The Ice Saints
One field chest, no laudanum since January, and four hundred names by July.
- ~95 min
- 14437 words
- 37 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
- Great Northern War, Ukraine, winter 1708 to July 1709
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The winter of 1709 was the coldest in six hundred years, and a Swedish army spent it quartered in Ukrainian villages that were not asked. Anna Brelin is the regiment's surgeon without being licensed to be one: her husband held the warrant until he froze to death in December, and the colonel decided that a woman who can take a leg off in ninety seconds and keep the patient alive was worth the irregularity. She has one chest, no opiates since January, and a notebook listing every man she has cut. The lieutenant who runs requisitioning has been in love with her since he carried her husband in, and is scrupulously correct about it. He is also hiding his own brother's name on a deserter's roll. The woman who owns the inn and mill at Hadiach has fed nine hundred soldiers out of a village of two hundred and eleven people, keeps a ledger, has buried three neighbours, and understands better than anyone what both armies are. She and Anna have been sharing a stove, and lately more than that. Then the spring requisition is calculated and it takes the seed grain — the village lives through the winter and starves in the autumn — and it needs a medical certificate to justify the tonnage, and Anna is the one who signs. Frostbite, amputation, a mill loft with a deserter in it, and a river crossing in July that fills a notebook with four hundred names. Surgery is described with period-accurate, non-instructional precision. Desire is frank and closes the door. Five endings, and the army loses in all of them.
Content notice
- graphic surgical and battle injury
- amputation without anaesthesia
- frostbite and death by exposure
- military requisition and induced famine
- execution of a deserter
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- grief
- sexual coercion referenced within an occupying army
Cast
- A Anna Brelin protagonist; regimental surgeon without a warrant no portrait yet
- L Lt Erik Nilsson cavalry lieutenant and requisitioning officer no portrait yet
- O Oksana Zhuravel innkeeper and miller of Hadiach no portrait yet
- C Colonel Grip regimental commander; signed her irregular warrant no portrait yet
- P Petter Nilsson Erik's brother; on the deserters' roll, in the mill loft no portrait yet
- S Sergeant Måns Ek the regiment's provost sergeant; keeps the deserters' roll no portrait yet