The boy popped another sizzling meat steak into his mouth.
"So good!" He ate and gulped down through the heat his mouth was being ravaged.
Dropping another hide into the campfire, his hand went to another steak right after. He gulped that down too.
It had only been an hour since he began working on crafting weapons and sizzling meat on his makeshift grill. The boy went from barbaric to weaponized. Or was he already?
His sharpened weapons now included three short swords, fourteen knives of various sizes, double edged daggers, chunks sharpened for a sling and nine spears all made from bone. The bone mound still hadn't reached its half point.
Bending his arm and rotating his shoulder, the boy said to himself. "That's about enough in weaponry. I have to start making soap or something from the extra meat and skin." He smelled himself without ever taking his nose to one of his body parts. "Uh! Eh! Eh! I really need a shower. And mere water won't work."
He stared up at the bright blue sky. No clouds walked among the above. This was his chosen escape from the disaster he brought.
Exhaling he stood again and walked to the meat mound first, then the hide mound and tossed some of the pieces from both to a different corner on the blood red surface. He worked faster because he did not know how stable is the surface he is on, and how much of a target he is considering there are desert mongers and such beasts.
He kicked his campfire out in broad daylight. The kindling settled and only ash remained surrounded by bone shards and pieces. He picked up ash using an odd shaped container like bone piece he had carved earlier. Shaking them a bit he sifted the lighter ash down on the blood ground in a specific area where he had drawn a circle.
He repeated this until all the ash that was lighter fell while the heavier ones sunk down into the hidden cavity of the bone piece.
The wanderer in between his weapon making had at times chopped off pieces of the meat and separated based on how oily they felt to him.
Meanwhile, now he stood in between two circles he had drawn earlier. One contained the meat chunks that felt oily more, and the other held the lighter white ash from the burnt hide.
In his brown overcoat, still against the wind, he bent down and drew two times the action of earth on both of the circles. And plopped down next to them.
"Now, we watch." He patted his overcoat as he said it.
The action of earth found an imperfect structure. It was incomplete as the surface was made by another incomplete action of earth and the circles contained something upon which the action wasn't called on.
Despite that, a feeble wall rose in each of the circles. One was made of wood, the other by stone.
Yet, the boy rather than watching the slightly rising walls, he was zoned out with his eyes open. He was chasing the feeling he had once felt in Rigac of from where the actions took the power from him.
His eyes did not move nor his body did. His mind however was ever silent, snuffing the winds whispers and the sound of rising action of earth.
He exhaled again. "Nothing… again." Sighing his head went down, but it quickly rose up too.
For his baskets of wood and stone were ready filled with their contents.
He drew the action of water in the air above the ash bucket. Water materialize and stayed floating for a quick second until the water fell suddenly. For the water did not find a structure to follow so it fell down following the most basic structure locateable.
Gravity.
The boy went on to pick another odd bone tool he made. One that seemed like a smaller brethren to a shovel made for pots except a bit more weirder in shape.
He started kneading and slicing the oily meat pieces, again and again. With his free hand he grabbed on a random strong bone he had cleaned off. With is he stirred the pot of ash and water.
One hand kneaded and sliced, the other stirred.
After couple of minutes, he stopped and went to check through the hide mound trying to find something he needed. He couldn't spot one that fit the description nearly. So he checked the meat mound and then the remainder of the bone mound.
In the bone mound, he found a bone, meat, and hide piece where the bone was the one that contained the most volume in the piece. Second place going to the meat, but he smiled at the hide for it was the right size of thin for him.
Taking a bone knife, he steadily and fastly cleaved off a good sheet of hide. It was thin.
"I need it thinner." He grabbed on a chunk from the sling chunks and began scrapping off the hide from its softer side. Within quarter of an hour, he got his wish. A thin hide, clean of its irregularities, to his desire and will.
The boy in the brown overcoat, alone in a desert, walked over from his spot on the blood surface to the wooden basket containing a caustic lime water mixture made from light ash and water. But it was impure, did he need an impure one? He knew he didn't but he has to skip steps.
So he put the hide above the stone basket, the one that contained the meat kneaded, and took a different bone piece. One he found earlier curious, he picked it and started scooping water on the hide from the wooden basket and pouring it onto the meat basket.
The water dripped through the hide held tight by his other hand and leg. It separated the impure lime water into a caustic lime water just before the moment it touched the kneaded meat.
Then, the process kept repeating and in between the boy kept tossing away the impurities collected atop the hide until his stone basket was full to his desire with lime water and kneaded oily fat meat.
Thus, came the main conclusion to his soap making task. Now he took a different bone piece just as long as the other he used for stirring and stirred the stone basket as fast as he could. Couple minutes later he stopped and placed a few of the bones he used for the fire ring next to the basket, surrounding it from all sides tightly.
He began tapping on the left side of each bone he could say had a left side to him for three times in a row to initiate the action of ice.
The bones cooled further than their coldest handling temperature, and they absorbed the heat from the air and the stone basket, even its contents.
The contents inside started solidifying soon.
"Yes." Nodding at his accomplishment as he smelled the air being less abhorrent than before. "I have made soap." He flicked both his hands forefingers and pointed at his accomplishment in pride.
Within next few minutes, he broke a piece out of the hardened soap and used the action of water on his metal pipe while he undressed quickly. He so wished to shower, and here he was moments away from it.
Even the winds celebrated it, they shrieked differently. He laughed at their incoherent noise, "Hah! Haha! You can't always come to me willfall!"
People forget when you haven't been touched by an incident for awhile, you invoke it by yourself in your defiance.
The ground below him broke.
His foot fell through one side. The other stayed up on the surface. "Ahh!"
The wanderer placed his left hand in front and pulled his leg out. His breath uneven and fast. He looked down at the hole. Stepping away he knew he can't stay on it further, he has to leave the blood surface.
His clothes half off of him, he took the other half off and used the metal pipe to drain him in pressured pleasant water while he used his made soap as a stand-in remedy for cleansing.
It wasn't even ten minutes when he saw the blood surface collapsing into the sand dune while his weapons stayed in his brown overcoat with pieces of grilled steak with it packed in hide.
"Back to chasing the mirage then." He turned around to face the harsh white desert and the lonely sight of a mirage to find the real thing.
The wanderer walked.