Full Summary: Helin was not like the rest of the children in the village bordering Fjerda. Black, short shorn hair as dark as spilled ink, eyes the colour of a starless sky, little Helin was an outcast, a castaway, something irrevocably wrong. Everybody knew it, and that was without seeing the small child manipulate shadows like a seamstress controlled yarn. When Ravka doesn't get its prophesized Sun Saint but another Shadow Summoner, the continent trembles in the turns of fate and fortune. Fem!Harry/Darkling. Half-Sibling Incest.

Chapter One:

A Hungry Child

Helin's name meant the light of the sun. There was something funny there that she couldn't understand at nine seasons old, and with no one around willing to clarify the untold joke, she was left to wonder why it seemed to bring a smile to those who knew. It must have been funny, to be sure. Something rather amusing that everyone who managed to catch a glimpse of the tiny child lurking at the boundary of the village found cleverly poignant, would snicker at as they passed by on market runs, would whisper to each other with frowns and scowls behind their windows and doors.

There's nothing sunny about her. Not a nail or a lash or a single curl.

Black, short shorn hair as dark as spilled ink, eyes the colour of a starless sky, little Helin in her rags and threads is every bit a bony, bait-toothed, little girl who appeared more a malnourished boy on a good day, and a feral beast on her worst. A child more fitting for the night with her moon-milk skin than the day with the rest of the villages' children.

She has no gilded freckles, or sunny tan, no softness to her features of a spring or summer glow. There's only dark, there's only shade, there's only night.

It's one of many things wrong with her according to her keeper.

Her knees and hips were too frail and knobbly her custodian, who had begrudgingly taken the child in after finding her discarded in a wicker basket, left on her doorstep one equinox night and an envelope of gold coin each month hence, would curse with a sneer. A local seamstress woman with petunias in her hair who could do with the additional funds, who already had her perfect boy and her perfect husband and only kept Helin for the money of course. She'd said once that she'd never be able to get rid of the girl, despairing over her needle and thread as she did her best to fill orders from two villages over. Who'd want the bag of bones? Destined for death in a birthing bed in some Ketterdam brothel that one she would snipe with a shake of her head and a slam of Helin's cupboard.

The twisting of the locks always felt like a slap.

Little Helin doesn't know what that meant, what a birthing bed or a brothel was exactly, but the woman says it in the same mocking tone she did when she pinned her down and clipped her strange dark hair down to the scalp with rusted sheep sheers.

Her son, who's heavy steps sounded like a dud-dud-dud when he chased Helin with a switch of thorny reeds, a rotund boy with rosy cheeks and the blond hair, blue eyed continuants of his Fjerdan father, called her soot-slug, said they found her in the fireplace amongst the ashes one night, abandoned and alone and wiggling like a worm. That's why her hair is black, her eyes black, her shadow black, when everyone else in the village bordering Ravka and Fjerda was just like the duddling boy with his spring-time paints.

We should have left you there for the crows to peck apart.

Some of the local children who played in the nearby pond, who now and then threw rocks and sticks at her when she came too close or tried to join their games, called her Henrikas, or Harry for short. They laughed at her hair, and her rags, and her tiny height, and as children were, they were cruel when they could see she clearly wasn't one of them.

Wasn't one of them and didn't have anyone else to say otherwise. A child with no mother or father, who appeared one day on a full moon, was an easy target for the tribal escapades of youth.

Helin, however, does not care. She cares not where she came from, who she came from, how she came to be, only that she was different, and different, clearly, meant bad.

And bad children didn't get supper for three days straight, even if it was watered down turnip soup.

That chilly, winter morning, sun coated in a heavy, thick, grey gauze of cloud, she was neither Helin or Henrikas or Harry. She wasn't even soot-slug or thing or freak.

She was hungry.

Starving.

Perhaps that was why when Raghnall, a ginger-spiced freckled boy who lived across the river west, and one of Helin's only friends, came sprinting across the rickety bridge and down the wooded path to the bed of flowers Helin had been kicked out of the hut to attend to at dawn, puffing and red-faced and grinning with dimples, telling her about a camp not far off, a camp comprised of Second Army men, Helin didn't immediately say no.

"Come on, Helin! They have rations in those carts of theirs. Ones with real cheese I bet! We'll be in and out before anyone notices us. Fredek and Georgiy used to do this all the time, and they never got caught."

Helin halted pulling up a shrivelled weed, fingers dirty with soil, numb with the cold and the ice, and her belly was already grumbling at the fantasy of a meal all her own and not pilfered from a bin.

"Yeah but when your mother found out she boxed them around the ears until they were pink and swollen."

Raghnall scoffed, hooked on the thrill of sneaking anywhere.

"Ma' won't find out."

Helin should have said no. The seamstress would skin her alive if she ever heard word of Helin taking anything-

She was gone by the time the rain began to fall.

Next Chapter Preview:

Crouched in the brambles, copses and thickets, Helin peered bottomlessly through the branches and twigs. The cart was a good few feet ahead, yet it may as well have been all the way over in Shu Han for all the good it was.

Five men stood around it, dressed in heavy crimson coats that made Helin's frame shiver just at the sight of the thick and cosy wool and fur, a stark reminder of the holes hastily patched in her own shawl. The rider was off his horse, back to them, and taking a piss over in a bush to the far right. If there was any time to go, it was to go now.

"Just do… you know. Your thing."

Helin hissed, voice swallowed up by the howling wind and spattering rain, stomach cramping low, tangled and knotted in want.

Want that burned as bright as any sun.

It was so close, the cart, twenty steps ahead, such a short way away, an easy enough undertaking.

If she was fast, swift, sure of hand, she could make it, stretch out what she shouldn't stretch out and take, eat.

And nothing was ever that simple.

"You know I'm not supposed to do that. It's bad. It's evil. The last time I-… Petunja beat me so hard I couldn't walk for a month."

A.N: This is actually for my friend who is feeling a little down lately and I wanted to cheer her up a little the slight way I could. I hope she likes it, and I hope you guys like it too. This is mainly a feel good thing, so expect some Protective/Soft Darkling.

Thanks for taking the time out to read! If you can and you want, don't forget to drop a review.