Adela on a morning when the fields still bore wheat and not corpses, and her father still had both eyes. But hunger, like rot, takes in pieces. One finger. Then another. Then a daughter.
The man who called himself her father was a miller, or used to be, before the river turned black and choked on its own sediment. The wheel outside his hovel stood still, draped in moss like the jawbone of a great fossilized beast. His teeth were yellowed stumps. His lies, whiter.
"She can spin straw into gold," he said.
He said it while drunk on fermented root wine, giggling before the King's men like a man who'd just vomited something valuable. They didn't believe him, not at first. But then they saw her. Pale and hollow-eyed, with hair the color of old corn silk. She looked like a girl from a dream or a fever, and that was enough.
The King wanted her.
He sent iron-shod horses to drag her to the castle—up the winding path, through the screaming forest where children once played and now whispered from the bark. She arrived at dusk. The sky above the spires pulsed with blood-orange clouds, and the towers looked like crooked fingers pulling heaven apart.
The King greeted her in a room lined with tapestries of conquest: wolves being gutted, peasants flayed in golden thread. He wore a robe stitched with beetle shells and a crown of glass that made his scalp bleed. His voice was syrupy and slow, too sweet to be clean.
"If you can spin for me, girl, you will be my bride."
His smile was mostly teeth and menace.
"If not, well—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
The guards locked her in a stone room with a wheel, a pile of straw, and a single candle that flickered like a dying breath. The shadows clung like oil. The straw reeked of mildew and mice. She sat beside it, dry-eyed. She did not cry. Not because she was brave, but because she was empty.
She had nothing to give this room. Not even fear.
Until she heard the knock.
No door. Just the stone behind her. Three gentle raps, like bone on bone.
Then it stepped through the wall.
It was small. Not a dwarf, not a man, but something ancient and compacted. Like a corpse left too long under a frozen lake. Its limbs were thin, twisted like roots. Its head too large. Its smile too wide. Its eyes—two black pits, each containing a pinprick of gold, like coins dropped down a well.
"Name your need," it said, "and I shall name the price."
Its voice was like thread snapping.
She whispered, "I want to live."
It smiled. "Then give me something living."
She hesitated. "I have nothing."
The creature tilted its head. "You have your name."
She blinked.
It nodded slowly. "Give it. I'll hold it in trust. You may still wear it. But it will no longer belong to you."
She did not understand. But she agreed.
And the creature spun.
The straw hissed. The air filled with the scent of charred sugar. The wheel turned not with squeaks, but low groans, like ribs being cracked. Gold spilled out—wet, molten, steaming with something red beneath the shimmer. The girl—no longer Adela—watched in silence.
When the guards returned at dawn, they found the pile of gold, glistening like bile, and the girl asleep beside it.
They did not see the thing hiding in the wall, grinning.
They did not smell the burn.
They called for the King, who came at once, robes still wet with the blood of some other misfortune. He was ecstatic. He promised her marriage. Then more gold. Then a crown of her own. But only if she could do it again.
And so they brought her to a larger room. With more straw. With taller ceilings. With torches that did not flicker but hissed, as if lit by something more than flame.
She waited.
And when the knock came, she no longer flinched.
This time, the creature asked, "What else will you give?"
She said nothing.
So it plucked something from her shoulder. A hair. Long, pale, and trembling.
"This," it said, "is the thread of lineage. A single strand holds many generations. I can spin it with the straw, but you must understand—it frays backwards."
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"You'll see," it said.
And again, the wheel turned.
The straw crackled. Sparks leapt. Gold bled out in viscous coils, threaded with red. The air shimmered with heat. And in the village beyond, her father screamed, not knowing why his legs no longer worked, not knowing her name, not even knowing if he'd ever had a daughter at all.
By morning, she had riches enough to drown in.
And no family.
The King's greed deepened. He brought her to the highest tower, the grandest room, with bales of straw so high they scraped the rafters. He promised this would be the last time. Then he would wed her. Make her Queen.
He lied, of course.
But she no longer cared.
When the knock came, she was already smiling.
"I know what you want," she said.
The creature blinked slowly.
"You want the child."
It grinned, revealing too many teeth. "You're learning."
And the wheel turned once more.
This time, the screams could be heard for miles.