The Shadows Of Lucidum

Souls forever lost

─━━━━━━⊱❍⊰━━━━━━─

I really should have returned instead of letting myself get distracted and getting caught up in the confusing situation, which had just taken place. Those juveniles were nothing but irritating.

Knowing the sun would set soon, I wasn't sure, whether I should still go hunting immediately, do it the next morning or not go hunting at all. I needed some sort of excuse for disappearing for almost a whole day, thus I had to go hunting. It was the only thing able to consume that much time. Sometimes, I was out hunting for around 3 hours, but I'd only ever do that, if our food storage was close to being empty and our other hunters were incapable of getting enough meat for all of us. I could say I tried out new grounds because we could't let even a single pack die out. I figured there still was enough time for me to get my bow and my knife, find a good place to hunt and bring back a boar or two.

It was quite pedestrian to get my bow, for I had forgotten how close to the village it was hidden. Every step I took could have been the end of my journey and Ferouna would have been mad at me...again, once she would have found out I had, truth be told, skipped my duties for nothing but lying around lazily.

Once I had reached the old and scrubby trunk, whose cavity served as a hiding spot for both my bow and my knife, I knelt down, turned towards the village and keeping an eye out for the sentry. He hadn't spotted me yet, although he was looking right into my direction. When I realized, who it was, I felt glee. It was Anguis, sitting high up on a kapoc tree. If he would have been to spot me, especcially while I was carrying my weapons, he definitely would have come running, trying to drag me back into the village. He always tended to be...how should I put it? Overprotective towards me? That probably was the most fitting term to describe him. He'd always been, but at some point it just drove me into a whole new level of insanity. He wouldn't even let me set a single foot outside the village, and let's not talk about how he wanted to cut my food for me because I could have cut myself. I mean, yes, I'd already been on the brink of death a few times and there were scars all over my body from the days, when the war was more hotblooded and other times when I fought wild animals barehandedly because it got boring to train with the others as soon as I was that much stronger and agile than them, that not even some of our strongest soldiers could keep up with me while fighting two or three against one. Me being the one fighting alone. And I highly doubted they ever held back when fighting against me, thanks to them kind of hating me for knowing I would have been a better soldier than them and not even having trained for half as long. I didn't know why there hadn't been protests or coup attempts yet. I had only ever caused them more trouble than they would have had without me. But I kind of am glad they didn't attempt anything yet. I doubt I'd actually resist.

Anguis eventually happened to look into another direction, which allowed me to run back into the forest. Even if he would have seen me, he wouldn't have been able to catch up to me. He wasn't quite the fastest, but at least he was good at sneaking up on people, so he was useful in some way when it came to sentry duties and getting information on the other villages.

I kept running until the burning of my throat got unpleasant. I don't know... Even when it started feeling unpleasant, making it hard to breathe and causing my heart to beat twice as fast as it usually would, I couldn't have loved the feeling it gave me any more. The feeling of freedom. That of childhood.... Of a childhood I never had...

There was close to no time left before sunset. The sky had already been painted in the color of marigolds. There was no way I could go hunting like this. Even for me, it was dangerous to encouter animals when I couldn't see them at all. The cave served as a good spot the night before, but who knew whether I'd even reach it, depite roughly knowing the way. For that wouldn't have helped at all, if I wouldn't have seen the ground or at least parts of the environment. This far away from the village, the night was but one big darkness, not letting through any light, whatsoever. The moon, the stars, all of it got devoured in the midst of the forest. Sometimes, I felt like it also devoured memories, feelings and lives. It wasn't unusual for people, who had spent a night in the forest, to go insane, to be an all new person....there, too, had been people going missing. None of them were to ever be found again. Not even their corpses, not even a single bone, not even...

a single sign they ever existed.

I didn't want to become one of them. One of the forgotten. But was that really something to choose? I doubt any of them wanted to vanish and, someday, be forgotten. At least their names had been perpetuated. Carved deeply into a memorial and passed on to the next generation and the ones after it. They were but faceless names. We might have known how they were called, when they vanished and how old they would have been if they had stayed by our side, but their souls were forgotten... Forgotten for eternity.

Forever lost.

"Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted." That's another thing my mother used to tell me. And it probably was one of the most useful things I could remember her telling me, so I did how I used to be told. I spent the last few minutes of sunlight searching for the highest tree I could climb. There was a coolibah, whose broad branches looked like a semi-comfortable bed. I stopped halfway up the tree and looked down. Most animals could climb 2 to 6 metres up a tree... I was about 20 metres above ground and figured I didn't want to die by falling down a tree. Even if higher up might have been a bit safer and I wasn't afraid of heights or anything that would have prevented me to keep climbing up the tree further, I simply didn't see the need to. I was tired already and would need a lot of energy the next morning, if I really planned on going hunting.

So good night it was for me. Well, except for the usual nightmares.

─━━━━━━⊱❍⊰━━━━━━─