Even before the sunrise the next morning, the girl's dead body was found in the woods by a hunter who had gone to check his trap to see if he'd caught good meat to sell in the market. She was so brutally disfigured and bloody on the forest ground that the man had screamed and run to get the authorities the moment he recovered from the shock of stumbling over a dead body.
Snow had stopped falling months ago in the land of Bimmerville, but the land was still cold, and the air was frigid enough to show in one's breath, with a light mist hovering in the atmosphere.
By the time the authorities looked into the girl's death, they immediately concluded it to have been caused by an animal—until the senior Councilman of Bimmerville, who was the head of the Civil Inquiry and Order, came to the scene to inspect her body himself.
