Crimson Flags & Razor Blades

Into the Belly of the Beast

The journey that Millie took into the Black Market was a descent into a different kind of hell-like experience. The open skies and the starkness of Bremen had vanished; in their place, shadows writhed and whispered, and the odor of corruption clung to the air like a sickly, sweet perfume. Her destination would be a dense forest located a couple of miles to the north of Bremen, where Luna discovered several footprint marks that vanished into the jungle. In a very low voice, Jack shivered as he made his statement. “The green hell.”

The night before she left Bremen, Gunner gave Millie instructions to pose as a street whore or a merchant looking to trade coins for slaves. Rusty cautioned her to maintain her composure in order to avoid upsetting anyone who might be wary of the new face.

For every stealthy glance and every transaction that was whispered among the hidden forest huts, there was a scent of desperation and greed. It was a place where nightmares were bartered like coins and humans like cattle to the slaughterhouse.

Her disguise was an old wound reopened. A flicker of red fabric here, a glint of steel there—she was a whore once more, but this time with a predator's heart beating beneath the façade. Her quest took her through a labyrinth of bushes and paths through the forest that were slick with vice and despondency.

During her research, she discovered that the Black Market did not have a single location; rather, it moved and slithered, revealing itself to only those who had the appropriate amount of money, flesh, or secrets. Millie was under the impression that she was unable to easily identify the children who had been kidnapped, and she did not wish to beat around the bush. 

Then, as if the shadows themselves had woven the answer, she saw them—the twins. Not the sweet innocents of the old tale, but two haunted figures standing sentinel near a sprawling tangle of roots that burrowed into a decaying mansion. Their eyes were hard, their movements sharp, yet a flicker of unease in their stances spoke of something more than simple servitude.

They called themselves John and Margaret now. Their tale spilled out in harsh, clipped whispers behind the mansion's crumbling walls. Abandoned not out of cruelty, but out of desperation. An unseen hand had been responsible for the famine that had taken hold of their town. Their parents had been given a choice: starvation, or a ransom paid to the 'Witch' who haunted the nearby woods. The twins were that payment, their names were Hansel and Gretel back then.

Their new life was a crucible of cruelty. The Witch, an ancient, twisted crone, was no mere child-eater. She was an agent of the Grim Society, a purveyor of flesh and misery. Children were her favoured currency, sold into servitude or worse. The surrounding woods housed her other 'stock', a feral tribe of cannibals who served as her hunters and enforcers. John and Margaret, trained against their will, had become the cunning negotiators, the silver tongues, and even hunters who had the ability to lure the desperate and the lost into the catacomb of slavery.

Millie saw within them a reflection of her past. Twisted, sharpened, but not yet broken. Their 'House of Candies', the vine-choked mansion, was less a gingerbread trap and more a decadent tomb, its rooms filled with the strange, sickly-sweet concoctions used to mask the scent of hunted humans.

"State your business!” John stopped Millie. She regained her composure in order to respond. "I have a desire to possess slaves, particularly young and fresh ones." Her voice was so calm, and she showed a bundle of coins gathered by the people of Bremen as bait. “I heard you’ve got Bremen ones.”

John and Margaret exchanged a glance with one another, fully conscious of the fact that the individual who stood in front of them was not merely a merchant. Her demands were direct, and her eyes were filled with a fierce gaze, as if she were a genuine warrior.

But a fool warrior indeed, she was alone in the lion’s den. That’s what the twins were thinking, but something sparked in Margaret.

“I applaud your bravery, young lady.” Margaret gave a respectful smile. "No one would have the courage to go to such great lengths in order to negotiate with the Witch. But unfortunately, she’s not a woman to be bargained with."

“If I can’t negotiate with gold,” Millie stepped forward. “Then I shall bring justice and freedom with a blade."

The Witch wasn't a woman to be easily around; she was a spider at the centre of a monstrous web. She orchestrated other merchants to be her frontlines, along with John and Margaret as her eyes and ears if anything happened.

Millie saw two paths: force, a desperate gamble, or a feint, a play on the very greed that fueled the Black Market. She chose the latter. With a few brutal strikes, she staged a scene: a rogue merchant fell prey to her swift movement. "You want to join him," Millie said as she splattered the blood of the merchant on her blade and dropped it to the ground. “Or be a part of the resistance with me and my friends in Bremen.”

The twins, forced to witness Millie’s fervor, saw not just ruthlessness but opportunity. Someone who dared to take every chance to lead the rebellion against the claws of the Grim Society and the Witch’s insidious agenda. In the aftermath of that, they discovered that she was Vermillion, the Wolf Slayer, the only person who had the ability to survive the attack that the Kid had launched against Bremen. The news spread quickly, and the twins were waiting for the armies of Bremen to arrive. However, they were astounded by Millie's bravery in entering the beast's belly by herself in order to save the kidnapped children. She’s not into the lion’s den. She’s the lioness herself.

That night, under the cover of a sickly, artificial moon, Millie shared her shard of knowledge—the Grim Society—a whisper among the shadows, a puppeteer of their despair, and her plan to gather forces to bring down the injustice.

John and Margaret exchanged their fragment with a name that she had heard before: ‘The Kid’, the blood-soaked brother of Willy, and his dark masters in the shadows. He offered the children of Bremen to enter the lair of the Witch, and John knew where it was located. Unfortunately, the Witch’s lair was guarded by armies of cannibals-the mutated human experiment was conducted with dark potion called ‘the breadcrumbs’.

The alliance was born out of desperation, not trust. Millie, the Wolf Slayer with the haunted eyes. John, the hardened informant, flinched at the memory of his childhood. Margaret, whose brittle smile masked a well of silent fury. The twins hoped for their own freedom, breakthrough from the green hell they raised into, all the horrors they forced to witness. Yet, within this tenuous partnership lay the seed of something more. A shared thirst for answers, for retaliation.

With the twins as her uneasy guides, Millie prepared to plunge deeper into the Black Market's beating heart. Every step was a risk, a dance with devils in the dark. But with every whisper, every cruel revelation, the flicker of defiance in her heart burned just a little brighter.