Prologue to “The Thrift Shop Witch” (Working Title), First Draft

                A snap in the brush caused the fox to lift his head from his kill.  Fur bristling, he tightened his thin body and prepared to run.  When things remained silent, he still felt uneasy and decided to take his family’s meal somewhere safer.  Grabbing the rabbit by its tweed jacket, he dragged it out of the forest clearing, leaving behind its monocle and pocket watch.  Any other day he would’ve gone back for the belongs of the late Mr. Richards, they would fetch a good price at the market if no one asked where he got them, but there was something in his bones that was telling him he needed to get back to his den.

                The air smelt strange, it had the same bitter, biting scent of iron and ice.  Winter was a month behind them now, but that didn’t rule out frost if they were exceptionally unlucky.  A chilling breeze blew in, ruffling his fur and stinging his eyes.  As he hurried along the deer trail to his den, he took note of the sunny green leaves and drowsy bees humming gently around fresh flower blossoms.  He wondered how they would hold up under an unseasonal blanket of snow. 

                The fox came to the old wooden bridge over Deep Creek and knew he was almost home.  He could practically hear his mate’s snide remarks.  It took you that long to catch that?  Losing your touch in old age?  Taking careful steps onto the creaking bridge, he thought about how many times he’d crossed it, whispering a prayer that this wouldn’t be the time that the moldy planks gave out.  That creek didn’t earn its name for nothing, and he wasn't a strong swimmer.

                The bridge moaned, exclaimed in a crack, and the fox fell through.  He yelped, thought of his pregnant mate, the rabbit she’d never eat, his unborn pups without a father, that powerful creek swollen from the spring rains.  Instead, he hit something solid, and very, very cold.

                Shaking from the shock, he tried to stand up, but his paws slipped from underneath him.  As he fell onto his dead rabbit, the fox caught sight of the new blanched world around him.  The once sweeping creek had suddenly frozen solid and the reeds and shrubs around it were coated in sharp frost.  The cold air was squeezing its way between every hair on his body and chilling his blood.  Everything looked as if he’d awoken after an overnight chill.  He wasn’t sure if he should count his lucky stars for this inexplicable change or ask Death forgiveness for cheating him.

                After deciding he wouldn’t question his fortune, the fox grabbed his meal, carefully made his way to the bank of the creek, and crawled up the slope to return to the trail.  A dome of clouds was making its way rapidly across the sky, obscuring the spring sun.  Snowflake began to drop like fallout, collecting on the baby leaves that were rapidly frosting over. 

Panic was settling into the fox.  Something was wrong, this wasn’t a storm.  He thought of his mate and dropped the rabbit, sprinting for the den.  A terrible droning pierced his ears, caused the forest to quiver, and he mistook it for the wind.  Snowflakes fell faster, stinging his eyes.   Suddenly, he slipped on a frozen puddle, fell onto his back, and skidded into a snowbank.

The fox flailed, dug himself out of the snow, and leapt onto solid ground.  He might have wondered how a snowbank could have formed so quickly, but that thought vanished when it growled at him.  Wide-eyed, he watched as it stood up, dwarfed him in its shadow, and took on a humanoid shape.  Metal claws slithered out of its arms and white teeth sprouted near the top of the mass.  It breathed and growled like the wind howling through a cave.  Stunned, the fox froze before this beast, stuck between fight and flight, the image of his sleeping mate burned into his mind.

She was the last thing he thought of.

And she awoke from her sleep, the sudden draft blowing into her den sending shivers through her body.  Or at least that’s how she explained it.  She thought she’d heard a shrieking in her sleep, but wrote it off as her kettle whistling.  Irritated that her mate had still not gotten home, she sighed, lifted her bloated body up, and waddled to the stove.  She was due any day now and he was taking hours to bring her dinner and leaving the stove on.  Some mate he was.  But another shiver rattled her bones when she realized the stove was long cold, when she realized that something was terribly wrong.

Without even considering her favorite scarf, she squeezed through the den’s tunnel as quickly as she could, but found the open door blocked by snow.  Panic seizing her, she dug through the snow and mud and came out the other side, into a white and grey world.  Time had rolled back three months, putting them in the dead of mid-January, when everything lives as if it had died and accepted it.  The new and budding greenery and floral had vanished under blocks of snow, the sound of the nearby bubbling creek had been replaced by monstrous howls and shrieks, and against the steel grey sky, pointing upwards like a sword and shining with the same sinister menace, was a spire of ice and iron.

And across the frozen meadow, where the fox family had been planning to raise their pups, was a snow bank stained red.

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Thoughts:

• This is feeling a bit disjointed, but I think everything I write initially feels horribly disjointed, so not sure if my feelings count at this point.
• I’m still fidgety about whether or not to include a prologue, especially this prologue as it seems to have nothing to do with the first chapter.  It starts to make a bit more sense by chapter two and a lot more sense by chapter three, which at this point puts it at about the 20 page mark.