Hello reader, my name is North, and I am scared.
I was just a regular guy, once. A peasant, if you want to get all technical about it. I was born on a vegetable farm in the Southern Isles with my three brothers to loving parents. We grew potatoes for a living. It was a peaceful, if boring life. I'm sure you're dying to hear all about the saucy details, but I'm afraid I don't have much time for elaborations. We grew potatoes. And then we sold them. That's it. That part of the tale is over. Donezo.
This story that I'm going to tell you, ongoing, hopefully, is about what happened after I finally decided to leave my home. Before I begin, though, I have something to say to a particular subset of people who may be reading this. If you, too, are a potato farmer thinking about ditching your happy, peaceful, and boring life at home, please banish those evil thoughts and get back to work. Otherwise, your family will try to eat you. Trust me on this. I've got "experience".
Okay, so lets start with Day Zero.
I'm in my bed, and the sun had just broken on the horizon. My mousy brown hair is tangled because of how fidgety I am in my sleep. I do a lot of rolling around; curling up, stretching, even dancing. My bed is pushed up against the wall so sometimes, if I'm dancing in my dreams, I'd be banging my head against that aforementioned wall in real life, annoying the other inhabitants of my humble abode. My brothers hated me, for that, and probably because I have the coolest name out of all of us.
My mother is a cartographer. She just goes crazy about maps and directions and stuff. My father is a bit of a pushover, so when she got pregnant, mother had a say in pretty much everything and father let her do whatever she wanted without a complaint. She named us after the cardinal points on a compass.
I'm North, the youngest. I have brown hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. I'm twenty now, but on day zero I was nineteen. My older brothers are South, East, and West. Like I said earlier, we were from the Southern Isles, which makes me "North of the Southern Isles." Pretty stupid, right? Don't worry, you can agree with me. Just don't say anything of the sort to my mother, otherwise you'd be dead to her. Make her angry enough and you might end up, well… actually dead! Push her beyond angry and she just might try and eat you.
But let's get back to the name.
You try introducing yourself to people with my name and I guarantee they'll be all like "But we're in the Southern Isles haw haw!" or "Everyone is North of the Southern Isles haw haw!" or the classic "Um, no, idiot, if you actually looked at a map you'd see that we're literally thirty seven degrees north of east, go educate yourself cabbage brain". Then you would be like "No, North is my name." and they'd look at you all funny and then walk away and never speak to you again. Then you'd run to your room, crawl into your bed, assume the fetal position and then cry yourself to sleep. At 10 AM in the morning. Yeah. Such was my curse.
I'm writing this in the middle of the night. There are people looking things outside trying to eat me, and sometimes they'll lumber by and mutter something about brains and I'll get freaked the heck out and lose track of where I was. That just happened, so gimme a second while I backtrack.
Okay so I was lying on my bed, my hair was tousled, and I yawned. I stretched. I brushed my teeth. I wore blah, did blah. Said blah. Most of that day was unimportant, so I'm just going to give you the essentials.
Essentially, I overslept.
I hate hate hated that my destiny, my purpose, was to grow potatoes. I refused to believe that that was what I was meant to do. My father trained me to take up the family business, but the family business was boring, and I had three older brothers who were more than willing to take up the torch. So prior to day zero I had made up my mind that I was done. I was peace-ing out. I was going to disappear into the night and never be heard from again except through rumor, tales about the legendary traveler from the South. Slayer of dragons and women alike. Extraordinary in every single way.
I had my bags packed, I'd shaved my pathetic facial hair, and as a sign of rebellion, I replaced the bowl of potatoes on our family table with a bunch of rotten ones, because I was stupid like that. My family was out and about at the time so I didn't expect any opposition to my leaving. It was around five in the afternoon. I wanted to wait until dark, but it wasn't going to be for another few hours so I decided to take a nap. I ended up waking at seven AM in the morning.
Day zero.
I got out of my bed, did that stuff I told you about, and walked into the living room. My family was there. They were acting all funny. You know, kinda like drunkards at a tavern. All lurching around making funny noises with their mouths. Drunkards don't try to eat you, though. Not usually. Not like my family did. Also, I noticed that the bowl of rotten potatoes was empty.
As you would expect, I, like most people threatened with being eaten alive, bolted right out the door. I couldn't get the potatoes out of my head. Why was the bowl empty? Surely my family, who lived and breathed potatoes, could tell if one was past its due by date. I kept running, past my school, past the tavern, past the town hall, all the way to the port. Everywhere, people were eating other people, and basically, it was all my fault. I should have thrown away the potatoes.
I hop into a boat. There's a guy sitting there. His mouth is bloody and he's got a piece of meat in his mouth. He looks at me like I'm just another piece of meat so I kick the dude off the boat and set sail. I don't think about where I'm going, so I just row and row and row. I rowed my boat down some stream, kept rowing, and ended up in the sea. At this point I'm pretty much starving. That's when I notice a sack at the base of the boat. I open said sack, and lo and behold! Potatoes. I know what you're thinking. You better not have eaten those potatoes, North! You'll turn into a zombie! I'll be so disappointed in you if you did!
Well you can tell your disappointment to suck it, 'cause I golfed those hot taters down like they were nothing. And hey, ten days later, I'm still here! Wherever "here" is. I'm in a house in some village next to a fjord. There's a castle deadsmack in the center of it. There are people eating freaks everywhere, but I'm hoping that one isolated castle is cannibal free so that's where I'm heading. Tomorrow morning, that is. I need to survive this night first. There's a dude knocking on my door so I'm gonna go check that out now.
Until next time, I guess, reader… person.
-North of the Southern Isles