Under siege

(Intro is a wall of text for well... introduction, the rest doesn't need to be)

Nika hugged her cape closed as she paced through the path of compressed snow as she got out of the abbey into the inner bailey. It had already been several weeks since they had arrived to this castle and the cold only kept intensifying. She stepped inside one of the bastions of the castle and came out on at the top of to walk on the wall walk. She looked and sighed desperately as she saw titans scrape against the walls. Those bastards were making the scouting mission much longer than planned and it didn’t seem it was about to end anytime soon.

It was supposed to be a simple retrieval mission. The summer hadn’t been good this year; the crops had been drowned by heavy rains before burning into a crisp by a sudden drought. Humanity ended the fall season with a poor harvest and many worries toward the upcoming winter.
Luckily, some honest souls in the King’s Police had managed to convince the head priests to practice an old custom humanity had adopted during similar, yet less desperate times. The measure consisted of a tax called tithes requesting every producer of any resource donate 10% of their annual production to the King. The King’s men would then store the gathered good and distribute them back through to the population in case of disaster. Normally, people always complained and called the tax unfair but nobody would raise their voice once their cupboards were empty and grateful accepted the bag of grains given to them.

Sadly, the hard summer had nearly emptied the silos inside the Walls already and the Scouting legions were soon called in reinforcement. The mission was simple: Retrieve the extra stock accumulated with the years in the different fortress nearby the Walls and bring them safely inside. Of course, many soldiers had already fallen during those seemingly easy expeditions. The worst part was that begin eaten by titans wasn’t the primary reason of death; the odd temperature had turned the ground into a slippery mush of mud and ice and it would make the titans trip and fall onto their prey. Some even unluckier had met a sad fate underneath their horses.

Her squad had successfully made it to the Ambroise Castle before the snow had started to fall but a single night in the deserted building and everything was covered with white. Worse, several titans had gather around the curtain walls of the castle, blocking all possible exits for the soldiers.

It had been 5 weeks now.