The village of Håvardby lay pressed between mountain and sea, a scatter of wooden houses clinging to the snowbound earth as if afraid to slip into the fjord. From afar it looked almost like a toy place, its chimneys sending ribbons of smoke into the pale winter sky, its streets narrow and half-buried in drifting snow. The forest crept close on the inland side, dark and endless, while the fjord stretched out on the other, black and frozen, a jagged scar cut deep into the land.
In winter, the fjord seemed less like water and more like a living thing that had been bound. Its surface hardened into glassy ice that fractured into long, splintering cracks. At night, the ice groaned long, low sighs that carried across the still air, as though something ancient stirred beneath. The villagers said the fjord whispered. They claimed it called names, luring the unwary out onto its frozen skin. Some even said it could swallow a soul whole, dragging it beneath the ice to sleep forever in its black depths.
Sarah believed the whispers. She had grown up with them, had stood many nights at the frozen shore with her breath steaming in the dark, listening to the mournful groans that rose from below. She knew the sound was not merely ice shifting. It was hunger. A hunger that echoed her own.
She lived in a cottage near the forest's edge, where the trees cast long shadows even in daylight. Her days were quiet, her hands busy with weaving and mending, her face a familiar one among the villagers. They thought of her as helpful, a woman who brought broth to the old and carried kindling to the widows. To them she was a comfort, a steady presence in the harshness of winter.
None of them knew what she truly was.
Sarah carried a hunger that had nothing to do with bread or meat. It was a hunger for what others carried within them emotions, soft and bright as candle flames. She could taste them in the air, feel them brush against her skin like threads of warmth. Joy was sweet, sorrow sharp and lingering, fear bitter but sustaining. She fed carefully, gently, so the villagers never noticed. A touch of comfort here, a kind word there, and she would sip at what they offered unknowingly. They felt lighter afterward, not understanding why, and they loved her for it.
She was not alone in this. There were others the nest. They gathered rarely and only in secret, bound by necessity rather than affection. Ingrid was the eldest, sharp-eyed and restless, her hunger barely contained. Erik was silent and broad-shouldered, his presence like stone, feeding on the villagers' fear when storms rattled the walls. There were two more, younger, neither yet as disciplined as they should have been. Together they shared the rule that kept them alive: never draw too deeply, never reveal the truth, and never let outsiders too close.
Sarah obeyed the rules outwardly, though her hunger often pressed against them. She had always felt… different. Where the others fed greedily, she lingered, savoring. She did not only take she listened, she cared. It was dangerous, Ingrid said, to grow attached. The villagers were cattle, not companions. But Sarah could not make herself believe it fully.
The winter deepened. Days shortened to pale hours, nights stretched long and heavy with silence. The fjord whispered more loudly in those months, its groans like voices drifting through the dark. Sarah often stood at the edge of the frozen water, her shawl drawn tight, gazing out at the vast white sheet and the black cliffs beyond. The whispers comforted her and unsettled her both, reminding her of her nature. She was like the fjord calm on the surface, but filled with something restless and dark beneath.
It was during one of these nights, when the wind howled through the trees and the village slept under snow, that Sarah felt a shift. A presence. The sense of something new approaching. She could not name it then, but she would remember later: the moment the balance of Håvardby began to change.
For soon, a stranger would come. And with him, emotions brighter than she had ever tasted, and dangers darker than any whisper beneath the ice.