It was week five. Kane sat against his favorite tree, whose color was no longer a healthy brown, but a faded brownish grey. He had a long, dark and scraggly beard and equally unkempt hair. His arms were bony, the thin muscles and blue veins showing starkly through his blotchy skin. His tattered and filthy shirt hung over his frail frame like a sail over a bag of sticks.

But in his eyes, there burned a fire.

In the red tome that floated still and silent in front of his face, there was a single dark red letter.

M

~

It was the second week when the cancer started to become noticeably worse for Kane. He found himself feeling tired from the easy ten-minute walk to the berry bushes, and the before faint and spread out red blotches on his skin, grew in both frequency and vibrancy. He felt ill and achy all the time. According to doctor Lemorris, he was supposed to have several months before reaching such a state. But he supposed that the cancer eating at his energy was finding the supply limited due to his daily routine of eating a few handfuls of unripe berries and sitting in the woods for prolonged periods.

By the third week, Kane decided that if he waited any longer to pick all the berries, he would not be able to pick them at all. So, he pushed himself in a grueling effort and soon there was a large pile of berries by his new campsite, the stream. At least the true heavens, or whoever had created this place had a modicum of fairness in their soul, because the berries were as unnatural as the rest of the forest copy and did not rot.

On week four, Kane had given up trying to mark the pages of the book. His attention kept wandering, due to his lack of nutrition and he kept drifting off into dreamlike trances. He was lucky when he woke one day at almost the end of the week and was lucid enough to realize that the forest around him had turned ghostly. He drank as much as he could fit from the stream and dragged himself along with a shirt full of berries to his favorite tree, which sat at the center of the forest. It was the only unfaded tree left that he could see.

He was dreaming on week 5. He had been thinking a lot about his past in the past weeks of trying to mark the book; trying to think of some word, some sentence, to write which would be the right thing to mark his soul with. He never found it.

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He thought of so many things. But nothing seemed quite to fit, not that it mattered since he did not know how to mark his soul in the first place.

But now he dreamed of his childhood.

Back then, his mother had been poor, and they had lived in a trailer park together. It hadn’t been her fault. The scum in the area where they lived did not care about discrimination to the disabled. Every day she would search for a job and come home defeated, shoulders slumped. Every day she would weep alone in her room and every day the money dwindled. They needed money, so Kane had adapted.

He had worked when his mother could not and brought in enough money, that together with the disability money, would be able to pay for food and rent.

At the school he had been bullied because of how many classes he missed, and the clothes he wore. He had no friends because he had no time with all that he had to do. The bullies picked on him and beat him every week and Kane felt bad for them. They were so petty and weak willed that they had to pick on those they perceived as weaker just so they could feel less worthless. He refused to be seen as weaker than people as weak as them, so he adapted.

One day he had followed the lead bully home. He had researched martial arts, how to incapacitate others, how to intimidate. It had never been enough because he was always fighting 3 or more opponents, but today the lead bully was alone. Kane took the bully from behind, incapacitated him easily and had him on the ground, arm twisted. He had whispered in the bully’s ear telling him what would happen if he kept up what he was doing and telling him that this was a proof that he was willing to go through with his threats. He broke the bully’s arm that day, and he was never bothered again.

After years of working to support his mother and going to college, Kane got a well-paying job as an architect. He was able to get his mother a nice house and do something he enjoyed, designing houses for every climate and every need. His mother met a man who recognized her for her worth and was able to pull some strings and give her a job where she excelled. He got a wife and settled down, happy to finally be free of the turmoil, stress and constant adaptation in his life.

Then his own body adapted against him, and everything went to shit. He could not adapt his way out when his own cells were working against him. The cancer ate away at him in both body and spirit. He learned that it was incurable that he only had a year or so, that it would be painful and slow death. He lost his job, his wife left him. He had failed to adapt.

So, what word could describe him? It wasn’t adapt, but maybe... Maybe it was something close.

Kane woke a few times in his dreamlike state. The forest was ghostly and faded to almost nothing. He was a stick thin remnant of a man. But he thought he saw a letter on the red tome floating in front of him. An m. Maybe he had touched on something back in that dream....

And then it came to him, like a flash of lightning on a clear day, or a tempest on windless afternoon.

MUTATE.