Chapter Five - Found

The first three days were the worst.

According to what he had read, this was quite usual: In the beginning, it is a torture to be without food, and the first three days leave one with the constant impression of impending death. These were the days when he was still used to eating regularly, and the sudden lack of nutrition pounded him in the stomach like the fist of a troglodyte, and he felt nauseated. It was all he could do to keep himself from throwing up - under the circumstances, this would have been disastrous, for it would have lost him even more water and nourishment, which he could not replenish. He had to conserve, conserve, conserve: And each day that he rose to look upon a bare grassy plain and woodland, without any sign of habitation nearby, knowing that he would spend this day, like the last, wandering on in a hopeless, straight line, without breakfast, without lunch, without dinner, and shamble on till at last he collapsed to the ground in utter exhaustion and slept till the next morning. Only to have to repeat the entire process again the next day, and the one after that, until one day he would be too exhausted to walk, and would just remain lying there, falling into a half-waking, half-drowsing dream, and finally falling asleep without ever waking again. Had it really been only three days since that terrible thunderstorm? Five days since his fight with the hyena? A week since he had left the academy behind forever? The days and nights appeared to blur, disappearing into a hazy, timeless nightmare in which he had been trapped forever, and would be trapped forever.

After the fourth day, it was as if something had shifted inside his body and his metabolism. Whether his body had adapted to the process of dying slowly, or whether it was tapping its last hidden reserves, he had some respite from his constant pains when he woke on the fifth morning after the storm had forced him into making his decision. When he woke, it was as if a new strength had taken hold of him, filled him with renewed vigour and returned hope to one who was hopeless. He felt curiously empty, as if disembodied, as if dreaming, but within this trancelike, unreal state of mind, he perceived a clarity of thought that had not been with him since long before the forachid - a clarity stronger even than the one that he had felt before falling asleep in the tree on the evening of the second day. This first day of his new-found strength was making itself felt so strongly that he could only marvel at the strange thought of dying of starvation: If it felt like this, how could one die from it? Was he not gaining new force, new energy, with every day that he was without food? Would he not finally, when he was rid of the constant craving for nutrition, pass beyond the needs of mortals and become like a crystal himself, sharp and clear, bright and eternal, as foretold by the ancient scriptures of his people?

He hastily withdrew from that line of thinking. If he was already hallucinating, then the stress on his bodily functions that resulted from the lack of food must be worse than anticipated. While keeping safely away from the unreasoning, rambling chains of thought, he travelled on and took great care to count the days, and take in the sensory impressions around him, in order to make sure he was not yet losing his mind to the hunger. If he was, then all hope was lost for him: Without reasoning, he had no chance of finding any inhabited place again once he could orient himself.

Indeed, he had regained his sense of direction the day after the storm: As soon as he knew that it was dawn, and the sun was rising, not falling, he had a rough idea where East was, and could work from there. It appeared he had been heading northwest all this time - if he had not changed his course at some point in the pitch-black night without a chance to know his directions, as was likely - although he knew no more where he was than he did so as he had been sitting under the Euwan tree. He had no chance of finding out his location now, for he was deep within the wilderness, and as far as directions went, he was as likely to find Avtris to the South as he was to find it to the North. Well, slightly more likely, because he had already travelled a good distance Northeast before he had lost his way, and it was unlikely he had retraced his steps so far south in the meantime.

Which still left him stranded many leagues from any place where he could hope to find food, unless the hyenas came back for a second try - and he doubted he would be able to slay one of them this time, if he would even survive the encounter, which was very unlikely. He cursed his luck and his folly for sending him into the outdoors at this season, when the plants had no fruits to offer, and even the most ferocious scavengers were starved for food.

---

The second week was the worst.

At this point, there was no doubt about the torturous signals that were sent from his body to his brain. The feelings and the pain were no longer coming from his stomach only, although they were cantered there like a hungry spider lurking in its web, which was spanned all throughout his limbs. His arms, his hands and legs, and even his triple-jointed fingers were aching with the exhausting feeling of starvation. His head felt like an enormous balloon, and he was barely capable of rational thought.

Indeed, only this morning he had started to have hallucinations and illusions again: Not merely illusions of the mind, and rambling, endless trails of thought, but actual sensory hallucinations. Shadows walked alongside him. He had heard noises that vanished when he listened more closely, a strange singing and humming in his ears, a feeling of dizziness and movement out of the corner of his eyes. He was losing it, he knew - his mind, that is. Soon, he would begin to talk to himself, and by that time he would be blissfully unaware of the world around him. Soon, it would all be over. There was no doubt about that, he was losing his mind and beginning to think in convoluted, long sentence structures that never ended even when one realized that one was thinking rubbish - he, not one, that was, was the one who was thinking rubbish, and he had better not start to become vague in his expressions, even though what he was thinking was not making any sense whatsoever and besides he was far too hungry to think coherently.

Coherently. That was the word he had been looking for all this time when he meant to describe something that made sense. Instead, his mind had been caught in strange nonsense like "senseful" or "cohesive". Was he losing the capability for language too? And if they found him, then what would he do, how would he communicate? He would have to grunt and point with his fingers like a troglodyte, and all those who looked upon him would marvel at the strange man who had lost his mind to hunger. He would be ridiculed and eventually fed, and maybe he would regain his mind, or maybe he would not, and live in blissful non-sentience for the rest of his life, not having to bother with complex thoughts again, nor with magical spells or carving crystals, and certainly not with the stupid professors of the academy. Perhaps they would lock him in some kind of zoo, for the new students to look on. "Here is the student who cheated on his test ten years ago, and was chucked out of the school. They found him two months later half starved in the wilderness, and completely out of his mind!"

He could not remember his name, he suddenly realized with a surge of panic. At first he thought it was a trick of his mind, a passing illusion. Then he strained to remember it. Was it something with fire? Ambition? Curiosity? Single syllables strayed through his mind. There was an 'a' somewhere in there, he recalled, but whether it had been at the beginning or the end of the name, he had no idea. He felt empty, bereft of his identity. There was a tired grin etched on his face as he remembered that this was what he had felt at the beginning of his journey - he might have chuckled under normal circumstances, but he did not have the strength for it: He was no-one, he was nothing, he was left without an identity, without a persona, without a character. He seemed to be floating alongside his empty, emaciated shell of a body as he walked, and he was a wraith, and his name was Nobody.

It grew midday, and it grew afternoon, and it grew dark soon as it was wont to do this late in the year. It could not be past the eighth hour of sunrise when the sun once again began to sink below the horizon, colored a ruddy crimson, and dousing the world in blood-red splendour. His sense of time was skewed in some way, because it seemed as though the day had passed in what felt like barely a glimpse, while the sunset was frozen in eternity, and he wandered on in the red light, feeling as though it would never end. Then it did end, as abruptly as if a torch had suddenly been extinguished. There was no way to mistake the onset of night: From one moment to the next, the world had grown noticeably darker, colder, it was as the transition from autumn to winter, compressed into the space between two seconds. There was no point to walking on past sunset, so he laid himself down where he had walked, his feet stretched into the direction in which he had been walking. As starved as he was, if he ever twitched in his sleep, it was barely noticeable. Even in its unconscious layers of sleep, his body appeared bent on conserving energy, and the dreams he had were vague, shallow and flickering mirages, barely rising above the dreamless oblivion of unconsciousness. His sleep, with every passing night, grew more death-like in its nature. He grinned again, and knew that it was the same grin that would remain etched on his skull when time and rot had eaten off the flesh of his face.

At length, he managed to quieten the discomfort of the hard forest floor, and blot out the constant burning pain of his body which still, unreasonably, madly, demanded nutrition. Exhaustion let him fall asleep, and he lay there like one struck down by death. That was when they found him.

---

At first he thought that he was seeing hallucinations once again, as he had earlier. The shadows moved out of the edge of his vision, and began dancing madly in front of him. He grew aware of sounds, first feet softly padding on the grassy ground, then... voices? They sounded more animalic than sentient. He strained to distinguish the growls and purring sounds that sounded distinctly... feline? He would not have believed it possible, but for a moment, fear flooded his starved mind once again. Had the wild beasts found him at last? A hyena, or worse: A tiger, the most dangerous of beings far and wide here? But in spite of the fear, he felt a sense of relief. He was too exhausted to move, let alone stand, let alone put up any kind of defence against these creatures. Soon, very soon, their claws and teeth would tear into him and end it all. He would feel no pain - his body was numb from the hunger and the tiredness and the blazing fire that was already raging within his limbs, reminding him of the time when he had last eaten: At least three weeks ago. He closed his eyes, pulled his dry, tight lips into a smile and waited for the end.

And the end did not come, as it so always does when one most expects it.

His eyes remained closed for several seconds. Then for several more seconds, and then he exhaled the breath that he had held inside him since he had noticed the presence of these strange creatures standing around him. And then he still kept his eyes closed, and he noticed that there was silence all around him.

Just another hallucination then? Or had the hyenas looked him over and decided that what little flesh remained on his carcass was not worth tearing off the bone, and then left again? A pleasant thought, although it did not mean much to his safety: He had days, maybe hours to live in his present state, and whether his last scraps of flesh became food for the predators before or the scavengers after he had died naturally mattered little to him.

But as he drew in his breath, he still sensed the smell of living beings - a smell that his body was now concentrated on with its full attention, for living beings like himself were edible. In an unreasoning, irrational urge, he felt the craving to eat the creatures he sensed were still standing around him. But he was still too tired to move. Or too scared, or a combination of the two.

At length, he grew aware that he was being watched. Whatever creatures were standing around him were hesitating, as if unsure. Uncertainty, however, was impossible in all the animals that he knew of. They acted on instinct, and instinct was instantaneous. Kill him, leave him, they would know what to do and do it without hesitation.

He opened his eyes, and his fading eyesight with his last remaining shreds of consciousness combined with the darkness to let him see strange mirages. He blinked, and the image grew clearer, although he still could not comprehend it. The beings stood on two legs, not four; they were without a doubt sentient. But he could see at once that they were not of the People, for by the orange glow of the torches they carried, he could see they lacked the smooth grey skin of the Vahnatai. Instead, they were covered by fur, and their faces appeared to resemble those of cats.

One of them - there were four, he counted, and they were all taller than he - nodded to the others and growled in a series of sounds that appeared to belong to a real language, but that were unintelligible to him. Another responded in what were clearly words, but that reached his ears only as alien sounds that suddenly sounded almost as scary as the growls he had believed to originate from tigers earlier. Sentience was even more frightening that pure instinct: What did these creatures intend to do with him?

And suddenly, one of them bent down to him - the one who had spoken earlier - and began to speak his language. It sounded forced, and the purring sounds were impossible to suppress, but it was very clearly Novah, the language of the People.

"What is your name?"

And in a sudden mixture of relief, exhaustion and exultation that swept across him like a wave, he felt the urge to close his eyes again and sleep, content in the knowledge that whoever these beings were, they intended him no harm. One did not ask someone what his name was before killing him, not among the People, not among animals, and certainly not among whoever these strange beings were that seemed to be curiously somewhere in between.

And as relieving as that question felt, so uneasy he was as he tried to answer. He still could not remember his name! It was gone from his mind, and what eighty years of conscious thought had etched upon his memory was suddenly swept away by the oblivion of starvation! He had truly lost himself, for he no longer knew who he was. His name was nobody.

He fumbled for a while, and then, with his last seconds of consciousness, the void of dreamless sleep already creeping in on the edges of his mind, he opened his mouth to form a single syllable.

"Tam."

 2766 words.