The hound was gone.
The trap dismantled.
The blood scrubbed clean.
But something had been left behind in the village.
Something heavy.
---
Lira sat alone near the dried streambed, rubbing her palms raw against a broken shard of pottery. Not to clean it. Just to feel something that wasn't fear.
"I thought it'd feel good," she whispered when Arion approached. "Winning."
He didn't answer. He didn't know how to.
Because he had thought the same.
---
By midmorning, the children gathered—not in joy, not in victory, but as if drawn by the same invisible weight. They circled around the fire pit without speaking.
Three boys nursed shallow cuts.
One girl, bruised from a tumble during the panic.
All of them quieter than they used to be.
Even Tov, who usually bragged loudest, only stared at his hands.
"Why do the grown-ups keep smiling?" Lira finally asked.
"Because we're still alive," Arion said.
"But Deno isn't."
No one replied.
---
The old beggar watched from afar, unmoving.
He had told Arion once: "Pain will teach what ink never could."
But Arion now wondered what lesson this pain was trying to teach. Was it strength? Or was it silence? And was silence worth the price?
That night, while most slept, Arion gathered the children by the broken kiln. They didn't ask why. They came anyway.
"We're going to learn how not to bleed," he said.
Tov frowned. "How?"
Arion bent down and drew a circle in the dirt. Then a triangle. Then a small "X."
"By not being dumb," he said.
"By watching where we step. By knowing what a beast smells like before it smells us."
Lira leaned forward. "You're going to teach us to trap like the old hunters?"
Arion shook his head.
"Smarter than them."
---
By dawn, the children had names for bones in the dirt and shadows on bark. They had lessons in hiding behind tree roots, crawling under woven branches, and tying dried vines into choking loops.
They bled during practice. From thorns. From rope burn. From tripping over themselves.
But it was different now.
This time, they chose to bleed.
---
That afternoon, old Mira saw them returning from the hills, bruised and muddy, and said to the herbal woman, "Why don't the little ones rest?"
The old woman replied, "Because they're not little anymore."
And neither, Mira thought, was the black-haired boy leading them.
---
That night, no songs were sung. No tales of beasts defeated. But there was food on every plate—thin stew, even a few roots.
No one celebrated.
But no one went hungry, either.
And in a world like theirs, that was almost the same thing.