Chapter 1: The Last Cup
27 September 1332, an afternoon as cold as any in the most common village of the Kingdom of Acatos, famous for accumulating horse manure in front of the inn and for having well-ridden axes before winter. A town with no prestige, no fun, no name, called Roble Seco.
What's its biggest "feat"? To be the cradle of the largest woodwork stretch. Here, babies, instead of a bottle, receive a small axe; the first garment you see on an infant is a plaid shirt and a pair of boots. We are the fuel for the chimneys of the kingdom and one more tentacle of the octopus of modern slavery. I, one more villager since I was born, am... wait, wait, wait. Guess the great mystery and I'll give you five golden lugons to guess my profession!
Looks like we got a winner! That's right, I'm a woodcutter. A fucking woodcutter among four thousand woodcutters. The only thing that distinguishes us is the color of our plaid shirts and how worn out our boots are. I have a cousin who has used the same "boots"—if they can even be called that—since he was five years old; he punched some holes in the front and turned them into some horrible brown leather sandals.
My name is Rober and this winter, on September 30th, year 32, I will turn 25. In spite of my terrible introduction to our unglamorous little town, village, community, or whatever this mountain of shit called Roble Seco is, I'm not as dissatisfied with living here as it seems.
Yeah, I hate the way we are thrust at birth into a lifelong role with limited sources of entertainment. That's right, I hate it and I can't hide it, but hey! We have the old wine of the Roto Teeth Inn and the tits of fat Teresa (from the inn). What would this village be without Teresa's strangely asymmetrical tits?
We've spent entire nights inventing stories about how one tit became immensely larger than the other. My cousin Juan told me that the other night he saw Teresa pounding garlic with that thing, but of course that's an exaggeration from that bastard... or so I think. My father used to say that one night while throwing away the trash, Teresa ran into a male bear and her two orphaned cubs; to save her life, she had to nurse the bear's young by alternating them all night, and ever since, her titty grew as large as a mother bear's. My theory is that Teresa has a tumor, and since she's poor and we live in a poor town, no one has ever examined her, and she'll drop dead at any time. I hope not, because if she does, what else would we talk about in the most boring town of the Five Kingdoms?
Other than that, we have a wet and cold climate most of the year. When it doesn't snow, it rains; and when there are no puddles, there is mud. Our toes are wrinkled from constant moisture, like being submerged daily in a mess. Some comrades have more fungus between their toes than a five-acre botanical garden. Generation after generation, we've grown paler, and our hair lighter; crossbreeding with northern cousins ended up turning us into a pale, dim-witted race with coarse features: pronounced nose and chin, incipient beards, and hair as red as a sorrel horse in a blizzard.
The only person of color in this town is my cousin. He's not actually my blood cousin: his uncle married one of my sisters when we were just babies, and the family bond did its job. We're cousins now, no doubt about it.
I finished my workday. I stopped at the Roto Teeth Inn, like every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of the week (and sometimes Monday and Tuesday). I'm a few blocks away from the place. The breeze tightens the skin on my lips like cold water, and the moon reflects in the puddles along the dirt street. Despite wearing winter gear, the cold bites deep.
There is no one outside their house; only lit chimneys and an orange glow beneath the doors can be seen. Tonight is as dark as usual. It is not a very violent town; last week only a family of farmers died. The doctor said it was a bear preparing to hibernate when winter worsens. It ate to the marrow of the bones, crushed skulls, and went into... well, anyway, it was horrible. Ever since that happened, I've been running down this street without looking into the alleys between the huts. If anything happens, I hope it's quick because what a horrible death, right?