Book of Brutality

Chapter 3

Night without Calliope was darker and colder than usual. Even a fire which he kept all through the night, and the rugs all pulled away so the flicker of dancing embers could only touch the hard and heated stone floor could not keep him warm within. His night was full of terror and dreadful dreams. His arm seared with the pain of his branding, the marking of flesh made to remind him who he was and where he came from. The legacy upon his flesh burned him. He awoke with a cough and noticed the fire raging hotter than expected. The sticks he arranged along the rim to fall in on their own as the fire ate them away from below were spread out and grew the fire's presence across the rock floor. Léon reached for his satchel of ash and threw a handful at the fire. He doused it, just slightly, and calmed the rage of the beast.

He scraped the rest of the sticks into the pit and covered it with ash. The fire blew the smoke up through the hollow roof cap and spread the smoke in a film over the top. It hung like a cloud torn down from a storming sky. Léon sat at the edge of his bed and swiped his hand through his hair. It was matted and dry, like coming through hay. The dying embers of the ash-smote fire looked back at him. They sent the shadows at the edge of his hut into a dance back and forth. For just a moment, he thought he saw something outside in the darkness. He got up to investigate.

There was nothing. Only the damp of the ground, made worse by the downpour of rain from earlier. He slept through the worst of it. The sound of rain was like a lullaby. His house was proofed against it well without a single leak. Only the door, which was a wooden bundle tied in cross hitches at the top and bottom, could block the advance of rain from entering his hut but was firmly affixed in a divot on the floor. He carved the earth with his bare hands to make it livable, and his hands were not capable of making waste.

Day broke, but the sun did not come out. The rain held it back. The sky turned to a tarnished, dull silver as the suffocated sunlight attempted to brighten the wide blanket of rain clouds. Léon waited until there was enough light to see. He stepped out into the rain and let the water run down his exposed body. It was his one time to reinvigorate his flesh. It would be essential for his next task. There was something in the woods he didn't understand, some beast or phenomena that terrified stern warriors and had an unexpected wisdom to it. A beast of beasts, a hunter not himself which stirred the forest in an unnatural way. He had to find it.

An ashen film ran from his body in the rain and pooled in a small puddle around his feet. He felt the hardened bottoms of his feet soften slightly from the water. The pool congealed into mud around his feet and threatened to stick him where he stood. He forced his way out of the muck and took up an antlered elk pelt, a prize catch which covered his full body. He layered himself with a tanned leather hide tunic and braces for his legs, an extra layer of skin to shrug off the bramble and branches of the undergrowth. He bound his arms in the same, leather bracers and gloves made from scrapped rabbit skin stitched together with finely wound hair twine.

Finally, his bow, his hunting tool, a composite short bow made from a lacquered branch and a curved leg bone from an elk. The string was finely wound to the point where it was impossible to fray, made of the coiled small hairs of an entire beast from snout to tail. It was all he needed. His arrows were fletched from sturdy sapling wood, light enough to fly far but hard enough not to break upon impact. The tips were fangs and claws extracted from the remains of those hunted before. And just for safety, and to satiate a prickling feeling in the back of his mind, Léon took the skinning knife with the carved handle and sheathed it into the bracer on his upper arm. He felt like he needed it.

The rain reduced to a slight shower. The sun lit up the ashen sky. The worst clouds were gone, fled into the dark of the night which the sun chased away. There was just enough light out to see. Léon went on the hunt. He ran into the forest and increased his speed past the trees. He stuck to the flattened route at first, then split off into the wild trees, the overgrown and bulging ground full of roots and covered in bushes. He was unleashed, less of a man and more like a beast in his motions. He reached and grasped the ground where it rose to meet him, so he did not have to alter his posture. He was low to the ground, a blur of brown with a crown of horns. At first glance, a stag in a sprint, but the beasts would smell the long-aged death that he wore. Fur without musk, leather without blood; to the beasts, he was a fearsome abomination. A monster made of their own kin's mangled parts. Not that they could smell him past the petrichor of rain.