Chương 9: B1 Chapter 8

Eyowon looked at me, seeing me with something deeper than her eyes. She didn't merely look at my face, nor at the blood on my hands, nor at the boy I'd been before the caiman's heart had been torn from its chest. Her gaze seemed to pass through all of that. It reached into the places I'd hidden even from myself: the fear beneath my courage, the grief beneath my silence, the desperate need to be useful before the world decided I wasn't. For a long moment, she said nothing. The village had gone quiet around us.

No one moved. No one dared to speak over the old woman's silence. The fire cracked behind me, and somewhere beyond the circle of gathered bodies, the forest breathed in the dark. I could hear my own heartbeat, heavy and uneven, as though it already understood that something had changed. Eyowon walked toward me without hesitation, knowing exactly where I stood. She'd always moved that way, as if darkness had never been an obstacle to her. But this was different.

There was purpose in each step, and sorrow too, a sorrow so old it seemed to have settled into her bones. She didn't walk like someone approaching a child. She walked like someone approaching a grave. Blood from the caiman's heart had begun drying across her hands, darkening the creases of her palms and coating her fingertips. It gathered beneath her nails and clung to the lines of her skin, black-red in the firelight. The heart had been warm when she took it.

Now its blood was cooling, becoming a stain that would remain long after the flesh itself had been consumed. She raised one hand and pressed her thumb against my forehead. The touch was gentle. That frightened me more than force would have. The blood tingled where it touched me. Warmth spread beneath my skin, tracing a path from the mark into my skull and down my spine. It moved through me like a living thing, slow and deliberate, finding every place where fear had taken root. My breath caught.

My shoulders tightened. I shivered, though the air around me remained warm. For one terrible moment, I thought I felt the caiman again, the weight of its body, the violence of its death, the final convulsion beneath my hands. I remembered its eye staring at me from the water, ancient and unblinking. I remembered the moment I'd chosen to kill it, and the moment afterward, when I'd realized that choosing to provide for others didn't make taking a life any less heavy. Eyowon's thumb remained against my forehead.

She spoke words I didn't understand then and wouldn't fully understand until much later.

"He who was born to hunt," she said, and her voice carried beyond me, beyond the gathered villagers, as though she were speaking to the ancestors beneath the earth, "the one who broke and was made better." Her thumb pressed more firmly against my skin.

"He who will save our souls because he wishes to provide, because that's who he already is, stands at the precipice of tomorrow." The words entered the silence and seemed to deepen it. No one shifted. No one looked away. Even the children had gone still, sensing that this wasn't a blessing spoken lightly, nor praise offered to make a young hunter proud.

"What he does upon that precipice will guide our future." Her voice trembled then, not with uncertainty, but with the pain of knowing what she was asking of me. She'd seen too many futures end in blood. She'd watched too many strong men mistake strength for permission, too many hunters return carrying meat and leave behind pieces of themselves they could never recover. She knew that survival wasn't victory.

She knew that sometimes the world allowed a people to live only by asking them to become something they could no longer recognize. Her thumb remained against my forehead.

"Slow, yet steady," she whispered. The words sounded small compared to what surrounded them. Yet they carried the weight of every season that had brought us there: every empty hunt, every child who'd gone hungry, every elder who'd died with their ribs showing beneath their skin. They carried the patience of those who'd endured because there'd been no other choice.

"Steady, yet strong." Her hand began to tremble. I wanted to reach for her. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't strong, that I didn't know what she saw when she looked at me. I wanted to tell her that I was still afraid, that the caiman's death hadn't made me better, only older. But the words wouldn't come. They remained trapped behind my teeth, too fragile to survive the weight of the moment. Eyowon's face softened.

"Strength is what we need, E'ru." She said my name as though it were both a prayer and a farewell.

"Strength is what you'll become, my stupid boy." There was affection in the insult, but it was wounded affection. The kind that came from loving someone who'd already begun to move beyond your reach. Her voice carried the memory of every time she'd scolded me, every time she'd corrected my grip, my stance, my patience. It carried the tenderness she'd never allowed herself to show plainly because tenderness could make a person careless, and careless people didn't survive.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. I looked at her and understood, though I couldn't yet name it, that she wasn't promising I'd become strong without suffering. She was telling me that suffering had already chosen me. That strength wouldn't arrive as a gift. It would be carved into me by hunger, by loss, by the choices no one else was willing to make.

It would come from carrying what others couldn't, and from learning that providing for someone didn't mean saving them from pain. Sometimes it meant standing beside them while the pain took what it came for. Her thumb lifted from my forehead. The warmth remained. So did the blood. And beneath the mark, beneath the fear and the grief and the terrible pride beginning to take shape inside me, something else had awakened. Not strength. Not yet.

Only the knowledge that strength would be demanded of me, whether I wanted it or not. My father looked at Eyowon. For a long moment, he said nothing. The silence between them wasn't empty. It was filled with all the years they'd survived together, all the names that had been carried into the dark and never returned, all the children who'd once laughed beneath the trees and now existed only in the memories of the living. Then he spoke.

"Old woman, if strength is what you need, then you have my arms, my legs, my back, and my body. Take all of it. Take whatever remains of me. I am the strongest among us. You know this." His voice was low, but it carried through the village. There was no pride in it, not truly. Only desperation dressed in the language of duty.

"I have carried men out of the forest when they could no longer stand. I have dragged the dead home when their families needed to see them one last time. I have gone where the trees were black with night and returned when others believed I had been swallowed. If something must be faced, let me face it." He stepped closer, placing himself between Eyowon and me. The movement was small, but it felt like a wall being raised. His shoulders squared.

His hands hung at his sides, empty and open, though I knew they could close around a spear and hold it until his fingers bled.

"E'ru provides, yes," he continued, glancing back at me.

"He brings food. He finds what others miss. He knows the paths beneath the leaves, the places where water gathers, the quiet places where prey sleeps. He's saved us more times than any of you know." His eyes lingered on me, and for an instant the strength left his face.

"But E'ru is E'ru. He is the sloth. A sloth is patient, yes. A sloth survives by enduring what would kill a faster creature. But patience is not the same as strength. Endurance is not the same as being able to bear the weight of the world." He turned back to Eyowon.

"Do not ask this of him." The words came harder now.

"Do not place this burden on his shoulders simply because he's survived the burdens you gave him before. He is not a tool to be taken from the earth whenever the village is afraid. He is not a sacrifice waiting for a purpose." His voice faltered. For the first time, the village heard the grief beneath it.

"He is all I have left of my Kakayah." The name seemed to wound him as he spoke it. He lowered his head, and the lines around his mouth deepened.

"All I have left," he repeated, more quietly.

"Her voice is gone. Her hands are gone. The warmth of her beside me at night is gone. Even the sound of her footsteps has faded from my memory. I've tried to hold on to everything, but the world takes and takes, and it doesn't care what it leaves behind." He looked at me again.

"But he remains. My son remains. When I look at him, I see her. I hear something of her in the way he breathes, in the way he turns his head when he's listening. If he dies, then she'll be gone completely. There'll be nothing left for me to protect. Nothing left for me to remember except the shape of an empty place." His hands curled into fists.

"It is my duty as the head of the hunters to lead the hunt. It is my duty to stand first when danger comes. It is my duty to be the one who bleeds so that others may live." He swallowed, and the sound seemed loud in the stillness.

"It is my duty as his father to keep him safe. I failed to keep his mother safe. I could not stop the sickness. I could not bargain with the spirits. I could not make the night release her. I have carried that failure every day since." His eyes shone, though no tears fell.

"I will not carry the failure of losing him as well." He stepped nearer to Eyowon, his voice breaking but not weakening.

"That burden belongs to me, not him. If the Last Night demands a body, give it mine. If it demands a hunter, send me. If it demands a life, then let it take the life of a man who has already lost everything once." Eyowon turned toward him. Her unseeing eyes found no face, yet somehow they seemed to see more than anyone else. Something close to pity and pride touched them, though neither feeling softened her.

"Yanrah," she said, and his name sounded like a blessing spoken over a grave, "you are a good father." She paused.

"And you are a good hunter." The words didn't comfort him. They only acknowledged the truth he'd spent his life trying to fulfill.

"But goodness does not make us exempt from what is coming. Strength does not make the strong immortal. And love, no matter how fiercely we hold it, cannot always keep death from finding the door." Her fingers tightened around the caiman's hardened heart. The object was small in her hand, but it seemed to draw the darkness toward it. Its surface was dry and ridged, marked by old scars and older rituals. Eyowon held it as though it were both a key and a sentence.

"E'ru is no longer a boy," she said. My father shook his head.

"He is my son."

"Yes," Eyowon replied.

"And that is why you cannot see him clearly." The words struck him. His face tightened, but he didn't answer.

"You see the child you buried beneath your fear," she continued.

"You see the boy who needed your hand, your spear, your voice to guide him home. You see the last living piece of the woman you loved. You see the one thing the world has not yet taken from you." Her expression grew sorrowful.

"But E'ru has grown beyond the shape of your grief." She turned slightly toward me.

"He has walked alone through places where other hunters would not go. He has returned carrying food when the forest gave none. He has learned the language of hunger, silence, and waiting. He has endured being overlooked because the world mistook quietness for weakness." Her grip tightened again.

"He is the one who will save us." No one moved. The words didn't sound like praise. They sounded like a sentence handed down by something older than any of them. My father's breath shuddered.

"You speak as though he has a choice." Eyowon's mouth trembled.

"Perhaps he does. Perhaps that is the cruelty of it." She lowered her head.

"I have searched for another path. I have listened beneath the roots. I have watched the smoke rise from the fires. I have asked the dead to speak, and they have given me nothing but silence. I have followed every sign the spirits left us, and each one led here." Her blind eyes lifted toward the darkness beyond the village.

"That is the only path I can see that does not end with the world being devoured by the Last Night." The words hung in the air. No one challenged her. Not because they believed her completely, but because they'd all seen enough to know that disbelief couldn't protect them. The Last Night had already begun to press against the edges of the world. It lived in the lengthening shadows, in the animals that fled without sound, in the cold that came even when the fires burned high.

It waited beyond the trees, patient as hunger. My father stood between Eyowon and me, but the space behind him suddenly felt very small. He'd offered his arms, his legs, his back, and his body. He'd offered everything a man could offer except the one thing he couldn't surrender willingly. His son. The entire village went still. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.