Two years.
It had been two long, brutal years since Rey first began moving northward, his every step a battle against death.
The dry, cracked ground crunched beneath his feet as he trudged forward. The red moon above cast a dull glow across the desolate terrain. Every breath he took was measured. Every blink was calculated. In this realm, carelessness meant death.
Each day began with the same ritual: smearing himself in wet soil. It masked his human scent well enough to confuse the weaker monsters that stalked the lands. He had learned quickly — painfully — that scent was everything here. Even a drop of sweat in the wrong place could lure in death.
Rey's instincts had sharpened beyond anything he ever imagined. He could now recognize the differences between beast tracks. Fangs with curved patterns meant fast, clawed predators. Webbed footprints usually meant group-based scavengers — weak but numerous.
That's what he had learned: weak monsters often traveled in packs. But the strong ones? They moved alone. Silent. Calculating. Much like him.
His shelters were always temporary. Dug carefully underground, hidden behind rock layers or beneath fallen trees, and camouflaged from any aerial threats. He stayed in one place no longer than two months. Then he vanished — without leaving behind a single trace. Even the soil he covered his scent with was disposed far from his sleeping quarters.
That discipline kept him alive.
But not without scars.
---
Two Incidents Burned into His Memory:
The first was the giant spider.
He hadn't seen the web until it was too late. One careless sprint, and he was strung up like prey, writhing in silence as sticky threads clung to his skin. It was dark, and he had no weapon. But with sheer will, he used his teeth, biting and tearing through the threads, ignoring the blood from his arms as he cut himself free.
The spider had sensed movement and came rushing — only for Rey to hurl sharp bones and ignite a fire using flint and monster scale. The web lit, the spider screamed, and Rey escaped.
That encounter taught him how to spin monster threads into ropes and rudimentary clothing — crude, but effective.
The second incident was worse.
He was caught — captured by a trio of lizard-like beasts. Intelligent, swift, and cruel. They didn't kill him. They were taking him somewhere.
He didn't wait to find out where.
In a rare moment of luck, he used the needle-sized fang of a smaller creature he had killed days ago to jab one of the captors in the eye. While it howled, he broke free and sprinted, ducking into a burrow and waiting for an entire day, unmoving, in the dark.
Since then, he never slept without setting traps. Never trusted silence.
---
Now, standing beneath a crooked tree, Rey looked up at the moon. His body was stronger, leaner, covered in bruises and hardened skin. But his eyes held something deeper — loss.
"I miss you," he whispered.
He hadn't said those words aloud in a long time.
His mother's laughter. His father's tired smile. His sister's teasing voice.
He would give anything to hear them again.
For the first time in two years, tears welled in his eyes.
"I'll get back," he muttered. "No matter how long it takes... I'll return."
But even as he made that vow, deep within the shadows of the northern path... something was already watching him.
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