He walked with the stream at his side for a while, letting the sound of it keep him company. The water helped, but his stomach still pulled tight with every step, reminding him it wanted more than water, more than that.
Food. He needed food.
He kept his eyes moving, scanning the bushes and low branches near the water. Most of it was just green, leaves and stems that meant nothing to him at a glance. Then something caught his eye, a spot of color that didn't belong in all that grey and green.
Fruit.
It hung from a branch a little too high for him to reach on his own, round and dark red, sitting alone near the top of a thin tree close to the stream. His stomach ached just looking at it.
He walked closer and stopped under the branch, tilting his head back. Too high. Jumping wouldn't get him anywhere close, not with legs this tired.
He looked around instead, searching the ground for something he could use. It didn't take long. A long stick lay half buried in the dead leaves nearby, thin but sturdy enough when he picked it up and tested it against his palm.
Good enough.
He walked back under the branch, raised the stick as high as his arms would let him, and swung.
The first hit missed the fruit completely because of the thing in his neck, catching leaves instead. He adjusted his footing, aimed again, and swung a second time.
This one landed.
The fruit dropped from the branch, hit the ground with a soft, wet sound, and rolled a short distance before stopping near his feet.
He dropped the stick and crouched down fast, almost eager, and picked it up with both hands.
That was when he felt it.
One side of the fruit had gone soft under his fingers, the skin broken where his stick had struck it. The other side was worse, flattened slightly, bruised deep from the fall onto hard ground. Two hits. Two ruined spots on the same small fruit.
His shoulders dropped a little.
Great. Half of it's already wasted.
Still, half was better than nothing. He turned it over in his hands, checking what was left, when the pressure came behind his eyes again, quiet and certain, the same way it always arrived.
He didn't need words this time. The knowledge was just there, sitting where it hadn't been a second ago.
Poisonous.
He went still.
Not part of it. All of it. Skin, flesh, whatever sat inside. His hands knew now, the same way they'd known how to twist plant stems into rope, the same way he knew which leaves near his feet would kill him. This fruit belonged on that list.
He stared down at it a long moment, saying nothing.
Of course.
The hunger in his stomach didn't care that the fruit was poison. It just knew there was something round and full sitting right there in his hands, and he had to force himself to remember why that didn't matter.
He felt something tighten in his chest, small and stupid considering everything else that had happened to him already. He'd climbed nothing, walked far, aimed a stick twice just to knock down something that would have killed him if Axiom hadn't give him information.
He pulled his arm back and threw it as hard as he could, sending it crashing into the trees somewhere off to his left. He didn't watch where it landed.
"Useless," he muttered, more to himself than anything else.
He stood there a moment longer, breathing slow, then turned back toward the stream to keep looking.
He turned back toward the stream, then stopped.
A sound came from where the fruit had landed. Not the crash of branches settling. Something alive.
He turned slow and saw it. A deer, thin and trembling, standing near the trees with a bite wound torn into the side of its neck. Blood had dried dark along its fur. It didn't move at first, head low, legs shaking under its own weight.
Then it saw him.
The deer bolted, crashing through the brush in a burst of speed that didn't match how weak it looked a second ago. He understood then. It hadn't been resting. It had been playing dead, the same way he had in the cellar, waiting for whatever had bitten it to leave.
It just hadn't expected him.
He didn't shout. He didn't chase it outright. He followed instead, quiet, keeping enough distance that the deer wouldn't feel him closing in. Meat. If he could bring it down, that solved the hunger problem for more than one day.
The deer didn't get far.
Its burst of speed faded fast, the wound and exhaustion catching up to it within minutes. It slowed to a walk, head hanging, sides heaving. It still glanced back now and then, ears twitching at every sound, but it no longer had the strength to run.
He kept his distance and kept following, careful with each step, avoiding dry leaves where he could.
He looked down at the stick still in his hand. Sharpening it would help, but sharpening it meant scraping wood against stone, and that meant noise. He couldn't risk that this close.
He tore a strip of cloth from his own shirt instead, using it to tie a sharp stone to his stick, as he crouched low near the ground, searching. If people had died in this forest, they hadn't always died with empty hands.
He found it a few minutes later, half buried near a root. A dagger, blade rusted and dull along one edge, but still a blade. He picked it up carefully, testing the weight of it in his palm.
This would work.
He moved ahead of the deer's path, low and slow, circling toward a spot where the ground dipped and the brush grew thick enough to hide him. He crouched there and waited, dagger held ready, eyes fixed on the deer as it wandered closer, still wary, still checking behind itself for whatever had bitten it.
It stopped near a fallen log and lowered itself down, legs folding beneath it.
He stayed still, breathing slow, and watched it rest.
---
He watched the deer settle fully into rest, legs folded, head drooping low. The gap between them had closed without him meaning it to. Close enough now that one clean jump could reach it.
He didn't let himself think past that.
He pushed off the ground and lunged, dagger first, all his weight going into the motion. The blade found the open wound on the deer's neck and sank in. He pulled back and drove it in again, same spot, deeper this time. Then he shifted his aim and stabbed into its stomach.
The deer screamed.
It wasn't a sound he expected from an animal, high and broken, more like something that understood what was happening to it. Its legs kicked out, useless against the ground, and its eyes went wide and wet, tears building at the corners as it thrashed under him.
Hmph, I have food now.
For one second, he felt something close to pride. He'd done it. He'd actually done it, brought down something bigger than himself with nothing but a rusted blade and a stick he never even used. Food. Real food, waiting for him once this was over.
Then the deer looked at him.
Its eyes found his in the middle of the struggle, wide and dark and full of something he didn't have a word for yet, and the pride in his chest died the moment their eyes met.
His hands started shaking.
Not from effort. Something else, something that started in his fingers and crawled up through his wrists until he could barely feel them holding the dagger at all. A strange numbness followed right behind it, spreading slow, like his hands belonged to someone else now.
He stopped breathing.
Just for a second. Long enough that his chest ached with the effort of not breathing, and then it came back all at once, too fast, too heavy, dragging air in through his nose in short, confused pulls that didn't feel like breathing so much as gasping.
The deer stopped moving beneath him.
He stayed frozen there, dagger still buried in its stomach, staring down at what he'd done.
It wasn't screaming anymore.
The silence afterward felt worse than the sound had. He pulled his hand back slowly, the dagger sliding free with a wet sound he'd remember for a long time, and knelt there over the still body, not moving, not sure what to do with his own hands anymore.
I killed it.
The thought arrived before anything else could. Not I have food. Not I survived. Just that, plain and heavy, sitting in his chest like something that didn't belong there.
I killed it.
He looked at the wound on its neck, then the one on its stomach, and something in him wanted to look away and couldn't. It had been alive a minute ago. Walking, breathing, scared of whatever had bitten it earlier. Now it was just weight on the ground, eyes still open, still wet, still fixed on nothing.
He was hungry. He knew that. He'd chased it because he was hungry, because his stomach had been empty for a full day and this was meat, real meat, exactly what he needed to survive another day in this forest. He told himself that. He tried to.
It didn't help.
A strange grief crept into him instead, sudden and unwelcome, nothing like anything he remembered feeling before, though he supposed he didn't remember feeling much of anything before waking up in that cellar. He didn't know this deer. It wasn't his. It hadn't done anything to him except run when it saw him, the same way he probably would have run if their positions had been reversed.
And he'd killed it anyway.
His stomach dropped, a sick, hollow feeling that had nothing to do with hunger this time. Nausea rose up right behind it, and he had to swallow hard against it, his throat tight and dry.
Cold sweat broke out along his back and the back of his neck, despite the morning air not being especially cold. His whole body had gone strange, hot and cold at once, trembling now in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.
He set the dagger down on the ground beside him, because his hand wouldn't hold it steady anymore, and just knelt there, staring at his own palms. Red. He hadn't noticed until now. His hands were red, and some of it had gotten onto his sleeve, and looking at it made the nausea climb higher in his throat.
He turned his head and was sick into the leaves beside him, body shaking through it, his stomach cramping around nothing since there was nothing in it to bring up. It didn't matter. His body did it anyway, over and over, until there was nothing left but dry heaving and the taste of bile in his mouth.
When it finally passed, he sat back on his heels, weak in a way that felt different from hunger, different from the walking he'd done all morning. This was something deeper. The adrenaline that had carried him through the jump and the stabbing had burned out all at once, and what was left behind felt like nothing at all. No strength. No pride. Just his own hands shaking in his lap and a dead animal lying in front of him that he'd have to touch again eventually, if he wanted to eat.
He didn't move for a long time.
The forest stayed quiet around him, the stream still running somewhere behind, birds he hadn't heard all morning starting up again now that the danger had passed, as if nothing had happened at all. As if the world didn't know or didn't care that something had died a few feet from where he knelt.
He looked at the deer again, really looked this time, past the wound and the blood and the stillness. It had been running from something bigger than itself when he found it. Bitten, exhausted, faking death the same way he had, in the same cellar, less than a day ago. And now it was the thing lying still while something else decided what came next.
He thought about that longer than he wanted to.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, to no one, to the deer, to himself. He didn't know why he said it. It didn't undo anything. But it felt like something he needed to say anyway, the same way he'd needed to say goodbye to the nineteen children in the cellar before he left them behind.
He sat there until his hands stopped shaking, until his stomach settled enough that he trusted himself to stand. Then he reached for the dagger again, slower this time, and made himself remember why he'd done it in the first place.
He needed to eat. Nothing about that had changed.
He just wished it hadn't felt like this.