After that, the anger came back.
Anger at the people who had abandoned me, and at the world that seemed determined to destroy me, but it wasn't the kind of anger that burned hot and quick, it was instead cold, sharp, and hardened, it was what kept me moving onwards, it kept me alive.
I started planning, if they wanted me dead, they would have to work even harder, I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of tearing me down.
I crafted weapons out of nearby supplies such as sticks, and stones, sure they were crude, but they were very effective.
the days bled into nights, and the nights often bled into something else entirely,
an eternal grayness that stretched without mercy. I stopped trying to track time.
And the sun was like a ghost distancing itself behind a veil of clouds, and the moon barely pierced the tangled canopy above me.
But I moved. I always moved.
In those first couple, survival wasn't about just living, it was about not dying.
The wounds from the last encounter with the beast still yelled with every breath. My ribs ached.
And I could feel my heartbeat in the gash alongside my cheek. I used what little fabric I could spare; I left to bind the cuts, it was clumsy and crude, soaked with blood that dried into rust-colored patches.
And the forest wasn't a sanctuary me. It was alive itself and was even watching me.
Every steep I took had to deliberate. The underbrush snapped too easily, which gave away my position.
I taught myself how to set traps to hunt small game animals. It took me trial and error, and I often found myself spending hours perfecting the perfect trap… a 5-foot hole covered in sticks and leaves.
The animals I caught I cooked them over campfires, though they barely stayed lit. Every bite of meat and every sip of water felt as if it was my victory, it felt as if I could defeat the odds that were stacked against me.
Water was my first God. I found a muddy stream, barely a trickle, and I drank it like a desperate animal. It tasted like soil and rot, but it gave me the strength I needed to crawl onto the next moment.
I shaped a cup from bark and leaf and with my hands, just to keep the dirt out.
the next couple days, I learned to fashion a spear from long splintered branches and a bound of a shard from this black stone to its tip, with strips of leather torn from my ruined boots.
The weapons were ugly and unbalanced, it made me feel like I had the strength I need to stand again.
I began to learn how the forest breathed; the birds were always quiet before danger. And wind came just before the rain.
The scurrying of the smaller creatures of the forest meant that no predators were nearby. other than me.
I listened, and I watched. I became a part of it all.
a shadow among shadows. I stalked hares through the ferns and tricked the squirrels into my traps with piles of crushed berry pulps from the nearby berry bushes.
I cooked them slowly, carefully, over fires that hissed in damp nights, I sat by the flickering light, eating meat so tough It tore at my jaw. But the meat was mine, each bite tasted like glory.
Every meal I had was my defiance, every step I took was my resistance to everyone who left me alone.
By the end of the first couple weeks, I had learned to sleep in the trees, I tied my body with vines in order to keep me from falling. I rested like how that beast would. I was half conscious but also alert to the snap of a branch or even a shift in the air.
I buried my waste far away from my settlement. And I kept the embers alive by wrapping them around dried moss.
I stopped flinching whenever the owls called or when the wolves howled, my fear was still there-but I caged it.
Then the silence begun.
Not the peaceful kind, it was the hollow kind. There were no winds. No birds. Just me and the beating of my own heart.
Then the beast came back.
The forest was silent except for the loud crunching of my footsteps against the leaves that lay beneath me. I began to talk to myself. "One more day," I'd whisper to myself. At first it started as survival,
but soon it was a ritual to me. I crafted figures from twigs; they were mock versions of the classmates who left me behind. I lined them up and stared at them by the firelight.
"You laughed," I told them. "You all laughed at me while I bled for you."
I buried one. I crushed another under stone.
The forest became a mirror, showing me things, I didn't want to see and the boy I used to be, soft-eyed and foolish, and the creature I was becoming, Sharp, ragged, and wild-eyed. I washed myself with river water one morning and saw a stranger staring back at me. Hollow cheeks. and sunken eyes. A jaw clenched tight enough to crack stones.
They did this to me
Not just the beast. Not just the forest. Them, the academy did this to me, the system that decided my life as if was disposable. I was supposed to die here-- to become a forgotten name etched onto a tombstone at some military outpost.
But here I was, still breathing.
And that infuriated me.
I trained. And I ran.
At first, it was just too warm my limbs, but it turned into something else. I would sprint until my legs buckled. Then I would crawl. Then rise again. I built weights from stones bound in nets of bark and vines. I lifted them over and over until my arms gave out.
I fought shadows, but I struck at nothing but air, envisioning them... all of them watching me starve.
"You want me dead that bad?" I would spit through my gritted teeth. "Then come and finish the job!"
By the next weeks, I had built scars on my hands through sharpening weapons. My traps grew more complex, I learned to carve grooves in the trees to catch rainwater, I built a shelter with branches bent into an arch, then layered them with ferns and mud. It wasn't comfortable, but it was home.
I spoke less and thought even more. I planned.
If I ever got out of this forest, I would return not as a soldier or a pawn, but as something else. Something they couldn't control. They'd tried to break me.
They tried to abandon me.
But I was still here.
Then the last week came, and with it came the whispers, I'd hear footsteps that weren't mine. Breaths in the dark. My eyes played tricks on me, catching shadows shifting between trees. The wind began to taste like metal again. That some old copper scent returned to me, it was faint but persistent.
Blood.
But my body knew what my mind refused to accept...
The beast was back.
It didn't announce itself to me at first, but the forest did.
The birds vanished, Even the insects had seemed to vanish into the earth. My breath caught in my throat.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a warning drum, I tightened my grip on my rebuilt spear, its tip sharper now, bound with resin and bones.
I scanned the trees and listened for the impossible silence.
Then the growl came.
Low, rumbling, ancient. The ground trembled beneath my feet. And I knew then and there.
This time, I wasn't the same prey.
This time, I wanted the fight.