It was enough. She had learned to think that way, even if she didn’t believe it. She had learned to tolerate the dark.
Now, forced to confront the dark, denied even the promise of light, she was forced to confront this: she had not grown as tolerant of the dark as she had thought.
And now, she was forced not only to tolerate it, but to be grateful for it. Forced to be a part of it. To become one of a number of creeping, silent things, poised to strike. To kill.
To die.
After a time, this no longer disturbed her. If she could learn to think one way, even if she didn’t believe it, she could learn to think another.
She could learn to think like a beast.
But she could not learn to think like prey. Dull, easily frightened, unable to act. She could not ever tolerate that.
She picked through a dense patch of the wood, disguising her trail in the packed undergrowth. Not that Sy would know enough to follow her; but someone else might. She barely needed to think, her new senses growing more attuned to the forest, guiding her path.
But as she went, she noticed her hunter’s edge fading from her. A delayed sense of urgency, a complacency.
She struggled to keep it.I am human, still, she repeated to herself. Then, aloud. “I am still human.”
She came upon a camp site. Abandoned – or, mostly. It looked to have been previously occupied by a fellow hunter, but it was hard to tell; the reddish furry growth all over him distorted most of his clothing and features beyond recognition, but for the limp tufts of hair on his scalp like the seed heads of grass, the blackened teeth poking through his melting jaw.
Though he was long dead, he moved. His corpse crawled with larvae eating decayed flesh, spiders eating the larvae, bats darting out of the darkness to eat the spiders. A fox, apparently unbothered by Anya’s scent or presence, approached and tugged a bit of skin loose from the corpse’s leg, then wandered off with it.
Pity, she thought, watching it go,I am not hunting foxes.
She stepped closer to the man; the diving bats ignored her. She wondered if she knew him, from the lodge. Friend in winter, foe in summer.
Neither now. She went through his supplies, which had been picked clean long before his corpse was. She found nothing of use but a flask, hidden inside his disintegrating breast pocket.
Clutched in his hand, covered in the same mottled mold, was a leg of an unidentifiable animal. Rabbit, or quail. She realized she still had not tried eating.
She sat across from the dead man’s long-extinguished fire and pulled a walnut biscuit from her pack.
“Cheers,” she said, lifting it to him. Tentatively, she crumbled off a piece and stuck it, delicate as a tea pastry, on her tongue.
It burned her. Horrified, she spat it on the ground, brushing stinging crumbs off her tongue. She recalled Johanna spreading salt in their doorway. “To keep out evil spirits,” she said. Evil spirits, and ants.
Mind reaved by panic, she tried to wash the taste away with a swig from the flask.
It lit her insides on fire. With a cramping gut and burning throat, she spilled it back out, retching into the dirt. Something else came up with it; something that disturbingly resembled the mess left behind by buzzard beetles.
No salt, no alcohol. No hunger. She’d already eaten her last meal and not even realized it.
Last meal, last light, last days. Not a conscious thought so much as a subtle knowing, a certainty.
No. Not my last,she told herself, repeated to herself.Not my last. “Not my last anything.”
But she knew she did have one last something: hope. And giving in to certainty would be the death of it.
As would sleep. Earlier that day, sheltering beneath a rowan’s shadow, she sat with her knife in her hand. Whenever she felt herself being pulled under, she dug her knife into the side of her thigh. Whenever her mind drifted to the grotto, she did the same.
When the sun finally set low enough that she could keep her eyes open for more than a few seconds, she crept out of the shadow, stiff and sore, bleary-eyed and bow-legged.
A wild wind had blown all day, and into the night. Now, the stars were obscured by clouds. Even so, she could hear their celestial song.
She left her decomposing companion and let them guide her to the river.
The less human she became, the more the Lichtenwald revealed its secrets to her.
