The first thing that stuck out to Motus was the sound. The world was practically abuzz with movement, and with it came a near-constant noise. Everywhere Motus turned, he saw motion. Some trees vibrated as if shaking in protest of being rooted to the ground; others swayed to and fro, branches and trunk alike, even when there was no wind to speak of. The beauty of the forest struck him next. The bark of the various trees was a mix of colors he recognized and others he didn’t. Ranging from ashen grays to obsidian-black and all the forms of brown in between. Every bit of flora that caught his eye pulsed from within, lit by glowing blue veins that ran across their forms.

  Shaking himself free from the almost hypnotic sway of the plants around him, Motus chose a direction at random and set off in something of a half-run, half-jog. It was a pace he knew he could hold for hours. His knuckles tightened around the handle of his dagger in a show of his nerves. With the barest hint of what could be considered a plan, Motus ventured deeper into the forest. Nothing had jumped out of the treeline yet, and it was making Motus anxious. The trek through the forest was going far too slowly for his liking, and he was plagued by a sense that he was doing himself a disservice by walking—he should be running, as fast and as far as he could; he should be free.

  He was almost tempted to tap into his gift and cover far more of the forest in his haste to find something; a sobering thought splashed ice water on that temptation, however. Motus could almost hear Sieg coaching him in that overly blunt yet efficient way of his.

  It was a brief thought, but it served its purpose well: it grounded Motus. With his focus redoubled, Motus cast his gaze about the woodland environment, applying a simple criterion for what he hoped to find.

  Would you make a good weapon?

  A question so deceptively simple it was easy to forget that it was about creatures who wanted to eat him.

  Motus had been running for nearly three hours, and in that time, he had encountered creatures that resembled the animals he knew, yet their differences were uncomfortably uncanny. Rabbits were common, rabbits with pristine silver coats and glowing blue eyes, when he expected to find white and brown. Rabbits that vanished in a burst of blue, vibrant light if you blinked at an inopportune time, and stared at you until you blinked. They were interesting, fascinating even, but Motus had a feeling that if he came back from his hunt with a rabbit, the commander might very well boil him. He wished he had asked Sieg more about how the weapons were made; if he knew the process, it would make his choice easier.

  The only thing Motus knew was that to kill a falion beast and return with its corpse was to turn its strength into your own. It was not the most descriptive of processes, but it did sound like something you wanted a stronger monster for. Yet nothing seemed keen to reveal itself willingly. For a forest that never appeared to stop moving, it felt shockingly empty.

  “Where is everything?” Motus questioned, exasperated.

  As if in answer to the boy’s question, several of the shifting trees rustled to his left. Motus’s attention shot towards the sudden and strange sound, his eyes quickly taking note of the disturbed foliage out of the corner of his vision. Sieg had trained the boy well, in a fluid motion, wherein his brain was still processing the situation he was in, he had already drawn his blade, and with it came a metallic ‘schwing.’

  A pair of birds perched on a branch far above him were scared by the sound, but to Motus, it almost looked like the birds were swimming through honey. Their wings slowly beat in a struggle to generate momentum, while the sounds of the birds lifting from the tree seemed to stretch out like an echo.

  His gift had activated, Motus realized; it seemed after the hellish training Sieg put him through, fear had his gift on a hair trigger. Even if slowing down would be an ordeal, no matter what happened next, he’d have more time to react, to do something—anything.

  A sudden, eerie silence followed the rustling, but Motus knew better now than to assume that he had been hearing things. Instead, the golden-eyed boy squared his stance and rolled his wrist, prepared to defend himself as he had been taught to. He fought to ignore the shaking in his hands; shaking didn’t help him here. After several tense moments of silence, a creature reminiscent of a deer slowly walked out of the foliage. Even simply thinking of it as a deer felt like a misnomer to Motus; it held the basic shape of a deer, but its similarities were few and fleeting.

  Firstly, the creature was twice the size of a deer—which were not small—and lacked proper branching antlers; in their place was a single jagged, curved horn. The horn was metallic silver in color, and within the structure were lines or grooves that reminded Motus of his markings. The horn pulsed with a glowing blue light that followed those grooves like a path.

  Motus narrowed glowing, electric-blue eyes at the creature who met his gaze. He tightened his grip on his knife in preparation for a fight. This was it. Surely the commander couldn’t be dissatisfied with something this big. The deer—though the single horn likely made it a unicorn, Motus realized, even if it was more deer than horse—snorted a breath that seemed to drag on for several seconds longer than it should. It lowered its head, and Motus watched as that silver horn began to glow brighter and brighter with no sign of dimming. Hit with a very chilling moment of sudden recollection about a certain umbrella, Motus moved first.

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  He had no plans to repeat that experience anytime soon, and as such, rushed forward, a blurred streak of black and brown trailed by glowing blue light. Motus moved to drag his dagger across the beast’s throat before the creature could release whatever it was storing in its horn. He was inches from the ‘unicorn’, a second more and he would be able to return to the commander victorious; he would be able to meet and make friends, he would—

  Swoosh

  The beast was gone, spirited away in a streak of black and glowing blue that passed him so swiftly that Motus very nearly missed it. The rush of wind that came seconds later practically knocked him off his feet. It came in the wake of that blur as if it had just caught up. When his blade finally came up to complete its arc, it did so through empty air. The force Motus had put into that swing was meant to end the fight before it ever started, so it sent him spinning when it didn’t connect. Yet, for as fast as his body was spinning, his mind was reeling faster.

  Motus thought, glowing eyes scanning the suddenly all too quiet forest.

  His gift had been active; the world moved more slowly to him now, and he still had only just barely managed to glimpse whatever it was that had taken the unicorn. It had been faster than him, far faster than him.

  The loud gurgling growl of his stomach protesting its emptiness alleviated him of his current concerns by replacing them with different ones. Using his gift had left Motus hungry, not so hungry that it prevented him from calling upon it or rendering him nearly unconscious as it had before in the arena. But hungry in monster-filled territory all the same. It was then that Motus made a startling realization that served to cool the fire of hunger in his belly. He had never actually asked Sieg if the creatures here were safe to eat.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, Motus’s rebellious stomach had decided it did not much care if they were edible or not. He would simply have to hope that the commander was correct in his assessment that falem were hard to kill. Bringing himself to kill one of those strange silver rabbits had, oddly enough, been the easy part for Motus; not that he wanted to kill them, but hunger had made the choice surprisingly simple. No, the hard part came from actually catching the elusive long-eared rodents. Motus had wanted to be frugal with the use of his gift, but the silverine rabbits had proven themselves keen to vanish at the slightest sound or movement he made.

  His solution had been clear to him, even if he was loath to follow through with it. Still, the decision was one he felt needed to be made if he wanted to be at his best, strong enough—fast enough—to ensure whatever it was that had taken the ‘unicorn’ couldn’t do so again.

  He had wandered through the forest as quietly as he could, given the present circumstances. Motus kept his eyes peeled, and the moment he saw a glimpse of silver fur, he tried to feel for that heat that lived just below his heart. When he felt it, Motus coaxed it to the surface like tending to a meager flame. It was a slower process than he would have preferred, but at least this way, he could slow down simply by relaxing his hold on his gift. The edges of Motus’s vision tinted blue more and more with every heartbeat, and the second that almost burning heat flared like a revved engine, Motus shot forward like a bullet, dagger drawn. The blue light from his markings and eyes lit the dark forest as he passed, but he was fast enough—close enough—that the rabbit did not have a chance to truly process that Motus had appeared before his blade flashed and metal severed its head from its neck.

  As Motus went about dressing and cleaning the rabbit, as Sieg had taught him—though in hindsight Motus found it strange the white-haired boy hadn’t included edibility in that conversation—he had a mouth-drying realization. If he kept having to use his gift to hunt his food here, he would never crawl out of the hunger hole he’d dug himself into. As Motus was lamenting the sordid realization that he would have to hunt something larger and eat it instead of bringing it back for his weapon, a sensation spread through him. It was more a feeling than anything he was consciously aware of, or could put into words. A sickly familiar sense of uneasy foreboding. It was far less potent than it had been all those weeks ago, but it did nothing to dull the potency of Motus’s reaction.

  He whirled from his skinned rabbit and flicked his blade clean, his eyes wide and his heart hammering in his chest, a comforting heat rushing out through his body with every ‘thump’ of the marching band in his chest. Wild glowing-blue eyes scanned the environment as the world tinted at its borders. His panic was overwhelming; just the idea that that thing could have found him again had put his gift into overdrive. The heat that lived below his heart was the closest it had ever been to being painful in the tense moments following that brief sense of unease. The moment stretched out due to his gift, and when it eventually faded, it took Motus an uncomfortable amount of time to calm himself down enough to release his gift. And when he finally did, the hunger that came made Motus doubt whether or not the silverine-rabbit would even make a dent. To make matters worse, Motus could not shake the hair-raising feeling he was being watched.

  It did not matter which way Motus turned or how far he walked; the eyes he felt on his back never left. Eventually, though, hunger won its battle with anxiety, and Motus stopped walking to start a fire; it was a slow, arduous process, but eventually bright orange flames banished the darkness around him. The light and warmth of the fire eased some of Motus’s worry, more so when he went about cooking the rabbit. Sieg’s ‘combat training’ was more survival training in hindsight, yet Motus struggled to be anything but grateful. It wasn’t as if he knew how to start a fire before; nor did he know how to prepare meat that he hunted himself, and he certainly wouldn’t have been able to stand before that false-unicorn with anything resembling confidence before Sieg, demigod or not.

  As the moon rose high above the trees, lighting the forest below, Motus felt his eyes grow heavy; the exhaustion of the day finally catching up to him. The golden-eyed boy leaned his head against a dark tree and found himself oddly reminded of a position he had found himself in nearly two months ago. Far too exhausted to allow the flickering ember of fear that sparked in his chest to bloom into something more, Motus stopped trying so hard to keep his eyes open, allowing sleep to claim him and pulling the curtain closed on the first night of his hunt.