Date: September 20, 540, from the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored
Dawn found Dur already on his feet. The cold autumn air bit at his cheeks, but inside Torm's hut, it was warm and almost cozy from the heat emanating from the small stone stove. Dur silently fussed with the pot, reheating the remains of yesterday's stew. His body, beaten and scratched just a few days ago, was healing with surprising, almost animal speed, but the new muscles, unaccustomed to this kind of work, ached and throbbed with a constant, dull background hum. His hands, especially his fingers, still trembled slightly—an echo of recent fear and physical exhaustion.
Torm, as always, was a man of few words. After breakfast, he nodded for Dur to come to him and, without a word, handed him a strange-looking object—a long, roughly hewn knife with a thick blade and a handle wrapped in cracked leather.
"This will be your main teacher for the next few days," the hunter's voice was dull and even, without a hint of encouragement or judgment. "Lose it, and you'll be eating bark and chewing leather from your boots. Understood?"
Dur just nodded, gripping the rough handle in his palm. The knife was heavy, clumsy, but sat in his hand with surprising confidence.
The hunter left the hut, and Dur followed. They went past the fence surrounding the dwelling and into the adjacent grove. Torm walked quickly and silently, his feet seeming to naturally flow around dry branches and uneven ground, while Dur rustled, stumbled, and breathed too loudly. Finally, the hunter stopped by a young, slender tree—an ash, as Torm later explained.
"There it is, your first bow," Torm patted the trunk with his palm. "It's in here, inside. Your job is to get it out. Not to break it, not to ruin it, but to feel it and free it."
With these words, Torm took the knife from Dur and, before the astonished youth's eyes, with a few precise, calculated movements, stripped the bark from a section of the trunk, revealing the light, resilient wood. He showed him how to hold the tool, at what angle to make the cut, how to feel the direction of the grain.
"The tree is not an enemy. It is an ally," the hunter spoke, his fingers sliding over the wood with an almost tender understanding. "You are not chopping it. You are having a dialogue with it. Listen to it. It will tell you itself where it wants to be flexible, and where it wants to remain strong. If you hear it, you'll get a weapon. If you don't, you'll get firewood."
He handed the knife back to Dur and stepped aside, leaning against a pine, arms crossed on his chest. His gaze was heavy and inexorable, like a mountain.
Dur made the first tentative cut. The knife slipped, almost flying from his hand. He gritted his teeth and tried again. This time the blade sank too deep, leaving an ugly, ragged scar on the future bow. A familiar wave of despair and anger rose within him—at himself, at his clumsy body, at this impossible task. He glanced at Torm, expecting mockery or anger.
But the hunter just watched. In silence. His silence was more eloquent than any words. It said, "I don't care how many times you fail. What matters is whether you get up after it."
Dur exhaled, forcing the tremor in his hands to subside. He remembered the quiet evenings at the orphanage, playing checkers with Aunt Marina. There, too, you couldn't rush. Every move required thought, patience. It was a different game, but the principle was the same.
He began again. Slowly. Painfully slowly. Each movement demanded incredible concentration. He tried to "listen" to the wood, as Torm had instructed, and at first heard only his own wildly beating heart and the whistle of the wind in the crowns. But gradually, as his fingers grew accustomed to the knife's weight, and his eyes learned to discern the fine patterns of the growth rings, something began to change. He started to notice where the wood yielded more easily, and where it resisted; where the cut was smooth, and where it was ragged.
The sun rose higher, chasing away the morning cold. Sweat beaded on Dur's forehead. His back ached from the awkward position. But he didn't stop. Cut after cut. Mistake after mistake. The callus on his palm, rubbed raw by the handle, burst, and dark spots of blood appeared on the wrapping. He simply shifted his grip and continued.
Torm occasionally approached, took the workpiece in his hands, ran his fingers over it, muttered something under his breath, and handed it back. Once, he roughly snatched the knife from Dur's hands and with a few sharp movements cut away a large piece of wood that the youth had been carefully preserving, afraid to overdo it.
"You're not sparing it. You're making it," he said. "Pity breeds weakness. A weak bow will break on the first day. And it will fail you at the very moment your life depends on it."
This was the longest monologue Dur had heard from him in all these days.
By noon, his workpiece only vaguely resembled a future bow. It was crooked, rough, and seemed ugly. But it was no longer a simple stick. A purpose, a potential, could be discerned in it. Dur looked at it, and for the first time in a long while, something akin to pride stirred in his chest, alongside the weariness and pain. A weak, barely noticeable sprout.
When the sun began to sink towards the west, Torm finally signaled that enough was enough for today. Dur, almost falling from exhaustion, trudged after him back to the hut. His hands burned, his back ached, and in his ears rang the silent dialogue with the wood.
In the evening, sitting by the fire, he couldn't even hold a cup of tea—his fingers refused to obey. Torm, noticing this, silently handed him a piece of old buckskin and a jar of thick, smelly fat.
"Rub this in. Every evening. Until your hands become like stone," he said. "Tomorrow you'll be sanding. And then you'll start learning to braid a bowstring."
Dur nodded, too tired even for words. He looked at his torn, trembling hands, smelling of wood shavings and his own blood, and at the ugly, but already so precious piece of wood leaning against the wall. And he understood that he had gone through something much greater than just a craft lesson. He had taken the first, hardest step—the step towards ceasing to be a victim who gets saved, and beginning to become one who can save himself. And this step began not with a loud oath or a desperate fight, but with the patient, monotonous scraping away of everything superfluous—from himself, from the wood, from his own fate.