The dawn fog hung low, whispering across the bramble and root-choked ground like ghosts refusing to leave.
Arion crouched silently beneath the crooked tree where he'd set the snare the night before.
His fingers were cold. His breath came shallow and quiet.
The bark-fiber cord was pulled taut.
Caught.
"Please," he whispered—not a prayer, but a calculation, a plea against probability.
He stepped forward and brushed aside the leaves. A rustle. Then a squeal.
A hare. Caught by the hind leg, thrashing and twisting.
It was real.
Arion stared, frozen—not with fear, but with disbelief.
This wasn't a dream. It wasn't an idea scribbled in the dirt. It was meat. Warm, living, struggling meat.
"I did it."
But then came the next thought—colder, heavier.
"Now I have to kill it."
He knelt down.
The hare's eyes were wide, wild. Its breathing frantic, like a broken bellows. It didn't know this was survival. It only knew fear.
And so did Arion.
His hands trembled as he reached for the sharpened stick he'd hidden beneath a root. He hadn't told anyone. Not Lira. Not even the old beggar.
He'd wanted this to be his.
A win.
But wins cost something.
Arion knelt over the rabbit and pressed the point of the stick down, just as his grandfather once had on a camping trip long ago.
The memory came unbidden—his younger self whining about cruelty, his grandfather answering with cold logic.
"If you eat, something dies. Just don't forget what that costs."
The stick pushed down.
The rabbit squealed once. Then didn't.
He sat there for a long time.
Eyes dry. Soul shaking.
He wasn't a killer. Not yet.
But he wasn't starving anymore.
---
The village didn't ask where the meat came from. No one ever asked when it was hard to look your own belly in the eye.
The elders muttered a prayer of thanks to nameless forest spirits. A child wept when the first bite hit her tongue.
Lira didn't say anything. She just gave Arion a small piece under the table and squeezed his hand.
He almost cried. But not quite.
---
That night, Arion didn't sleep.
He built three more snares.
One near the stream. One near the thorn-thicket. One beneath the fallen log where droppings had been fresh.
His mind spun like it used to—in boardrooms and crisis rooms, back when he was a man with wealth and armies.
Now, he was a child with strings and sharpened sticks.
But strategy didn't care about age.
Only results.
---
The next morning, one trap was tripped.
But the animal had escaped.
The second held a squirrel—bones snapped, neck twisted.
The third had nothing but blood. Something larger had chewed through the snare and dragged it away.
"Something else hunts here."
It wasn't just rabbits. Not just desperate rodents and birds.
Something with claws. Fangs.
Something hungry enough to steal from a child's trap.
He stared at the blood trail, heart racing.
"They'll come for the village too."
He looked back at the horizon where smoke from cooking fires rose weakly into the air.
They weren't safe.
Not yet.
Not ever.