Shadows wrapped and coiled around Chia Ru Meng’s face, twisting and morphing as the young boy sprinted down the tunnel, the mud squelching under his feet. Four heavy steps trailed closer and closer behind him.

Ru Meng dove into a small, constricted passage and started crawling through it on his hands and knees. The pursuing beast growled impatiently, but followed after him anyways. Ru Meng could hear its limbs thumping against the rock walls as it pulled itself forward. He picked up the pace, bracing himself as he put more weight on his left hand. White-hot pain burned through his palm, but he shuffled forward as quickly as he could.

He burst out of the passage and ran, only momentarily looking back to catch a glimpse of a black, hairy hand reaching out of the gap in the rock. He was almost there. Ru Meng darted into a small, empty clearing. He then pressed himself against a wall and shuffled forward for a few meters.

Finally, panting and gasping for air, he stopped and turned back. As he raised the light talisman above his head, he saw the grotesque beast in all its gruesome glory. A canine head and body resembling that of a wolf, supported beneath four disproportionally long, hairy limbs bound in tightly corded muscles, all of which ended in disturbingly human-like hands and feet. Its four dull yellow eyes tracked Ru Meng intently.

It paused conspicuously as it neared its prey, keeping a healthy distance. It stared at Ru Meng, cocking its head as if studying him. Suddenly, it sneered, the corner of its mouth drawing upwards to reveal its large, yellowed fangs. It pressed itself against the wall just like Ru Meng did, completely avoiding the wide-open area.

Right as the beast was about to lunge, Ru Meng muttered and flicked his wrist. A dull grey dagger shot out of a gap between the rocks, embedding itself in the creature’s maw. Its head swerved violently from the impact, but it did not stop. The beast howled savagely and snapped its head back to stare at Ru Meng. It leaped with its powerful limbs.

A sword flew out of the same gap, impaling the beast midair and sending it careening into the clearing. The earth turned into sand before the beast hit the ground. It fell into the pit underneath, its body skewered by the stone spikes awaiting below.

The beast whimpered in pain, like a puppy, but it was quickly silenced by the floating sword thrusting itself deep into its eye.

Ru Meng’s father stepped out of the shadows and carefully lowered himself into the pit. After hoisting the beast out of the pit and climbing out himself, he slung the carcass over his shoulders. He recited several incantations and the sand flowed back over the pit, clumping into dirt once more. He then took the light talisman from Ru Meng and stuffed it into his pouch, plunging the both of them into darkness.

Later, once they were far enough away from the site of their kill and safely tucked into a small cave, away from any other predators, Ru Meng’s father laid the beast on the ground and slit its belly open. Ru Meng did as practiced, holding a light talisman over his head and examining the nearby paths and entrances for any tracks or signs of life. You could never be too careful here, where the role of hunter and hunted could turn at any moment. The banewolf lying on the ground with its intestines spilling out was a living testament.

When he was done, his father beckoned him over.

“Look, it’s empty,” said his father as he splayed the creature’s stomach open for him to see, “That means it’s been starving. Which means we’re getting close to the skeleton bear. Banewolves are cunning and cruel scavengers; they always find a way to feed. Only something truly savage could scare them enough that they would rather go hungry. A skeleton bear.”

Ru Meng wrinkled his nose at the smell of the gore but he didn’t gag. He still hated it, the smell of blood, but he had gotten used to it in the past week. He still couldn’t use his left hand at all, to help skin, bleed or carve up any of the creatures they had hunted, but that didn’t stop his father from making him sit by and watch as he did it himself.

Ru Meng liked hunting. The meticulousness of tracking, the foresight of trapping, the patience of waiting, the thrill of chasing and running; it felt good. It didn’t come any easier to him than anything else in his life. It was hard to remember all the different marks that a prey leaves behind and their different behaviours and characteristics, but he liked how prepared it made him feel. For once in his life, it felt like he was ahead of something, that he could actually do something, make things go the way he wanted them to.

He didn’t regret what happened to his left hand. It was a reminder to himself, that he was capable of change. He liked the pain; it made him think clearly. Sometimes, when he was practicing his spells instead of resting again, and when he was getting frustrated over his lack of progress, he would clench his hand into a fist and let the pain assault his nerves and bite into his flesh. Blinding lights would go off in his mind. It helped him think and things that stumped him would suddenly seem very simple to him. He was learning faster, he could tell. He was on the verge of grasping the Spell of Sharpening already. Still, Ru Meng knew how untalented and slow he was. He continued training with every spare moment he had, never neglecting practice and repetition.

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“Come,” said his father when he was finally done butchering the banewolf. Ru Meng sat down beside him and he gently took Ru Meng’s left hand. He tore away the bandages, revealing the throbbing red, white and black mass beneath. Yellow pus oozed from the self-inflicted cuts, the flesh beside them swollen and scarring. Ru Meng winced as his father washed the wounds with water and wrapped his hand firmly in fresh bandages. He was always so tender when tending to Ru Meng’s hands, grasping his wrist as if it was a newborn baby. These moments of tender silence with his father were precious to Ru Meng, more so than he knew how to express with his eight-year-old vocabulary.

“I’m bringing you home after this,” said his father. He seemed grim and solemn, even more so than usual.

Ru Meng looked up at him with a mixture of fear and disappointment in his eyes. They had been tracking the skeleton bear for the past few days. He had been wanting to see this rumored beast with his own eyes. Why didn’t his father want him to come along?

“The skeleton bear is dangerous. I can’t watch over you if I’m hunting the skeleton bear. The Darktide is coming. Those bastards just raised the price for shelter four times compared to last time and there’s two of us. There's not much time left to get the funds together.”

The fear of his father disappearing into the darkness to never return again haunted Ru Meng's mind once more. Was he still not good enough? Doubt crept into Ru Meng’s heart. He could feel the throbbing aching of the raw, exposed flesh in his left hand, but the pain was nothing compared to the slithering feeling of inadequacy snaking around his heart and constricting his throat. He wanted to tell his father that he would be good, that he was ready, that he wouldn’t be a burden, but all he managed to do was simply nod in compliance.

Ru Meng winced as his father pulled the bandages tight. He stifled his voice through the pain.

——————————————————————————————

You develop an unusual spatial sense when you have spent much of your life in darkness, day and night. Your hearing, your smell and even the sensitivity of your skin improve to make up for what you cannot see. You become able to approximate the size of a cavern from the echo of your breath, to know when there’s water or animals in the vicinity from the way the scent of the air changes, to perceive the terrain merely from a shift in humidity. You might not know all these things, but your body does.

Chia Song Yu’s senses had been honed to such an extreme. His years of navigating treacherous ground and grappling monstrous beasts had taught him when danger was close by, even when he did not know it yet. His hair would stand on end, his bad shoulder would ache and his heart would start beating faster.

This was why it was strange when he noticed nothing out of the ordinary as he approached his home, even though his usual self would have picked up on the subtle signs of an intruder trying to put things back where they were after searching through his house. Stranger still that he would not notice a foreign presence right by his side.

“Chia Song Yu, what have you done?” said an eerily familiar but long-forgotten voice in Malay.

Chia Song Yu turned back frantically and looked down the corridor he had just walked down. His son hurried to his side as a tall, dark man emerged from the shadows cast against the wall, the tendrils of darkness peeling away from his flesh as if they had a material presence.

The man was dressed in the black garbs of a silat practitioner, his long, wavy black hair draped on his shoulders in curls. A dark brown sash around his waist secured an empty black sheathe. He held the dagger in his right hand, the blade short and wavy.

“Nazirudin.”

“How could you? He was your own brother, and a good man. A very good man. A lesser man would have left you to rot down here, where you belong,” said Nazirudin as he walked forward. His eyes were seething with hatred and disbelief.

Chia Song Yu didn’t know how, but it was clear that Nazirudin knew everything already. Shaman folk magic. He slowly drew his own shortsword and looked down at his own feet to hide his mouth from his opponent.

“Tell me, how did it feel to kill your own brother, Chia Song Yu? All these years, he never forgot about you. Every time we talked, he—”

Nazirudin suddenly stopped talking and immediately struck his own throat with his left hand. Both men let out stifled cries of pain. Chia Song Yu brought a hand to his own throat, trying to recover as quickly as possible, but his incantation had already been interrupted.

Meanwhile, Nazirudin had already closed the distance. He stepped into Chia Song Yu’s range, lowering himself and thrusting the keris at his ribs. Chia Song Yu hastily swung the sword up to parry, but the silat master was one step faster. He knocked the sword aside with his keris and pivoted. He stepped his right leg behind Chia Song Yu and swung his right arm into the opponent's chest. The dagger sliced across Chia Song Yu’s thigh as Nazirudin swung his arm. The scissoring motion of his arm and leg swept Chia Song Yu off his feet and onto the ground. The contents of Song Yu's backpack spilled all over the ground, the tools he used for trapping and the pelts of his prey.

Nazirudin ignored the pain in his own left thigh and swung his feet over Chia Song Yu’s body. He was about to mount him and fully immobilize the man, when a hoarse whisper escaped Chia Song Yu’s mouth.

All of a sudden, the light from the talisman in his left hand intensified to blinding luminosity. Both men were blinded in an instant, pain searing through their eyes. Chia Song Yu swung his shortsword wildly, and felt pain bite into his shoulder on impact. He quickly shoved his opponent away and got onto his feet.

“Ru Meng!” he shouted. He felt a small hand wrap around his fingers and he let his son guide him away.

He had only been running for a few seconds when he felt a sick, gripping pain in his gut, as if someone had stabbed him in the stomach and was now twisting the blade and shredding his intestines. He crumpled to the ground, clenching his belly and moaning in agony. A curse. But with what medium?

He turned around and through blurry sight, saw Nazirudin’s dark figure kneeling on the ground. The keris, covered in Chia Song Yu’s blood, was impaled into the ground, onto the footprints he had left behind in his escape.

The silat master slowly got up on his feet and hobbled over to where Chia Song Yu was lying on the ground. He was experiencing the same pain that Chia Song Yu was. He clutched his own stomach, while cold sweat streaked down his face. And yet, somehow, despite his opponent’s condition, Chia Song Yu had a feeling that this was where he would meet his end.