The "heat" stolen from the Alpha's blood was a fickle mistress.
As Soren stood over the cooling carcass of the beast, he felt the artificial strength beginning to fray at the edges, replaced by a cold, leaden exhaustion that threatened to pin him to the forest floor.
But the desperation of a Nameless Guest was a powerful engine.
He knew that if he left the Alpha here, the scavengers; things smaller but more numerous than Shade-Cats, would strip it to the bone before the sun hit its zenith.
He knelt in the dirt, his hands stained a deep, bruised violet from the mixture of his own ichor and the cat's gore.
He took his rusted paring knife and began to butcher.
It was a messy, amateurish job.
He didn't have the anatomical knowledge of a hunter, only the frantic instinct of a famishly starved, ostracized boy.
He hacked away at the hindquarters, his blade snagging on bone and gristle.
Every time the knife hit a pocket of the Alpha's marrow, his Tranquil Poison would flare, the black threads in his fingers twitching with an almost erotic greed.
He wrapped the best cuts of the stringy, lean meat in a flap of the cat's own charcoal-gray hide, creating a heavy, dripping bundle.
He couldn't take it all, so he only took the meat, the heart, and the thickest part of the hide.
As he stood to leave, he felt a strange pull from the violet lines in his vision.
They weren't just vibrating; they were flowing, like a current of water, toward the higher ground to the west.
He followed the "pull," dragging his bundle behind him. His breath coming in ragged, frosty plumes.
He climbed a steep, limestone ridge where the trees grew thin and the wind howled with renewed ferocity.
There, tucked behind a screen of skeletal briars and a fallen slab of granite.
It looked like a mere crack in the mountain's face. But as Soren pushed through the thorns; ignoring the way they tore at his already ruined tunic, the space opened up.
It was a shallow cave, only about ten feet deep; its floor covered in a layer of dry, pulverized stone and old leaves.
Howeve, the most important reality to Soren was that it was shielded from the wind, and substantially elevated from the ground.
From the mouth of the fissure, he could see the entire valley he had just crawled through.
It was a strategic vantage point, a perfect place for an observer.
Soren dropped the bundle of meat and slumped against the wall, his chest heaving, even as his eyes adjusted to the dim, dusty light.
Once his vision got moderately accustomed to the new ambience, Soren realized that he wasn't the first thing to seek refuge here.
In the far left corner of the cave, a flat slab of limestone had been dragged away from the wall to serve as a makeshift table.
Its surface was scored with thousands of tiny, diagonal nicks, the unmistakable mark of a blade being cleaned or sharpened.
Higher up, a rusted iron ring had been hammered into a fissure in the ceiling; a frayed piece of hemp rope still dangling from it, ending in a loop that sat at breast-height to him.
'This isn't a home. It's a station.' Soren realized.
He crawled his way toward the crampier depths of the cave, his fingers brushing against a small pile of debris midway through.
Unraveling the content of the debris, Soren unearthed several tools that felt like a Goldfinger to the current him;
A heavy, notched skinning knife with no handle, leaving only the full tang of dark, pitted steel, and a palm-sized whetstone that had been worn into a smooth, curved crescent.
There were no bones here, or any signs of a struggle, so he felt whoever had used this place had relocated, or simply walked away, leaving their heavy, broken tools behind.
'A hunter's Perch,' The thought raced through his mind, still strangely sharp despite his fatigue.
'He sat here and watched the game trails; observing the area from a stealthy and protective vantage point'
~Grrwww~
The grumbling of Soren's stomach drowned all active and straying thoughts running through his mind.
The hunger was no longer a dull ache; it was becoming a violent, physical force that made his vision swim.
He looked to the bundle of raw Shadow-Cat meat. His first instinct was to tear into it like an animal, but his "vision" warned him; showing him several black parasites within the raw flesh; the natural impurities of the Forest.
To eat it raw was to invite a different kind of death.
LHe needed fire.
He turned to a small stack of dust-covered wood in the corner; gray, weathered branches of heartwood that had been kept dry by the cave's depth for months, likely years.
Taking his rusted paring knife and the heavy tang of the skinning blade he found earlier; Soren struck them together.
~Clink.~
For a village such as theirs that lived surviving very close to the wild wastelands, little tricks such as these are what anyone including 5-year-olds of their tribe have learnt to replicate.
And as such, it was only normal to Soren that, a dull, orange spark would appear and fly across the air.
However, what he would never have anticipated was for it to die before it even hit the tinder of dried moss.
~Clink.~
This time nothing happened.
He repeated the actions about seven more times before he looked down at his own hands; they were already trembling.
His fingers were so cold they felt like they would snap if he gripped the iron any harder.
Tears of frustration pricked his eyes, blurring the violet lines of his vision.
"I am not... dying... for want of a spark," he growled, his voice cracking.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feeling of the "heat" from the Alpha's blood.
He then focused that sensation into his hands, and struck again, not with his muscles, but with the desperate weight of his entire existence.
~CHINK.~
This time, a fat, brilliant spark landed in the center of the moss.
Soren, initially stunned by the turn of events watched the spark in the moss glow, then fade, then glow once again.
But the moment his stomach growled in indignant fury, He swiftly leaned forward, and whistled a soft, rhythmic breath into it.
Then a tiny thread of blue smoke curled upward out of the moss.
A moment later, a small, orange tongue of flame licked at the heartwood. The light hit the walls of the cave, dancing over the rusted iron ring and the notched stone.
Only then Soren sit back, his face illuminated by the first real warmth he had known since the Weeping Cottage.
Nonetheless, he didn't rest on his laurels; after all, he would be all the Ignis Tribefolks thought him to be if he let wood to turn to coals before making optimal use of the fire.
So, he skewered a slab of the Shadow-Cat meat on a sharpened stick and held it over the flame.
The smell hit him first. It was a heavy, musky aroma, reminiscent of scorched earth and wild grease.
As the fat began to drip into the fire, hissing and popping, out the aroma of hunted game, Soren's mouth began to water so violently.
He didn't wait for it to be done. He pulled the meat from the flame, the edges charred black while the center was still blue and dripping and took a bite of his first true meal in days.
The meat was tough, stringy, and tasted like the bitter cedar and iron-rich blood that sustained the predators of the Wastelands.
To any high-born of the Ignis Tribe, it would have been an unpalatable mess of gristle and musk; to Soren however, it was the bread of heaven itself.
As he tore a hunk of the charred flesh away with his teeth, a jolt of pure, primal electricity surged through his palate.
He didn't even chew the meat enough to grind the fibers down; he simply swallowed them with a desperate, guttural sound.
The moment the warm, grease-heavy mass hit his stomach, the Tranquil Poison in his system went into a frenzy.
It was a physical sensation; almost as if a thousand tiny needles were prickling past the lining of his gut, into the mound of flesh.
He could almost "see" the black threads of the venom uncoiling from his organs, reaching toward the incoming nutrients.
The poison was a glutton; it had spent years refined and starved, and now, presented with the calorie-dense, antibody-rich meat of an Alpha Shadow-Cat, there was no way he was leaving much, if any for Soren.
~Badump! Badump!~
Soren's heart thundered two heavy, solid beats.
The constant, rattling caged bird of a heartbeat he previously had vanished and was replaced by a steady, even if labored, pulse.
He sat by the small fire, his face smeared with grease and soot, methodically stripping the bone.
As he ate, he felt a strange, terrifying shift in his perception. The "hallucinations"; the violet veins of the world, didn't fade; instead, they became more structural.
He looked at the walls of the cave and saw the way the limestone breathed, the tiny fissures where the mountain's internal pressure bled into the air.
He realized then that the "vision" wasn't a byproduct of his sickness. It was a byproduct of the Tranquil Poison's interaction with his sensory nerves.
The poison was a supreme predator; it was designed to perceive its habitat and surroundings in terms of vulnerabilities, flows of energy, and points of decay.
By feeding the poison the blood and meat of the Wasteland beasts, he was inadvertently "tuning" his own eyes to the frequency of the forest.
He wasn't seeing the world of the living. He was seeing the world of the effective apex predators of the Wastelands.
After several servings, Soren's stomach finally carried a weight of its own; it bloated and tighted his waist against his belt.
Nonetheless, Soren didn't succumb to the lethargy of a full meal.
The heat in his blood wouldn't allow it, so he instead reached for the heavy, notched skinning tang he had unearthed from the debris.
He sat cross-legged by the fire, the whetstone in his left hand and the heavy iron in his right.
~Shhh-tink. Shhh-tink.~
The sound of the stone against the metal was rhythmic, a meditative grinding that echoed off the low ceiling of the cave.
He focused on the edge of the blade, his violet-tinted vision highlighting its microscopic chips and the dull, rusted curves.
He didn't just want to sharpen it. He wanted to prepare it.
Every few minutes, he would pause, taking a deep breath and focusing on the indigo wound on his shoulder.
He would wait for the black ichor to seep out; the "perspiration" of the thirty venoms, and deliberately wipe his fingers across the stone, allowing it to slowly grind the molecules of the poison onto every gap in the blade.
He was tempering the iron with his own misery.
By the time the fire began to burn down to a low, orange glow, the heavy skinner was no longer a piece of scrap.
It had become a dark, matte-black wedge of metal that didn't reflect the firelight, but absorb it.
The edge was wicked, thin enough to shave the fine hair on his forearm, and it carried that familiar, rainbow-on-oil shimmer of the Tranquil Poison.
He looked at his two weapons: the small, rusted paring knife—the "fang" that had saved his life—and the heavy skinner, which felt more like a "claw."
He was a seven-year-old boy in a hunter's cave, surrounded by the bones of his enemies and the tools of his survival.
He had fire. He had meat. He had a roof of stone.
For the first time since the night he was "erased" from the tribal scrolls, Soren didn't feel like a Guest; no, he felt like an Host.
He lay down on the dry leaves near the hearth; the heavy skinner clutched in his hand and the small knife tucked into his boot.
The cold of the Wastelands still clawed at the mouth of the cave, and the wind still howled through the "Forest of No Return," but inside the fissure, the air was warm and smelled of scorched meat.
As he closed his eyes, he didn't see the faces of the Matron or Kaelen. He didn't see the cold eyes of the Chief.
He saw the forest. He saw the violet veins of the earth.
Then he saw himself, a black thread woven into the very heart of the Wastelands, waiting for the world to realize that the "Sinkhole" was no longer just empty space.
It was a mouth. And it was just getting started.