We stood against the big humans: the oppressors, the opponents, the enemies, the hated.

These were all names I had learned for them, and yet were they the right names? Experience screamed yes, logic screamed no, and I grappled with morality as I grappled with slavery, unable to tell what made a man and what made a monster. Where did we fit, we oppressed? 

Snow – white ice made in freezing clouds atop the world. I am Snow, and the world we live in has no place for snow, no place for me or my kind, save in labor and death. The radiation of the sun burns up the land and the bigger humans that stalk this Earth have claimed it for their own. They care nothing for us smaller folk. 

Caramel – soft, silky, sweet. Little Caramel, the sweetest of sisters. I would not allow the world to burn her as it burned her namesake. I would keep her safe and golden if it cost me everything. She was the only beauty left in life. 

In our reality, with force and a few coins, you had power of life and death over a creature of equal awareness and thought. How had it world come to this? How could any of us, especially those so small as we were, create cracks in which to sow the seeds of change? I did not know the answers, but when I stared across parched land, I knew that the cracks must be found, the seeds sown, or the world could never heal.