Flesh Caches (The Pockets)

In the frozen wastes, where starvation kills more people than cold or violence, there exists a practice so shameful that those who know of it speak of it only in whispers, using euphemisms and code words. They call them "the pockets" or "ice cellars" or sometimes just "the larders." The truth is simpler and more horrible: they are caches of preserved human flesh, hidden in the deep ice, marked only by those who know where to look.

These are not the bodies of loved ones given proper rites. These are not the frozen corpses of strangers stumbled upon in the wastes. These are deliberately preserved remains, stored against the day when there is no other food, when the choice becomes eating the dead or becoming the dead. They are insurance policies written in frozen flesh, the final hedge against starvation that everyone hopes never to collect on.

The practice emerged gradually in the first decade after the Fall, born from the simple mathematics of survival: the cold preserves meat indefinitely, humans die regularly, and starvation is patient but inevitable. What began as desperate individuals secretly cutting flesh from the recently dead and hiding it "just in case" has evolved into something more systematic, more organized, more terrible. Some settlements maintain communal caches, though they would die before admitting it. Some families have private pockets known only to them. Some scavengers stumble upon caches created by people long dead and face the agonizing choice of whether to use them.

The existence of flesh caches is one of the great open secrets of the frozen world—everyone suspects, no one speaks, and the silence itself has become a kind of mutual protection. To acknowledge the pockets is to acknowledge what we've all become. Better to maintain the fiction of civilization, even as we store its failure in the ice.

The Practice

Creation of a Cache

The process varies, but certain patterns have emerged:

Location Selection

Caches are hidden away from settlements but close enough to reach in desperation. Common locations include:

• Natural ice caves with narrow, difficult-to-spot entrances
• Crevasses in glaciers marked with subtle cairns
• Beneath particular rocks or ruins, with the ice carefully excavated
• In abandoned buildings at the edge of settlements, in cellars sealed with ice

The location must be cold enough to preserve flesh indefinitely (which, in this world, means almost anywhere outside) but sheltered enough that scavengers or animals won't discover it by chance.

Preparation

The bodies—or more often, parts of bodies—are prepared with varying degrees of care:

• Some simply place the corpse intact, letting the ice do the work
• Others butcher carefully, removing the most nutritious portions: thighs, upper arms, organs
• A few even attempt smoking or salting first, belt-and-suspenders preservation
• The most disturbed remove identifying features—faces, hands, tattoos—so that using the cache won't require looking at who you're eating

Marking

Caches must be marked subtly enough that strangers won't recognize them, but clearly enough that the desperate can find them:

• Specific rock arrangements (three stones, always)
• Scratched symbols in ice or stone that look like natural weathering
• Cairns with a single red stone hidden in the pile
• Directional patterns—"from this tree, walk toward the mountain until you see the split boulder"

Some marks are known to whole communities, passed down quietly. Others are private, family secrets shared only with children old enough to understand what they mean.

The Unspoken Rules

Over two decades, a kind of grim etiquette has developed:

Take Only What You Need

If you find a cache that isn't yours, you may use it to survive, but you don't empty it. Leave something for the next desperate soul. This rule is universal and surprisingly well-followed—violating it is seen as stealing from the future.

Never Ask: If you suspect someone has used a cache, you do not ask. You do not investigate. You do not confirm. The silence protects everyone.

The Volunteer

In some settlements, when someone is dying, they may privately indicate that they wish their body used this way. A final gift. This is never discussed openly and is often communicated only through gesture or a whispered word to family.

Children Are Exempt

This is the one absolute. No child's body is ever cached. The taboo around this is so strong that violating it results in immediate execution if discovered. Even in starvation's deepest pit, this line holds.

Mark What You Take

Some caches have crude tally marks scratched nearby—anonymous records of how many times the cache has saved a life. A way of honoring the dead without acknowledging what you've done.

Psychological Impact

On Those Who Create Caches

The act of cutting flesh from the dead and storing it changes people:

The Disassociation

Most describe a strange mental state while preparing a cache—a distance from their actions, as if watching someone else do it. "I was there but I wasn't," one anonymous account describes. "My hands knew what to do. I just... went away for a while."

The Rationalization

Creators tell themselves stories: "They're already dead." "It's practical." "They'd understand." "I'm not going to use it—it's just insurance." The mind builds walls between the act and its meaning.

The Weight

Those who've created caches often report feeling watched, haunted not by ghosts but by guilt. Some develop compulsive behaviors—checking and rechecking that the cache is well-hidden, or avoiding the area entirely, unable to face what they've done.

The Solidarity

Paradoxically, knowing others have done the same provides comfort. "I'm not a monster," the thinking goes. "I'm a survivor. We all do what we must."

On Those Who Use Caches

Actually eating from a cache is a different horror:

The Threshold

Many report that using a cache the first time is like falling through ice—there's a moment of resistance, a sense that you're crossing into a place you can't return from, and then it's done. You are now someone who has eaten human flesh. That fact cannot be unlearned.

The Texture

The cold preserves meat well. Too well. It doesn't feel like eating something long-dead. It feels fresh. This bothers users more than almost anything else—the wrongness of how normal it seems.

The Forgetting

Users describe a strange selective amnesia. They remember finding the cache, remember the decision, but the actual act of consumption becomes foggy, dream-like. The mind protects itself by refusing to store the memory clearly.

The Silence

Those who've used caches recognize each other, though they never speak of it. A certain look in the eyes. A particular type of guilt. They form an invisible fellowship of the damned.

Social Knowledge and Denial

What Everyone Knows (But Won't Say)

In most settlements, the existence of caches is an open secret:

• Everyone has noticed that some frozen corpses in the wastes show signs of careful butchering
• Everyone has heard the rumors about "ice cellars" and "the pockets"
• Everyone knows someone who survived an impossible winter with no visible supplies
• Everyone suspects their neighbors, and everyone is suspected

But acknowledging this knowledge would require confronting the reality that their community—their family—their self—has crossed into territory that defines monstrosity. So the fiction is maintained.

The Official Positions

Different factions handle the issue differently:

The Order of the Last Light

Publicly condemns the practice as a violation of human dignity and Father Death's rites. They preach that the dead deserve rest, not desecration. Privately, individual members struggle with the knowledge that some of their own have likely resorted to caches in desperate times. The cognitive dissonance is destroying the Order from within.

The Iron Hand Regiment

Takes a brutally pragmatic stance: "Waste is worse than sin." They neither encourage nor discourage the practice, simply pretending it doesn't exist. If discovered, a cache is quietly destroyed, the discoverer transferred, and nothing is said. The state maintains order by maintaining useful fictions.

The Silver Company

Treats knowledge of cache locations as valuable intelligence and will pay for reliable maps to significant caches. They make no moral judgments—they deal in commodities, and preserved meat is a commodity. This mercenary approach disgusts most survivors but is at least honest about what the world has become.

The Children of Silence

Uniquely, they embrace the practice. In their theology, flesh caches represent the ultimate honesty—accepting that the dead feed the living, that survival requires acknowledging reality without moral pretense. They maintain caches openly as "gifts to the desperate." Other factions find this disturbing, but when starving, even the horrified sometimes use what the cultists provide.

Variations and Extremes

The Communion Caches

In certain isolated settlements, the practice has taken on pseudo-religious dimensions. When a respected elder dies, their flesh is cached with ceremony—treated as a final gift to the community, a way of continuing to provide even in death. Users of these caches report that eating feels almost sacramental, though they struggle to articulate why.

This variant horrifies most survivors not because it's worse than standard caching, but because it suggests people are beginning to accept the practice, even valorize it. The slippery slope becomes visible.

The False Caches

Some raiders and bandits have begun creating fake caches—marked like real ones, but filled with poisoned or diseased meat. Those desperate enough to use a cache are unlikely to carefully examine what they find, and the resulting deaths both eliminate potential threats and spread terror. Several documented cases exist of entire parties dying this way.

This perversion of the caches has created a new layer of paranoia: even if you're willing to use a cache, how do you know it's safe?

The Living Pockets

The darkest rumor—unconfirmed but persistent—suggests that some have created caches before death. Individuals near death from cold or injury, knowing they won't make it, allow themselves to be cached alive, their flesh preserved in ice while still technically breathing. They become suicide-insurance, their final act a gift to those who might need it.

Investigators who've pursued these rumors report finding evidence—bodies positioned too carefully, showing signs of cooperation in their own caching—but never living witnesses who'll confirm the practice. If true, it represents a final frontier of horror: commodifying not just the dead but the dying.

Detection and Consequences

How Caches Are Discovered

Most caches remain hidden, but discoveries happen:

• Melting patterns during rare warm spells expose hidden chambers
• Animals, especially ice bears and frost wolves, occasionally find and raid caches
• Scavengers stumbling on marks they don't understand follow them to horrifying revelations
• Those dying of exposure sometimes confess the locations of their caches in final delirium
• Rival factions torture information from prisoners (cache locations are surprisingly valuable intelligence)

What Happens When Found

The response depends on who finds them:

By Authorities

The cache is quietly destroyed, burned if possible or collapsed if not. No investigation. No questions. The location is marked privately to prevent re-establishment. The discoverer is reminded that some things are better forgotten.

By Scavengers

Most mark the location privately for future need but take nothing immediately. The cache becomes a dark secret, a terrible insurance policy they hope never to need but are grateful exists.

By The Righteous

The Order's more zealous members occasionally make examples, destroying caches publicly and condemning the practice. These demonstrations briefly boost morale but ultimately change nothing—new caches appear within weeks.

By Raiders

Ironically, raiders rarely use discovered caches. Their code, such as it is, draws lines around certain acts. Using the dead this way marks you as weak, as having already surrendered to desperation. Better to take from the living than eat the dead.

Moral Weight

The Great Silence

The widespread existence of caches creates a pervasive, unspoken guilt across survivor communities. Everyone suspects, no one knows for certain, and the not-knowing is itself a kind of protection. But the weight accumulates:

• Elders die wondering if they'll be cached
• Parents look at their elderly parents with unthinkable thoughts during lean times
• Communities fracture over unspoken suspicions
• Trust erodes under the weight of what everyone pretends not to know

The Slippery Slope

Scholars and priests worry about normalization. As caches become more common and more accepted, will the next step be killing to create caches? Will we progress from using the naturally dead to creating the dead? The line between survival and atrocity blurs in the cold.

Some settlements that initially tolerated caches "in extreme emergency" have seen the definition of "extreme emergency" shift. What was once unthinkable becomes pragmatic becomes routine. Several documented cases exist of communities where caching the dead is now almost standard procedure.

The Alternative

Yet advocates (and there are advocates, speaking carefully in private) ask: what is the alternative? Let people starve when preserved meat sits frozen in the ice? Die for abstract moral principles while the practical means of survival exists? They argue that denying the reality of caches is itself a kind of moral cowardice—a refusal to acknowledge what survival actually requires in a world this broken.

This argument convinces almost no one while simultaneously convincing everyone. The practice continues. The silence holds.

Known Incidents

The Farrow's Rest Horror (Year 18)

A hunter from Farrow's Rest discovered a massive cache in a ice cave three days' travel from the settlement—over thirty bodies, carefully butchered and arranged. The cache was old, possibly dating to Year 5 or 6, and showed signs of regular use over the years.

The hunter reported it to the settlement's elders. After heated private debate, they decided to say nothing publicly but quietly collapsed the cave entrance. The hunter was asked to forget what he'd seen and began drinking heavily shortly after. He died two years later when he walked into the wastes during a storm. Some say it was suicide. Others say he was helped.

The incident has never been officially acknowledged, but everyone in Farrow's Rest knows something happened. Trust between families has never fully recovered.

The Silver Ledger (Year 22)

A Silver Company ledger was stolen and briefly circulated before being recovered. In it, detailed maps to seventeen major caches across three regions, with notes on capacity, condition, and estimated "value."

The Company claimed the ledger was falsified by rivals seeking to damage their reputation. But too many of the locations checked out. The revelation that the Company was quietly mapping and monitoring caches sent shock waves through survivor communities.

The broader implications—that the Company likely knew who had created many of these caches, that they were treating human remains as tradable assets—sparked brief outrage. But outrage requires moral high ground, and who in the wastes can truly claim that? The scandal faded. The Company continues its operations. And everyone quietly wonders what other ledgers exist.

The Last Confession (Year 27)

A dying courier from the Black Ice network left a written confession describing their use of caches over fifteen years of operation. The account was horrifyingly detailed: locations, dates, how many times each was used, what it felt like.

Most disturbing was the math. By the courier's careful accounting, their use of caches had saved seven lives—their own, four clients they'd delivered to settlements who would have otherwise starved, and two children they'd found dying in the wastes and fed before carrying them to safety.

The confession ended: "I am damned. But they lived. In this world, perhaps that's the trade we make."

The confession was circulated privately among the Order of the Last Light, who debated for months about what moral framework could address such calculations. They reached no consensus. The document was eventually burned, but copies persist.

Advice for Travelers

If you discover what you believe is a cache:

1. Do Not Report It: Unless you're certain of your moral ground—and who is?—reporting it serves no purpose. It won't be destroyed, merely relocated. And you've made an enemy of whoever created it.
2. Remember the Location: You may need it someday. In extremis, you will be grateful it exists. Judge yourself later, if later comes.
3. Follow the Rules: Take only what you need. Leave the rest. Mark that you were there if the cache has a tally. Respect what little honor remains in this horror.
4. Tell No One: Not your companions, not your family, not your confessor. The knowledge is dangerous. The silence protects everyone.
5. Forgive Yourself—Or Don't: Using a cache will change you. You will be someone who has done this thing. Whether you can live with that is between you and whatever gods might remain. Most manage. Most have to.

The frozen world offers few mercies, and terrible choices are rarely avoidable. The pockets exist because they must. We pretend they don't because we must. And when the time comes—if it comes—we use them because we must.

And then we live with what we've done. Or we don't.

Related Articles

• The Day the World Broke
• Starvation and Resource Scarcity
• The Children of Silence
• Order of the Last Light
• Walking Out / Winter Walks
• Frost Madness
• The Last Taboos
• Rites of the Dead

"There are things we don't talk about. The pockets are one. We all know they exist. We all hope never to need them. We all judge those who use them. And we all know, deep down, that when starvation comes—really comes—we'll use them too. That's the truth that keeps us silent."

— Overheard in Farrow's Rest, speaker unknown

"My grandmother cached my grandfather. I know because she told me where, in case I ever needed it. She cried when she told me. Said it was the last gift he could give us. I've never used it. I've been close. But I haven't. Every winter I think about him, frozen in that cave, waiting to save my life. And I wonder if it's worse to use him or to let his sacrifice be for nothing."

— Anonymous confession, found written on paper and weighted with stones outside an Order chapel

"The Company calls them 'cold storage.' The Regiment calls them 'strategic reserves.' The Children call them 'gifts of the gone.' Everyone has a euphemism. No one has the courage to call them what they are: proof that we lost our humanity somewhere in the ice, and we're never getting it back."

— Scholar's journal, Aurora Conservatory restricted archives