Lessons in Silence

Survival is not a victory, but merely the postponement of a final defeat.

I slept in fits and starts, my back against a tree on the opposite side of the fire from the strange boy. Every time I drifted off, the image of the burning granary or the sound of the bandit leader's scream would jolt me awake, my heart hammering against my ribs. The boy, however, did not seem to sleep at all. He remained seated with his back against a tree, a statue carved from shadow and moonlight, his mismatched eyes lost in the darkness beyond our small circle of light. When the first grey fingers of dawn touched the sky, he stood up without a word. It was time to move.

Our journey continued in that same, oppressive silence. He was the phantom, and I was the clumsy, all-too-human shadow struggling to keep pace. My initial attempts at conversation had been met with such profound indifference that I had given up entirely. It was clear that my existence was a matter of complete irrelevance to him. I was not a companion; I was merely something that was there, like a rock or a tree.

By midday, a new, more pressing concern made itself known: a gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach. The last time I'd eaten was the stale bread from the morning before Cinderfall burned. My body, already pushed to its limits, was beginning to fail me. I had my hunting knife and a rudimentary knowledge of trapping passed down from my father. Survival was a skill I possessed, however meager.

I spotted the tracks of a deer, fresh in the damp earth. With a clumsy gesture, I tried to signal to the boy that I was breaking off from the path. He stopped, turning his head to watch me with that same blank, unnerving curiosity. There was no judgment in his gaze, no impatience. Just a quiet, unnerving observation.

For the next hour, I put my skills to the test. I was quiet, I was patient, I moved against the wind. I found the deer, a young buck drinking from a stream. I crept closer, my knife held tight, my heart pounding with the thrill of the hunt. I was just a few feet away, ready to make my move, when a twig snapped under my boot. The sound was a gunshot in the forest's silence. The buck's head shot up, its eyes wide with alarm, and in a flash of brown and white, it was gone.

Failure. I stood there, my shoulders slumping, the gnawing hunger in my stomach now mixed with the bitter taste of my own incompetence. When I returned to the path, the boy was exactly where I had left him, watching me with those same empty eyes.

He did not mock me. He did not say a word. He simply walked past me, deeper into the woods. I followed, my shame a heavy cloak. He stopped in a small clearing, a place where sunlight dappled the forest floor. He tilted his head, as if listening.

Then, he lifted a hand and flicked his fingers.

A tiny shard of light, this one a pale, icy blue, shot from his fingertips and landed on a patch of moss. The moss instantly froze over in a perfect, slick circle. He flicked his fingers again. Another shard, this one the color of dark earth, landed a few yards away. The ground there softened, churned, and then rose into a crude, cage-like structure of woven roots and stone. A trap.

He then sat down on a fallen log and waited. I watched with him, not daring to speak. We sat in silence for what felt like an eternity. Then, I heard it—the sound of something moving through the undergrowth. A large, boar-like creature with wicked tusks emerged into the clearing. It saw us, snorted aggressively, and charged.

Its path took it directly over the patch of frozen moss. Its hooves slipped, and with a surprised squeal, it lost its footing, tumbling head over heels directly into the spot where the earthen cage waited. The cage slammed shut with a dull thud, trapping the beast inside.

The boy stood up, walked over to the struggling, squealing creature, and placed a hand on the cage. The boar went silent. It was over.

I stared, my mind struggling to comprehend what I had just witnessed. He had not hunted. He had simply... arranged reality to his liking. He had set a stage, and the world had provided an actor to play its part.

He turned his head, his gaze once again fixed on the empty air beside him. "The kinetic transfer was still not perfect," he murmured, his voice a low, self-critical monotone. "The beast's momentum was miscalculated. It should have been incapacitated on impact."

"It is dead, is it not?" a different, sharper voice seemed to emanate from him. "The result is the same. Efficiency is not always elegant. You obsess over meaningless details."

"The details are all that separate art from butchery," the boy replied with a sigh.

He was doing it again. Arguing with a ghost only he could see. I watched him, a cold knot of fear tightening in my stomach. I was following a being who could reshape the world with a thought, a being whose mind was a fractured, warring landscape.

He butchered the boar with a detached, surgical precision, and cooked the meat over another one of his perfect, smokeless fires. He ate his portion in silence. When he was done, he pushed a skewer of cooked meat towards me. It was not an offering of friendship. It was a pragmatic gesture. The same way a farmer gives feed to his livestock. He needed me to keep up, and for that, I needed to eat.

I took the meat, my hands trembling slightly. It was the best thing I had ever tasted.

As I ate, he spoke again, his gaze fixed on the dying embers of the fire.

"Your reasons for fighting are fragile," he said, continuing our conversation from the night before as if no time had passed at all. "They are tied to things that can be taken from you. A home. Friends. What will you do when they are all gone? What will you fight for then?"

"I... I don't know," I admitted, the words tasting like ash.

He finally looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something other than emptiness or annoyance in his strange, mismatched eyes. It was a flicker of something ancient, something profoundly weary.

"I am going to a place that needs to be erased," he said, his voice a quiet finality. "A wound in the world, left by a god who grew bored of her own creation. When you have nothing left to protect, the only thing left to fight for is a cleaner end."

He stood up, the firelight casting his long shadow across the clearing. "Rest," he commanded. "We are close."

Close to what? A wound in the world? A cleaner end? I was left alone with the dying fire, the taste of meat in my mouth, and his terrifying, nihilistic words echoing in my mind. I was no longer just following a monster. I was following him to the end of the world.