The Price of Survival

Branches whipped Scarlet’s face as she bolted through the forest. In the distance behind her, the village she was born and raised in was burning to the ground. Raiders had come, murdering and pillaging, kidnapping villagers to use as slaves. Scarlet only managed to get away because her family’s home was near the edge of the village and her mother heard the screams of the townspeople. The cold air burned in her lungs as she ran with all she had. She wanted to stop so badly, but as she slowed, she heard men crashing through the woods behind her. 

They found me, she thought, looking back as she ran. It was two men, wearing fur clothing, covered in blood. They had dirt and grime embedded in their tough, scarred faces, their blackened teeth hiding behind cracked lips. They pounded through the brush and little snow dunes like wild animals, sending a white mist flying behind them. Scarlet pushed on, desperate to escape the pursuit for fear of her life. The men screamed obscenities as they chased her, their hot breath turning to steam in the winter air. 

“Come on, little piggie, we won’t hurt you too bad.” One of the men yelled as he ran, uttering a savage laugh as he spoke. Scarlet didn’t even look back this time. She knew that she couldn’t take her eyes off the opening in the forest in front of her. Thorns scraped her arms as she flailed through the forest, pushing branches out of the way to try and clear a path. Suddenly, an object sailed past her vision, a knife barely missing her shoulder. She looked back for a split second and lost her footing, her head hitting a fallen log. The world faded as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Her vision blurred and she could just barely make out the forms of the men, their feet crunching the snow underneath. 

“Little b***h really had us going,” one of them said, noticeably having to catch his breath. “She’s lucky I didn’t actually hit her. Be a waste of a good slave.” They each grabbed one of her arms and drug her through the snow. The freezing wetness stung her knees as it made its way through her clothing.Their gnarled fingers wrapped around her slender arms like ropes, almost burning her skin with friction as they dragged her through the snow.

 

After what felt like an eternity, they came upon a campground about a mile from where her village was. Scarlet could see the flames and smoke in the distance, marking the site of her home burning to the ground. Her eyes clung to the sight of her mother's house aflame at the edge of the forest. 

 

She was brought through a makeshift gate at the entrance to the camp. Torches burned, illuminating a vast swath of tents laid out. In the darkness of the night, the camp seemed to go on forever, stretching into the distance. How could none of the villagers notice all of this so close to home? She could barely make out the forms of dozens of men, standing around fires, sharpening weapons and laughing. Eventually, they brought her to a small tent near the center of the camp near a huge ornate red tent. Without care for her health, they tossed her in through the tent flaps. She hit the ground hard and started to cry hot tears, but the cold air that followed from outside drying them before they could escape her eyes. 

After a moment, a small hand was placed on her back causing her to look up. It was another child about her age, her face dirty and saddened. Scarlet looked around and saw there were eight other children in the cramped tent. The girl helped her up and helped her lay down with the other young children. 

Sleep did not come easy for Scarlet, between her recent ordeal and the cold air seeping into the thin tent. She tried to think of something other than the pain and cold, looking around at the nothingness that surrounded her. Over the heads of the other children in the tent, two small pins of light peered over to her. She froze for a moment and closed her eyes shut tightly. After a few seconds, she reopened them to see the pins of light were still there, the eyes of a slightly older girl. 

Scarlet sat up, not taking her eyes off of the girl, who sat across the tent. The girl said nothing, just lazily watched Scarlet with intent. The only noise between them was the soft snoring of the other children. Suddenly, the girl flashed a slight, tired smile, directing Scarlet to sit down next to her. She hesitated for a moment, before crawling to the opposite end of the tent, careful to be silent as she could barely hear the ravings of drunken raiders just outside. The canvas walls rippled slightly with the wind�"or maybe it was someone brushing past. Scarlet kept her head low, her breath shallow, until she was beside the girl.

Up close, the girl smelled faintly of ash and something metallic. Like the smell of dried blood. Her smile had faded, replaced by a look of undulated sadness. Now that she was closer, she realized that she knew this girl from her village.

Her name tumbled forward in Scarlet’s mind like a stone breaking loose: Elira.

But that wasn’t possible. Elira had vanished months ago�"taken during a raid, presumed dead. Her parents had mourned, the village had mourned. She remembered the hollow looks in the grown-ups’ eyes as they realized she was never coming back. Scarlet had cried for her. “Elira?” Scarlet whispered, her voice breaking around the edges.

The girl turned to her slowly, and there was something hollow in her eyes. Not empty�"worse. Like they had been filled with the wrong memories.

“I remember you,” Elira said. “But not like I should.”

Scarlet pulled her hand back slightly, her throat tightening. “Elira… what did they do to you?”

Elira looked away, her shoulders curving inward. “We serve them now,” she said quietly. “That’s what happens when they take you. If you’re useful, they don’t kill you.”

Scarlet’s breath caught. “You mean… like slaves?”

Elira nodded, but it wasn’t a full nod�"it was distant, mechanical. “They don’t call it that. They call it earning your keep. They take our names, our homes, and then they give us new ones. They decide who we are, what we’re worth.”

She looked down at a bloody scrap of cloth in her lap.

“I clean their knives. I wash their clothes. I smile when they tell me to. And when they’re done using us for the day, they make us sleep beside the children so we remember how helpless we are.”

Scarlet stared at her, mouth dry. The weight of Elira’s words settled on her chest like a stone, pressing until it hurt to breathe.

The girl she remembered�"Elira with the loud laugh, the scraped knees from climbing trees too high�"was still in there somewhere. But now she sat curled like a shadow, speaking in the voice of someone who had forgotten how to live. 

Elira's face softened just slightly, and she shifted in her spot, curling tighter into herself, as though the act of doing so might shield her from the weight of her own memories.

Scarlet remained frozen beside her, the echo of Elira’s words ringing louder than the distant sounds of the raiders outside. How helpless we are.

She felt that awful truth, a quiet cold that sank deep into her bones, but the exhaustion of everything�"the fear, the helplessness, the sorrow�"settled in her too. Her eyelids fluttered, heavy, like the weight of the world was pulling them down. She tried to fight it, to keep her thoughts sharp, to remember Elira’s warning.

But then, beside her, Elira’s breathing evened out, the soft, hollow sound of it almost soothing in its rhythm.

Scarlet blinked again, slow, deliberate.

The tent was so still now, the quiet so thick, that the snoring children sounded like the gentle pulse of the night itself. The wind whispered against the canvas. And despite the heaviness in her chest, despite the cold knot in her stomach, sleep began to creep in, quiet, inevitable.

The darkness pressed in from all sides. The last thing Scarlet heard before she succumbed to it was the faintest whisper from Elira’s lips.

“Try to dream... if you can.”

And then, all was still as they drifted off to rest what little they could for now.

Reviews

[JayG]

While I respect and report what you’re trying to do, like nearly 90% of those who turn to writing fiction, you’ve fallen into the “Storyteller” trap. And since the writing it produces works perfectly for the author, you’ll see no problem. Yet, were this to be submitted to a publisher it would be immediately rejected.

Why? Have your computer read this to you and you’ll hear the problem: Because the reader has no idea of how YOU would read it, the only emotion in the words is what punctuation suggests. And because of that, start to finish, it reads as dispassionately as a report, of the form: This happened...Then that happened...and after that...” History books are written like that, and how many have you read for fun?

People who come to fiction aren't hoping to learn what happened. They want you to make THEM feel as if they're actively living the story as-the-protagonist.

For you the narrator’s voice is alive. For you the storyteller’s performance is real as you read. But can the reader know the emotion you would place into the words? No. Can they know gestures you would use? Nope, How about the changes in expression and body language?

See the problem? The skills of a medium that makes use of sound and vision can't be used in one like ours that doesn’t.

The short version: Writers have been figuring out how to avoid the traps and hook the reader for centuries. Acquire those skills—the ones the pros use, and you avoid the traps and hook the reader. Skip that step though...

To write fiction you need the skills of writing fiction, not the report writing skills of school. No way around that, and there are no shortcuts.

And since your story deserves the best presentation it can have, grab a copy of Jack Bickham’s, Scene and Structure and dig in, to acquire that knowledge. You’ll enjoy the learning, and the practice is writing stories that are more fun to write and read.

https://archive.org/details/scenestructurejackbickham

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

- - - - - --

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein

[RyanMills234]

Thank you for the review. I understand that it is constructive criticism. I will definitely look into Scene and Structure. I see that you had things to say about HOW the story is written, but how did you feel about the plot itself?