The sun was beginning to rise over the mountain tops, but the light gave no respite from the cold. The wind blew a fine dusting of snow over everything. Aside from the howling of the wind, the scene was silent. No coyote yapped, no vulture called from overhead. Little else moved in this frozen landscape, even the chimney of the warehouse was still, no smoke drifted overhead. Closing in the distance felt like hours as the wheels tore ruts through virgin snow, which disappeared in the wind again.

  The farm hands sprung into action as soon as the truck connected to the warehouse’s shipping dock. They worked with professionalism as they carried crates of supplies into the warehouse. By the time I put the truck in park and walked in, they were already getting a fire started in the stove.

  Despite the best efforts of the farm hands, the scene inside was almost as barren and cold as the outside. The beds were all makeshift with bodies placed on improvised mats of and blankets cut of heavy canvas tarp. Most of the bodies were completely covered over, they lie no longer breathing. The cold has neutralized the smell, but I'm familiar with what it would smell like if it weren't frozen. I can see blood freezing into ice in the mats and blankets covered in frost. In that moment, I had given up hope that anyone at all had survived.

  I spotted the nurse by the furnace. She was sitting against the wall with her knees pulled in close. She was without a coat, but was no longer shivering. She was still, as if death had already taken her. I could tell by her face she was likely even younger than me.

  I grabbed a blanket and gently wrapped it around her shoulders. "What's the status?" I said. I sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder, hoping to give her some of my warmth, even if I didn't have much to spare. The frost on the shoulders of my own coat hadn’t melted yet.

  She shook her head and said nothing.

  "You can't tell me they're all dead."

  "Every last one." She said barely a whisper.

  "We didn't drive all the way up here for nothing!" I said. I tried but failed to keep my voice down. The poor woman already had enough weighing on her conscience, but in that moment, I felt anger rush to my heart.

  "Afraid so." She said.

  I growled and put my face in my hands. The fire was just big enough to emit some kind of warmth. At this point I know it could only serve to unlock the stink of death, but it was necessary as the only thing that would keep this nurse from joining her patients.

  "How many?"

  "32 men."

  "Maria!" I shouted

  "Yes Ms. Warden-Ernest?" Maria responded. She had a crate of coal in her hands. She set it down by the stove before standing over me.

  "Help me up." I said. I reached a hand out. I was trembling. She pulled me up with little effort.

  "What's wrong?" She said.

  "They're all dead." I said.

  "What’s the problem? You told me earlier you figure they would be."

  "Yeah, but it doesn't feel good to be right sometimes."

  Maria gently squeezed my hands. Her hands were so much bigger than mine. Mine were small but strong after many years of hard labor. Hers were big and strong because of who she was, but her skin still felt soft compared to mine. She leaned in and pulled my hand up to her lips for a gentle kiss.

  "That's uh... that's um..." I tried not to make it awkward, not at a time like this. "That's a much more romantic gesture in Chunish culture than it is human." I said.

  "Well I mean it to be encouraging." She said.

  "Thank you. Sit with the nurse, she needs the encouragement more than I do. This is routine for me, I'm the militia's necromancer." I tried my best to look confident in front of the new recruit, even though I didn’t feel it.

  "You do a lot, don't you." She let go of my hands and sat with the nurse. She didn't say anything to her, she just put an arm around her. The nurse rested her head on Maria's shoulder.

  Lavender was already hard at work looking over every single body. She took care to write a note for each one, dead, and the likely cause of death.

  "What's the status, doctor?" I said.

  "I've counted 10 dead so far. 2 of them seem to have bled out quickly from severe wounds. One of them is a missing leg and the other has a gash in his jugular. They had no hope of surviving. 4 bled out slowly. All of them had tourniquets applied, but that wasn't enough, they needed a blood transfusion to replace what was lost before it was applied. The last 4 had relatively minor wounds that would have needed stitching or cleaning. I can see attempts were made, but they still froze to death."

  "So that's 4 that would be alive if they had heat."

  "Correct."

  Lavender lifted another blanket. The man underneath was a very broad shouldered Rhenian man. His face looked hard enough to crack stone. His skin was covered in ice crystals, they grew out of bloody gashes as well as on every hair from his eyelashes to his beard. As Doctor Lavender continued to peel the blanket back, his cause of death was a little more clear. There was a copper pipe lodged in his chest, piercing through his lung. It had been cut down and gauze had been placed around the wound. It would have required a surgeon to remove this pipe safely, Doctor Lavender could have done it if she had been there, but it was far beyond the skill of the young nurse. The blood had frozen the gauze into a solid brick. There would be no removing the pipe, and he would have to be buried with it still in him. Doctor Lavender placed the blanket back over his face and noted, "dead, severe puncture to the right superior thoracic region, likely penetrating the right pleural cavity."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I'll go start on the other side and meet you in the middle." I said. Doctor Lavender nodded.

  In the far corner, I removed the blanket of another Rhenian man. This one was familiar. He and Solomon looked identical. They weren't twins, but I remember assuming they were for years. I knew he worked in the mines, but I didn't think he worked nights. His face was punctured by some kind of shrapnel, likely shattered rocks. As I continued to remove the blanket, I could see his shirt was charred away, and his skin showed severe burning. By now it was a mess of frozen blood and dead tissue. This is likely what took him.

  My handwriting wasn't as neat as Lavender's, and there were many words I just did not know how to spell. I grabbed a pen from my coat pocket and tried to write something, but the water based fountain pen ink was completely frozen. I tried to warm it with my breath just enough to get the ink flowing. "Full thickness burn to most of the thoracic region." became a mess of common Morrin text and Chunish logographs.

  I replaced the blanket. "Was there an explosion in the mine?" I said loudly enough anyone could hear me. I heard the nurse mumble something.

  "Yes, leaking gas pipe." Maria relayed. "Some of the people here woke from the collapse and then were hurt trying to evacuate the injured."

  "Damnit Abraham!" I shouted looking at the blanket that was covering the man. "Why do you human men always do this, always trying to be the hero, now I have to tell your brother how you died." I said.

  "Do you know him?" Maria asked.

  "The girls' uncle, Abraham Brasher." I said. The tears could freeze to my cheek. Even with the fire lit, it was not warm enough in this corner of the warehouse. I'm not sure it would be until we get better weather. The stove was far too small for this size of building.

  The nurse looked up at me. Even from a distance I could see the tears suddenly rush down her face. "I'm so sorry!" She said. "I tried so hard! I cleaned and stitched their wounds, I stopped the bleeding, I used up all our gauze, I used up all our coal!" She said between sobs.

  "You did your best." I said. I wasn’t certain she could hear what I said.

  "This is the mine owner's fault!" Lavender spoke in quiet trembling anger. "They should have known this could happen and had safety measures in place."

  "Don't you think it's too early to point the finger of blame?" I said.

  "Don't you lecture me! I know the laws of this place! I didn't leave Ssotsrode just to be subjected to the cold industrial hell once again!" Lavender shouted.

  "Then why in the gods' name did you move to Tacust!? Paradise is on the west coast. Here in the desert, life sucks and then you die!" I shouted back.

  "Nearly half of these deaths could have been prevented if the owner had hired a doctor and kept proper medical facilities!"

  "What doctor? You're the only one in the whole county with real medical training! The only other options are livestock vets, green nurses like her, and people like me who know what a dead body looks like from experience!”

  "You can't run a medical system on nurses and necromancers!" Doctor Lavender had gone red in the face and had stepped away from her patient just to point a spiteful finger at me.

  "We have no choice! The gods put us on Ciolon just to suffer and die, do you never study the mythology?"

  "No, I damn well do not study the mythology, you know why? I study medicine, and here in my field we try to actually reduce suffering and pain! You religious types do nothing but help people ignore it!"

  "You ivory tower bitch!" I shouted back. "You think I don't try to reduce suffering? Do you think I volunteer weekends at the temple for my health? Do you think I spend time caring for orphaned kits and continue to donate breast milk months after my daughters weaned because I don't care?"

  The tears streaming down my face were finally staying fluid. I was hardly aware of the fact that I had stormed up to Doctor Lavender. I was tall for a chunish woman, just taller than Doctor Lavender, even if I was shorter than humans. Deep down I knew Lavender's anger was indignation. It was just hard to decide where to direct that anger in a place where nobody has options and hard decisions have to be made.

  "Just stop it, both of you!" Maria shouted. She finally found her authoritative voice. It was a deep orcish growl. She let go of the nurse, stood over a foot taller than Lavender or I, and put herself in between us. "Get back to working or I'll have to make you!" She said.

  Lavender finally put her finger down and returned to work. I stood there, still trembling with anger. I drove all of us here overnight just to be greeted by the dead, and insulted by my co worker. Some kind of petty revenge is the only thing I wanted, but I knew it would only harm the situation.

  "Do you know anything about radios, Enya?" Maria asked me.

  "yeah, why?”

  "I need to get you and the doctor away from each other for a moment. The nurse says the radio broke when the explosion happened, maybe you and I can take a look together."

  "You know radios?"

  "I had a hobby when I was a kid, it was just something I could do indoors where nobody has to see my face."

  She pulled a rag from her pocket and wiped my tears away. Her gentle smile was so beautiful to me, especially with the large orcish teeth. She grabbed me by the hand and we left the warehouse together. We were silent for a moment as we trudged back out into the snow with each other.

  "I didn't know you volunteered at the temple." Maria said. "You're full of surprises."

  "Yeah. There are a lot of orphans here, and not a lot of temple workers. Do you know Rachel, she works at the temple?"

  "The one who is always pregnant?" She asked.

  "Yes, that's the one, she does surrogacy, so she has been pregnant most of the time that I have known her. It's beautiful, really, her belly gets so big sometimes. If I had a penis of my own, I would absolutely have loved to fill her womb myself."

  "Oh! Well uh-” She chuckled. “I don't believe I've talked to her, but I've seen her around town."

  "Yes, well she's the high priestess, her and I are close, we have sex sometimes. Well anyway, like I said, there are a lot of orphans in Tacust. Rachel and the other priestesses do their best but it can be hard to produce enough milk on their own. You can feed a baby aurochs milk, but that doesn't have exactly the right nutritional balance. My daughter Susanna started weaning early, about 2 years old. Sophia on the other hand only weaned just under a year ago. I started going down to the temple after Susanna weaned just to donate milk. Sometimes I put it in a jar and they keep it in the ice box for later, sometimes I just feed an orphaned or abandoned baby myself. They're both weaned now, but Sophia still tries to ask for milk."

  "How old are they now?"

  "Four, they turn 5 in… just over a week."

  "When do babies normally wean?"

  "2 for humans, 3 for chunes. It varies, though, different mothers have different preferences. I'm glad Susanna weaned early, it was easier to drop her off at the temple when I had to work. Before then, I had to bring my daughters with me in a seat so I could feed them from time to time. Sophia still wants to drink milk, but I don't think I can let her. This milk is needed elsewhere and she grows up so slowly, I need to push her a little."

  "I can tell you love them." She said.

  "Those girls are my whole world, my whole reason for getting up in the morning. I work so I can keep them fed and clothed, I volunteer to make the town a better place for them to grow up in. Every single thing I do is for them. That’s why it hurts so bad when someone… you know, just like Lavender did earlier, accuse me of not wanting to help people."

  "Do you ever think about having more?"

  "All the time. I think if someone got me pregnant today I would probably thank them."

  "Can the girls' father not give you more?"

  "He's married to another woman now. We had a fling when I was 16, I got pregnant, he's Rhenian so we decided not to marry because we're different races, the marriage wouldn't be recognized on the federal level, not to mention the religious differences."

  "Ah, I see. Is that sort of thing normal for Chunes?"

  "Having kids with friends and not taking on a long term opposite sex partner? It's pretty common. It's common to just form "households" as they're called with partners of both the same and opposite sex."

  "Do same sex partners have sex with each other?"

  "Yes, all the time. I understand humans find that sinful, but I enjoy it, nothing quite like a gentle woman's kiss on my-"

  "Oh, look, we're at the radio!" Maria interrupted.

  The radio may have been the only thing new in the mines. The control room was inside of a building not far from the mine entrance, it seems the tower was built nearby just to make use of otherwise unused space. I figured the shack probably didn't need heating with all the electronics in there.

  With the radio being so close to the mine, I already had my suspicion on what was the cause of the problem. I opened up all the access panels and looked over the vacuum tubes. The problem was simple, just a couple of them were broken. Maria found spares, and while some of them were also broken, we had enough to get the radio turned on again. The machine hummed and I tuned it to the militia's communications frequency.

  "Bray Valley to Militia Headquarters. Do you read me?" I said over the radio.

  "We read you." I heard the voice of the militia's morning shift radio operator, Marie Lebel. She must have been up early, and that was evident with her tone of voice.

  "Radio has been repaired, but the radio operator is nowhere to be found. We have 32 men in a temporary medical facility. All presumed dead. Inadequate heat, staff, and supplies is to be blamed."

  "Understood."

  There was silence for a moment until someone threw the door open. It was the nurse.

  "Lavender found one alive, one of 32." She said.

  "We should go see." Maria said.

  "I don't want to see that ugly bitch's face for at least another hour." I said.

  "Okay, you stay at the radio, I'll go see." Maria grabbed my hand and kissed it before she left the shack.

  "Update, HQ, 31 confirmed dead, 1 still alive. We will direct what medical attention we have to help him."