A brown overcoat laid flat out under a boy of 16 years in a vast desert of seemingly endless sand.
The very same boy had crashed out after using actions that drained something vital from him crippling his strength and endurance. He did not know how the actions sourced it from his body but he knew it did.
His eyes moved under his eyelids, frantically. For the same dream visited him in a new form.
Burning towers in a land of sand and drought. His dream, a vivid painting, wanting to come alive.
His eyes saw his dream becoming brighter and redder. He still crawled out of the flames surrounding him, when he opened his eyes to the blue expanse of the sky.
The wanderer was awake.
Fingertips touched around the surface he was lying on. 'Not sand, solid ground-like.' He deduced.
Turning his head to the left and right, the deep red colour of the surface shone back the harsh light starkly into his sight.
He sat up immediately. Blinded by the light, his mind was stunned. Adding to the effect of his vivid dream, the boy in the brown overcoat felt many of his jumbled thoughts getting struck down by lightning like effect.
"Ahh!" he shook his head violently. That's when the smell of raw cut meat fell upon him.
He remembered where he was, what he had done and what he laid upon.
Running his right hand on the surface, he called out to himself in a whisper, "That was a lot to be taken for this many actions. What is the source of these actions in ourselves?"
Maybe he had fallen upon a trace of this mysterious source, maybe he hasn't. He did not know. The only fact was he had spent more actions in Rigac than he spent in the desert.
'What was the difference?' He considered as he stood up. Patting his overcoat, he looked at the scattered pieces of meat, bone and hide.
He turned his head back to the mirage. It was still there, only seeming as far away as it was before.
The wanderer began with collecting the meat pieces in one area, then he proceeded to do the same for the pieces that had more bone or more hide in them in two different areas. All placed on the surface he made before collapsing.
Shriek of wind ran against the surface. The boy cursed. "No! I don't want to hear it again!"
His declaration did not stop the wind but it did break the sound to be registered in his brain.
A word closes in on being a taboo when its familiarity in every day is beyond acceptance.
The scattered pieces collected back together formed three mounds of meat, bone and hide. He picked up two bone pieces and started tearing off the meat part and tossing it into the meat mound.
When his two bone pieces were cleaned off, he hammered one on the other trying to break it off. His brown overcoat fluttered in the wind matching his strikes of bone.
Soon the one he was hammering on broke and the bone which earlier looked like a large femur bone was now having a broken pointed end.
With the broken end of the bone, the boy began cleaving off the bone slices off the one he used as a hammer. Slice by slice he carved a better pointed conical bone than his hammered one was.
"Onto the more weapons and grilling the meat." He glanced at the meat mound and hide mound.
'I was damn lucky that I killed the monger at first contact.' He compared his height to the largeness of the mounds. All of them were bigger than his entire body thrice over.
'Even more is used to lock and make the blood surface.' The wanderer tapped with his right foot on the blood ground. It sounded stable for now.
With his short spear, he scrapped off more meat from several other bone pieces. The bone shards that didn't qualify to be made into any sort of weapon were put next to each other forming a circle.
He tossed a single large hide piece in the middle of the circle and tapped three times on top of it. The action of fire lit a burning kindling that used the hide as its source.
The kindling ignited and became larger. Trapped inside the bone fire ring, it sizzled. Smoke wafted black climbing higher into the sky.
The boy sat beside the ring. Sharpening bones of various shapes into fitting weapons that fit that shape. Some broke, some were ill-suited for combat. Yet, there was a bone short sword, three spears, seven knives, and chunks of bone shards made for slings.
"I need to make a shield… somehow," he concluded looking at the declining bone mound, bone fire ring and the weapons he made. 'I won't be able to take them all but I'll see what more I could fit in this special brown overcoat.'
He knew his overcoat was special. He hadn't even found how much was it because he had only scratched the surface. His overcoat carried all his items and he never had to carry a bag for it since the day he got the overcoat. The boy did feel the weight of the items but never his overcoat showed that it was being weighed down.
Trace of the secrets behind the overcoat eluded him still.
Taking up the slightly thinner long bones he put them above the fire ring in a criss-cross pattern. After a dozen of each bones in each direction was laid, he picked up a bone knife and began slicing off meat in small rectangle pieces.
He placed them all on the improvised grill to be cooked. He had got more than two irregular bones that he had sharpened which could be used for turning and grilling the meat.
His mouth salivated at the scent of the dark red meat sizzling above the fire. Once one of them was cooked just enough, he tossed it red hot into his mouth.
"Ah! Ah!" He chewed. "Its good! Its good! Ah! Ah!"