Author's Note: This chapter begins a series of chapters that explores Sorin's past on Innistrad. Content begins prior to the ignition of Sorin's planeswalker spark, and chronicles the events that lead up to it.

Human Frailty

Hemlock berries, a raven's claw, mandrake root.

Sometimes, Sorin didn't know why he bothered taking care of his grandfather's chores. It wasn't like potions could fill an empty stomach. The store hadn't sold anything in weeks.

He was hungry beyond what he once believed to be livable. He moved with effort, fracturing the absolute silence of the desolate forest with his clumsy steps and scattered thoughts. When he was in good health, a trip to the hills and back would have been a morning walk. Now it took concentration just to stay on his feet.

The remains of the river were less than a mile off. Hemlock liked water. If any survived, it would be there. The claw he picked up soon after he set out, not far from the house at a desiccated nest. He didn't know what he'd do about the mandrake.

Frail brown leaves crunched under his boots, though it was only summer and the forests of Stensia were famous for the bright autumn colors of their trees. No water, no trees. No crops either. No people. He couldn't be certain the last time he ate.

"This is it, Sorin," his grandfather had told him that morning. He had set the knapsack down on the table with the ingredients list. Inside were a stale chunk of bread and a few bites of salted fish.

"Find me everything on that paper and I promise it'll last."

So Sorin trudged up the hill toward the parched ghost of a river.

The dry wind wafted wisps of detritus against the thin cotton of Sorin's shirt. The woods themselves were dying, drying up and blowing away in the winds that drove out the rain and brought death to Stensia. He ought to leave. Grandfather was all he had left, and it wasn't his fault Grandfather thought their village had something left to save.

If he wanted to get out alive, he had to make for the Kruin Pass and the farmlands of Gavony, Edgar and his stubbornness be damned. The old man was irascible at the best of times, and the more the drought ravaged their village, the more he seemed determined to stay. The past few months had been one failed scheme after another improvised by Edgar to try and turn the tide, and Sorin was now thoroughly disillusioned. He owed his grandfather for everything he'd learned from him; Edgar was a bottomless resource of magical learning, and Sorin owed all of his considerable arcane knowledge to his instruction. But getting out of Stensia had become a matter of survival, and Sorin could no longer afford to wait. He'd do his final duty by Edgar and absolve himself of responsibility.

He sat down to take his lunch in the brown depression in the earth where the Geier River used to flow. The dry soil was hard and unyielding, and coated his pants in a fine layer of gritty dust. The food Edgar had sent him off with was little more than scraps, but he devoured it with the ravening hunger of the starving. He thought someone might have seen him leave town with a knapsack, but no one came to take his food. Not that it mattered. He was still hungry.

A few moments of sifting through the detritus of the dried-up shallows revealed the withered brown stems of some dead hemlock. He cut a few samples, but the plants were of such poor quality, he doubted they would brew a functional potion at all. He had found mandrake in this part of the woods before, but finding it now would depend on him seeing those specific dried-up leaves in the dead brown forest.

Edgar's discontented mutterings started after the first dry month. The autumn harvest would be greatly diminished, if it didn't outright fail. Sorin's mother laughed it off. Two or three dry moons in a row weren't outside the range of normalcy, and the winter wheat was sure to come through. A little bad weather might upset Stensia natives, but they were spoiled. In Kessig, she had gone to the fields fully armed, and they had still lost kin to werewolf attacks. She had braved the Getander Pass on her own because she knew it was safer to be a laborer in Stensia than a landowner, like her father, in werewolf country. It just showed how spoiled her husband's family was that a little drought was enough to scare them.

The winter wheat didn't come through. They still had Edgar's alchemy shop, but the outlying towns weren't any better off and Edgar traveled farther and farther out in search of customers. It wasn't long before the larder ran dry.

Adela, the Gephardts' little girl, was the first to sicken and die. Her family had shown up all skin and bones at the burial, except for Adela's brother, too weak to come, who followed her to the grave a week later. The Markovs held out longer than most. They were the wealthiest family in town, and had the largest supply of food in their stores. Sorin's parents wouldn't hear talk of leaving the family home, even when things grew so desperate they drew on Edgar's alchemy supplies to supplement their meals. Rain was bound to come eventually. The drought couldn't last forever. These things pass.

Sorin's mother and father died on the very same night, too hungry to keep on living and too desperately in love to leave each other behind. Sorin and Edgar dug the graves themselves in a vacant corner of the cemetery. There were no grafdiggers to do the job for them, no pallbearers to carry the coffins, no moon priest to preside over the funeral. The town priest had died some weeks before, having given away all his food to help the poor, starving Gephardts, who all died anyway. Sorin wasn't sure how his grandfather kept going in his old age, but Edgar clung to life with a grim vitality that lit his sunken eyes with a sinister fire. The old man was more stubborn than ever, but if Sorin could finally convince him to leave Stensia, he'd willingly carry him over to Gavony on his back.

Mandrake leaves. In his hunger, Sorin almost missed them under the shadow of a bare ash tree. He knelt in the tree's frail, spindly shadow to dig up the roots. The leaves snapped off at his touch, so he dug up the root with his hands and added it to the knapsack.

The sky had taken on a haze since the drought set in, a rusted-iron grey that tinged the horizon with unreality. At first the desperate villagers hailed it as a portent of storm clouds, but the haze settled in to stay and the clouds never came. Sorin couldn't make out the sun at all in the russet half-light, and picked his way home through the woods by force of habit. He had thought to follow Grandfather into the alchemy trade one day, and the woods around their farm had been his laboratory. The locations of a dozen useful plants were still fresh in his memory. He'd be back shortly. On the far side of the wooded hills lay the road to Gavony, the quickest route to salvation, the Kruin Pass.

The fence posts marking the outer edge of the Markovs' farm had fallen into disrepair, tipping over at wild angles in the hard, cracked earth. The back of the family home faced out onto the desolation, its elegant gabled roof and paneled glass windows relics of the Markovs' former prosperity. The neat, ordered rows of Edgar's alchemy garden were still visible next to the house. Sorin had dreamed of being master of the house one day, expanding his grandfather's alchemy business and adding to the farmland his mother and father had acquired in a series of fortuitous deals. Just a few years ago, the fields were fertile and vibrant, shimmering gold with swaying stalks of wheat or the deep green of corn and beans. Now his family's livelihood had been ravaged by drought and death, reduced to a barren, dusty waste that couldn't sustain even the most tenacious weeds. He would have been a dutiful son; he had stayed as long as he had out of his sense of duty to Edgar, who kept insisting he was going to fix their problems and they didn't need to go anywhere.

The whinnying of a horse broke the silence of the still afternoon. Sorin furrowed his brow in confusion and quickened his pace as he followed the noise toward the front of the house. There weren't any more live horses in town, as far as he knew. As he turned the corner into the street, he stopped in his tracks. Parked outside the sweeping veranda of the Markovs' home were two liveried carriages pulled by two emaciated, malnourished horses apiece. Each was guarded by an armed servant in matching livery nursing a bow and arrow. Closer to Sorin, two squalid chestnuts stamped in their fittings, roped to an elegant blue and gold chaise bearing the unmistakable lettered crest of Runo Stormkirk. Before the drought, the brilliant young aristocrat had been a frequent visitor of Edgar's, a fellow alumnus of the mages' colleges in Gavony and Nephalia. What had brought him away from his land and its tenants during such difficult times, Sorin could not surmise. The more distant of the two carriages, pulled by a mismatched pair of flea-bitten bays, bore a red and black insignia with which Sorin was not familiar.

Sorin nodded to the two servant guards as he stepped around the veranda to the front door, keeping a healthy distance from their precious charges. The mahogany paneling and polished brass fittings on the door were a luxury by their village's standards, but nothing in comparison to the opulence of those who could afford to travel by liveried chaise. Finding the door unlocked, he steeled himself for the unexpected and stepped inside.