The forest was dim when Loki stopped running.
Fog lay low between trunks, a thin, gray veil that moved in slow, uncertain eddies. The air smelled of wet soil, old rot and of resin that had fermented too long. Loki didn't know how long he'd run after the explosion. Minutes. Hours. The forest's cold air had numbed the burning in his lungs long before he realized he had stopped moving. The cat curled into the hollow at his knees and purred once little teeth clicking against a ragged tongue, the sound was small and ridiculous.
He had killed the Hunter.
The sentence was blunt, cold, and at its edges thrummed with the memory of the man's last look: composed, deliberate.
"Let me choose my death." The words landed in Loki's mind with the weight of a verdict.
No matter how many times he repeated the truth, I had no choice e asked me to… he would have turned… it didn't lighten the weight inside his chest.
A man had died at his hands. Not a stranger. Not an illusion. Not an enemy.A teacher.Someone who had chosen to help him.
His eyes blurred and his throat ached with something he refused to call sorrow.
He leaned against a pine trunk, breath unsteady. The cat pressed its head into his palm, soft and warm.
"…You're not helping," Loki whispered, voice cracked.
But he still scratched the cat's head.
The warmth anchored him more than he wanted to admit.
Time passed. Rain came and went. Loki let the moments slip like sand from a hand.
Eventually his memory went back to the Spell's haunted voice
[You have slain an Awakened Human, Gehrman, The Hunter.][You have received a Memory.]
The message should have been a relief. Rewards for killing meant power, progress, proof that the spell worked on businesslike terms. But the notation lodged in him like a splinter. A Memory born of the Hunter's death meant a trophy of the deed; it meant inheritance carved from loss. Loki could not bring himself to reach for that inheritance.
Not because he feared possessing the memory, but because summoning it would harden the Hunter into an object, something he could hold and catalog. It would turn the man's last breath into an answer written in metal. That finality frightened him more than the idea of the memory itself.
He thought of the Hunter's laugh, a dry sound like wind through a hollow reed. He remembered the way the man had set his spear to sing when struck against the wood and had said, without tenderness but not without care, "Feel how it wants to move. Learn it." How to find weakness. How to forgive one's necessity. The lessons were small and practical, and they had cut through Loki's panic and made him competent.
Now those small practicalities were charred into him and he could not remove them.
For a long time he refused. He forced himself to sit on the damp ground. He rocked, palms pressed against dirt.
The forest changed while he waited. Fungus crept in new creases along trunks. A bird's call came, then ended badly. Sounds that had been ordinary minutes ago now hinted at something else. Loki's Child of Mysteries hummed under the surface of his thoughts, a low, intolerant alarm that insisted he pay attention.
He had a choice. He could stay in inert grief until the horror spread, or he could do what the Hunter had set him up to do: move, act, finish the work. Grief did not need action to exist and action did not cancel grief. One fed the other. He could tell himself both things at once.
At last he pushed himself up. The motion was clumsy, as if his limbs had forgotten how to fit into a useful life. He walked to the shallow hollow where the Hunter's body had been left. When he finally reached the place he knelt and dug with his hands until the wood-sodden earth opened like an old wound. He rolled the hunter's cloak what remained of it, from the ground and wrapped it around a section of the Hunter's spearhead that still stuck a short, black stump in the ground.
The gesture was useless and necessary at once. He would not pray, nor did he know the rites to call a dead man to rest. Still, he wanted to mark what had been and could not be restored. He set the stone atop the makeshift bundle.
He pressed the stone into the earth and let the world take it.
The motion steadied him more than he expected. The cat nosed the stone and then settled with its body curved around Loki's legs. He sat back on his heels and let the cool seep into his palms. The symbolic gesture, an awkward grave for a man who did not expect ceremony felt like an apology he could give and accept simultaneously.
Grief reasserted itself then, but different: not explosive but wider, like a long tide.
"Thank you. I'm sorry."
The words were not answered. They did not need to be.
After a while, after the tremor in his limbs had faded to a low hum.
He held his hand in front of him and imagined the memory forming in them. Then, slowly, with a reluctance he would not have admitted aloud, he summoned it.
Golden sparks ignited into his hands the memory came into being with slow unwillingness. A long, slender dagger appeared in his hand, forged from a single piece of dark, matte metal. Its surface was strangely cold to the touch, drinking in light rather than reflecting it. The blade tapered into a razor edge, almost needle-thin at the point. Tiny grooves run along the metal, not decorative carvings, but the faintest imprint of a serrated hunting spear, as though this dagger remembered the weapon it had once been part of.
The hilt was wrapped in weathered black leather, tied in the same pattern the Hunter used on his spear haft. Even when summoned, it carried the faint scent of smoke, pine resin, and wet steel, the scent of the forest where its former owner made his last stand.
When held, it felt unnaturally stable, the weight perfectly balanced. The dagger sat in the hand as though it were meant to be wielded by someone who fights quietly, precisely, and without hesitation.
Loki held the dagger for a moment then summoned his runes:
Name: Loki.
True Name: ---
Rank: Aspirant.
Soul Core: Dormant
Memories: [Deck of Cards], [Heartwood Token], [Hunter's Fang].
Loki focused on last one. and a string of runes appeared before him:
Memory Name: Hunter's Fang.
Memory Rank: Awakened
Memory Tier: I
Memory Description: [A blade sharpened by patience, tempered by loss. Those who walk the dark must strike first.]
Loki had expected the runes to end here. But he could see more, which he guessed were thanks to his attribute.
Memory Enchantment: [Cruel Precision]
Enchantment Description: Your strike finds the kill.
Loki unsummoned the runes, closed his fingers around around the dagger and bowed his head. He did not pretend the blade would lessen what he had done. He could only make a small promise to himself and to the man who was gone now: I will use it well. I will not let this be wasted.
----
The sounds of the forest had shifted. The Child of Mysteries prickled, a sharp clinical warning that something was wrong. The cat rose with a soft stretch and licked his wrist. Loki let the motion anchor him. He drew a breath that tasted of resin and iron and wrapped the Hunter's Fang in his cloak. The blade's presence sharpened his edges; it brought the lessons back into a clear shape. Where before his grief had been a swamp of helplessness, now it was a steady weight on one shoulder, something to balance against, not to smother him.
Fog swirled at the edge of the clearing, and in it the distant roofs of the town glimmered with candlelight. They were too clean and too human to be left.
Loki took a step forward. The blade at his side dipped like a pendulum and settled. He did not know if the Hunter would have approved of the violence he would commit in the name of mercy. He only knew this: the choice had been made, and he had to live with how it shaped him.
He walked into the forest. The weight in his chest, grief braided with purpose kept his feet steady. Tonight he would keep moving, keep breathing, keep the Hunter's lessons close as a blade against the dark.