Deadfall

A two-hour novella set in the village where the Codebreaker Chronicles begin. Kira is fourteen. Her father is chief of Millbrook, he has been training her four years, and the terms of her first solo hunt are his: three days, alone, north as far as Owlcrag and not one step past it, and come back with something that feeds people. She keeps to them for two days. Four miles past her father's line, in a fold with a fire in it the size of a dinner plate, a goblin is burning marks into a scraped hide. A long line with a kink in it, where the creek bends at the gravel bar. Four strokes for the ridges. A narrow gap between two heavier marks, and a rectangle below it. The trail her village uses, gone over and over until it is the deepest mark on the skin, and then crossed out. And new, shallow, pale beside the rest: a line coming down the eastern side, off the trail, in the soft ground, under the lip of the slope the whole way. It is a drawing of Millbrook, made by something that has been looking at Millbrook for a long time. Cutting it off the frame is the easy part. Getting it home is four miles of timber, a fall through storm-thrown deadfall, a leg that will not hold her, and nobody coming, because nobody knows where she is. No System, no status window, no magic of any kind - a fourteen-year-old with a bow, a broken leg, and a piece of scraped skin her village has to see. A complete, self-contained story, and the entrance to the Codebreaker Chronicles.