Back to the Run

Hunger Clock: 69%

I woke up thinking about the piglet. Not the kill, or the sow, or even the thing in the dark. The part that stuck with me was simpler than that. One bite, and my whole day's work was gone, and I'd gone to sleep on a single fish.

Every day since I'd woken up in this body had been the same shape. Wake up lower than I went to sleep. Hunt. Eat. Climb home. Do it again tomorrow. The Clock never stopped. It didn't care that my leg hurt, or that I'd learned something, or that I'd almost died. It only cared what I'd eaten lately. I was stronger than I'd been two weeks ago, a lot stronger, and I was still living one meal at a time, the way I used to live one paycheck at a time.

I didn't have an answer for that. But lying there, I realized there was a question I'd been avoiding since my first day, and it was about time I asked it.

So I went back down Ichor Run to the place where I'd found the husks.

I hadn't been back. I'd told myself it was because the hunting was better upstream, and that was true. But the real reason was that the place felt like a grave, and I'd been in no hurry to stand in it again. The first day, I'd looked at it for a few minutes, done the math, and walked away. I'd been weak and half-blind and starving then. I wasn't any of those things now.

It was smaller than I remembered. A flat stretch of bank where the stream curved, with soft mud at the water's edge and higher ground behind it that had dried and cracked in the sun. The husks were where I'd left them, scattered across the higher ground, gray and brittle and half sunk in old leaves. The egg casings were still there too, crushed flat into the mud.

I walked among them slowly, letting Sense and Insight do the work. The first thing I noticed was the size. On my first day, everything had looked big. Now I was bigger and I could judge better, and some of these husks were huge. One of them was longer than six of me laid end to end. Its scythes alone were longer than my whole body. I stood next to it and looked up at the empty eyes, and I thought about the Goddess saying "the last of its kind," and for the first time it meant something more than a number.

"So this is what we grow into," I thought.

The second thing I noticed was the damage. The first day, I'd seen that some husks were cracked wrong and some were burned. I hadn't really looked at how. Now I did. The burns were black and smooth at the edges, the kind that came from a fire held close, not a forest fire passing through. And the cuts were straight. Long, clean, straight lines through the shell, all at the same kind of angle, as if whatever had made them had done it the same way every time. Nothing I had seen in this forest cut like that. Claws tore, and teeth crushed. These had been sliced.

I knew what made cuts like that. I'd held something like it in my old kitchen. Something here had used tools, and fire, and had been careful enough to crush every egg. I could think of one kind of animal that did all three.

I didn't want to finish that thought, so I didn't. Not yet. I didn't know enough. But I put it away somewhere I wouldn't lose it.

I was standing by the big husk when something inside it moved.

I went still. There was a dark gap where the husk's back had split open, and from inside it I heard a scrape, and then a small growl. Something long and brown slid out of the gap and onto the leaves, low and quick, with a narrow head and a body that seemed to bend in the middle like a spring. It looked at me with shiny black eyes and showed me a mouth full of needle teeth.

[Sense]
Target: Bank Weasel ~ Lv.6
Threat: High

It had made its den inside one of my kind. It had dragged in leaves and bones and was sleeping where something like me used to sleep. I can't explain why that bothered me as much as it did. The husks weren't anyone I'd known. But I felt something cold and hard settle in my chest, and I decided this weasel was going to be my breakfast.

It didn't wait for me. It came straight at me, fast and low, and went for my legs.

The old me would have been too slow. But I had twenty-nine points in Agility now, and the weasel found out what that meant. I lifted my front walking legs out of the way and struck down with my right scythe, and it twisted away so fast my hook only grazed its back. It came again from the side. I turned with it. It feinted left and went right, and I'd seen that move from the rat and the shrew, and I went right too and met it with my left scythe across its chest. It slammed into the hook and bounced off, snarling.

It was quick and it was angry, and it never stopped moving. I loved it. Every time it came in, I knew a little more about how it moved. It liked the right side. It always pulled back before it lunged, a tiny dip of its head like a breath. The third time it dipped its head, I was already striking.

Both scythes caught it in midair. I pinned it to the ground against the side of the big husk and held it while it thrashed, and when it slowed down, I bit.

[Kill] Bank Weasel ~ Lv.6
XP gained.

I ate it right there, sitting in the shade of the husk. It was lean and stringy and very good.

Hunger Clock: 63% → 78%

Afterward I pulled the weasel's bedding out of the husk with my scythes, all the leaves and the little bones, and scattered it across the bank. It didn't make any sense to do. The husk didn't care. But I did it anyway, and when it was done, I clicked once, quietly, the way you might say something to somebody who couldn't hear you.

The sun went down while I was still there. I climbed a tree at the edge of the bank instead of walking all the way home in the dark, and I settled in where I could see the husks and the stream and the cracked, dry mud of the higher bank.

The forest got loud with frogs and then slowly quieter as the night went on. It was late and very still when I heard it.

It was coming from the dry part of the bank, not far from the big husk. A slow, soft sound, so faint that I almost thought I'd made it up. A long pull of air, then a long wait, then another.

Something under the mud was breathing.