The ashes from the fires, carried skyward by the wind, have turned to snow as ash tends to do when it falls from above. Boards, beams, shingles, and furniture lay a blanket of white and gray in the places where they once resided. With every five paces, ten feet of vision is lost to the ash, and with every passing minute the same fate awaits the footprints left behind. And now only one set of footprints exists in this corridor of gray, which used to be the farming village that only mattered to a few. The farming village that once stood here will never return. Nobody will ever hear of its whereabouts, and dream of rebuilding on top of these ashes. The fact that nobody cared about this village to begin with was one of the reasons why Hadley and his son decided to build a cabin here. And let me assure you that this village shared more of a kinship with Hadley and his son than they had first anticipated, for their past is yet another tale of ashes and vanished populations. Buried deep beneath the ashes, where the farming village once stood, survives a horrific memory for the young man passing through.

     Some of the villagers called him Roy, others referred to him as Hadley’s son. They called Hadley by his last name because they didn’t know his first. He never said it out loud, neither did his son. By asking Hadley his first name, one would require to look Hadley dead in his eyes. To look Hadley in the eyes meant to recognize who Hadley was, and nobody in their right mind wanted the burden that followed. Roy Hadley was a less abrasive version of his old man, but not by far off. By comparing photographs of Roy and his father, one could easily lead to the assumption that the two were different versions of the same man, separated by some forty years of age.
     It was Roy’s father who decided to restart their lives in this village. The village didn’t exist on most maps of the region, and it was understandably so. Tales of the hellish Oaurin tribes terrorized the surrounding lands for hundreds of years. Stories of kidnappings, ritualistic killings, and the consumption of human flesh were rampant and only increased in numbers as the years went by. And no matter where the stories ended, they always began in the counties surrounding this farming village. However, these tales never discouraged the ignorant or those skeptical of things supernatural from finding refuge here—neither of said traits could be attached to Hadley and his son.