Orphans in the Snow: the Long Road Home

[Ring World] [Edge World] [Rat Tribe Derived Mod Snow Orphan] After the snowstorm passed, she crawled out of the snowdrift, leaving only two dogs, a hatchet, a cane, and a mechanical bird that would never sing again. The parents left, the town was wiped out, and the whole world was left with only boundless whiteness. The fourteen-year-old Hyacinth did not cry. She just counted the remaining supplies on her body, clutched the hatchet made by her father, and walked alone into the gray-blue twilight of the permafrost wasteland with her two snow dogs. Collecting ice crystals in exchange for food rations, building signal towers to contact orbital merchants, and lighting bonfires in caves - she has learned how to live, but she has not yet learned how to look forward to tomorrow. On this ice sheet that rejects life, a man who has a habit of carrying all the orphans alone, "lives on" with other refugees, searches for and builds a new home together. The bones are buried in the wind and snow, the orphans get married