Andre Valias

He awoke before the birds, in that pre-dawn black. The dressing was swift, even in the dark, by his memory alone, the weight of it both settling upon him and seeming insignificant against the crushing responsibility of the day. He let his hands brush the carving of Storihbeg on his sill as he passed, before clambering out the window out onto Aldous’s roof. The window itself gave no complaint, he had oiled the latch a fortnight past, and the hinges answered silent.

The air was mild, yet thick with yesterday’s rain. Morach could smell the river-rot on the wind from the Bjoulsae; he took it in before lowering himself from an eave to the stones below. With a final glance-check back at the Cobbler’s, he moved on down the alley.

Evermore slept poorly; drunks ambling around before joining their ordained rest in a doorway, a watch-pair laughing several streets away, cats howling and fighting on every other street. Mor threaded through them now with a well-practised ease. The postern gate on the eastern wall had a single guard, who always slept through half of his shift without fail, his chin on his chest and pike propped beside him like a steadfast hound. Mor had used the entrance a hundred times, and had left him untroubled each one.

Out the walls, the way ran south-east toward the Viridian, narrowing from road to path to trail before it dissolved into nothing but wild grass. Beyond it, he found the game trail he knew, one that wound up through juniper scrub toward the ridge line above the lake. He let his stride lengthen until the ache from yesterday’s work repairing Aldous’s roof bled out. By the time the sky began to grey in the east, his breath came hard and deep.

The trail crossed a stream, ankle-deep and fast, ice-cold even with the heat of summer. He knelt and drank from cupped hands, looking east. Not yet. The sun still hadn’t broken.

Mor pulled Daeghar’s knife and cut a sprig of juniper from the nearby bush, tucking it through his belt. He sat back on his heels and waited. It was far from a complex ritual, which his clan had *plenty* to boast of. It was made from a memory and a year of hunting in wilds more gentle but no less Hircine’s. You waited for dawn. You gave blood and asked nothing but a chance to prove your worth.

Gold broke over the crest of the mountain. He pressed his father’s blade to his left palm, and drew it swift and shallow. It welled and fell into the stream below as he turned his hand, watching as it feathered away in its current. He flexed his hand and rose. The blood dried as he climbed.

Dawn was an hour past when he found the elk-sign. A bull, grown fat and arrogant on the easy feed of the summer. His antlers would be up in velvet, soft and blood-warm. He had bedded down in the shade, after wallowing in a churn of mud by the boulders to keep cool. Morach crouched at the fringe of the clearing and searched. Deep prints from the heavy beast. The trail pointed down, towards the lake-shore. The droppings were hours old, rather than minutes.

It was quiet work, the tracking, slow and attentive. Every part of him narrowed to what lay afore him. A thread of quarry’s hair on a strip of bark. The depressed grass. The faint musk of a summer-bull. His father taught him how to read and breathe the forests and mountains for a hunt; after twelve years, it felt more natural to him than reading Evermore or its people ever could. He moved through the scrub without a noise. His weight kept low, and each footfall taken with the same care he’d give a marked floorboard on a job.

The bull was drinking when he found it. Knee-deep in the shallows, roughly a hundred paces away. His rack was broad in the velvet, no hard tines to mind; only the size and his foul temper to watch. A magnificent beast, all the same. The kind of elk his father would have made him wait for. To be sure the shot was earned, and not given as a fluke.

He hadn’t brought his bow today; it sat back in his room above Aldous’s shop. The night before, when he flitted between waking and sleep, he’d set his mind on only having Daeghar’s knife. The blade felt alive, the handle warm from his grip, the worn leather wrapping that was moulded to his father’s palm, and now his own.

He checked the wind and started down, watching the beast side-long every step. The bull was utterly serene, the chief of his own private lake-shore. Morach checked every step before he committed it, avoiding the leaf-litter for moss or stone. The elk looked up, away from him, and the water dripped from his muzzle like silver. Thirty paces.

Mor flew forward— the bull started, turned. Morach was on the elk, his thighs deep in the cold shallows. The knife went up, through the jaw. The elk let out a cry, violent and ugly, and thrashed. A fore-hoof came up and caught him across the shoulder, and tore through clothing and the skin beneath it. The blade stayed in, Morach twisted it. The blood ran hot from the wound over Mor’s arm, and the elk’s legs slowly began to buckle, before collapsing entirely as he took Morach down with him into the waters.

He held the elk as he went, both arms around his neck, skull pressed against Mor’s chest as his breath rattled out with a few wet bursts. His dark eyes rolled to find him, and he met them. Mor held him until the light went out.

“Og Pater Noch. Co lan, co noch.”

The coarse fur on the bull’s neck steadied him as he watched the water lap at them both. His own blood, from his shoulder, and the elk’s from the jaw. Two red-threads unwinding, before twisting about each other, until he could no longer say which belonged to him or the beast. His blood, the same he’d given alone at the stream at dawn. It was no longer his gift alone, but theirs together. The water thinned the two and drew them off to be lost in the greater lake. Mor stayed a while yet, in that frigid shallow with the elk cradled against him. Underneath it all, the press of a hand between his shoulder blades. The attention settled on him, weighing the work.

The butchering itself took roughly two hours. The amount he could take back was limited, both out of practicality and on purpose. He took the liver, back straps, and a hind-quarter. The rest would stay for the scavengers, back into the wild, Hircine’s share. The knife washed off in the stream easy enough, him less so. He scrubbed the blood off, and checked over his shoulder. The bleeding had stopped at some point, but left a gash that would scar without a doubt.