“Mr. Beast, please forgive me. My leg is hurting; could you perhaps slack your jaw a bit? I know for a fact that my mother told me that your kindred can understand us. I was wondering if you understood me."

Viktor was holding tightly and firmly by the kid's right leg; he was carefully moving him away and appreciating the creation as he travelled. Rays of warming showered the landscape; in the kid’s eyes, this would foresee a good day; in other words, what his father reassured him to resemble ‘happiness,’ a kind of happiness only found in the wilderness, ironically thought her mother that happiness was to be located out of the human stronghold rather than within the walled fortress of the human invention.

“I’m gonna die. Damnit beast. Father was a stupid fellow; he believed in delusions; he knew this would happen one day, but he was so concerned with the idea of freedom and purpose that he abandoned civilization for this. This stupid thing called the wilderness. How one in his brain would conceive such an idea of living outside civilization?

The kid let out a cry. He was suffering like any other beast in the world; his destiny would soon be closed. His leg had started to rot. The sepsis would become insufferable. Scientists knew at least this about this kind of beast through empiricism. Their fangs could corrode human flesh at a fast pace. This, of course, was an evolutionary mechanism that nature provided to these predators; therefore, disabling elusive prey like human children was at hand. The kid’s begging didn’t fool Viktor. He can perfectly understand what those words shouted by the kid are, and they can (in its mind) form a reference to something else that could serve as a translator, a beastly translator. Viktor had a good grasp of the human language, yet words, for Viktor or any beast, were words bare of any meaning. This wasn’t much different from the supplications of a bird when its wings are maimed flying or a dog howling to the moon. Suffering didn’t, in Viktor’s brain, convey anything special. The kid, in desperation, tried to shift his attention.

“Why are you a predator? There is something I can do; there must be anything! Help me. Leave me. I miss them."

The landscape, rich in colours and vegetation, was covered with blood. A trail formed by the drips of the child tinged the soil. Soil, unlike water, lingers longer, and time takes longer to erase proofs. The kid's existence vanishes bit by bit. Fading away as Viktor penetrates into the wilderness. A field of edelweiss paints itself, popping in front of the kid’s eyes after blinking. His mother dreamed of reaching a place like this—a perfect place to settle in. An Eden, a garden of beauty. Her Eden had fed and nurtured an illusion that had convinced her to follow her husband. Sacrificing the mundane for eternal, perpetual beauty. The field of edelweiss, however, was only visible for her kid, yet only for a brief moment, for Viktor moved forth, stamping upon the edelweiss as he went by. Slanted edelweiss down to earth disquieted the kid. Every day in front of this field might have been the closest to Eden. Viktor didn’t mind crushing vegetation; these flowers his mother cherished so much were crushed by an unconscious might. The kid had two parents and a sister. An old man, an old woman, and a young woman are members of his family. His father tried to fight, but he just posed a gunshot, acquired by the time he served as an orderly in the military. A young and brave man follows a dream—a dream where no monster should be left alive. This dream of his hatched little hallucinations of bravery and heroism in no time. Meaning required a fateful wife, and he obeyed. A woman from the country who worked selling goods beside a place where he used to eat breakfast. Had she never dreamed of anything besides a garden, she would not have swayed herself with his ravings. And flooded by these hallucinations—a garden presented to her in an illusory cover that gleamed and intensely reassured her that what shines is indeed gold—she let go herself. They deliver a child to this world, a daughter. She was hope incarnated. The father dreamed of her coming of age and the reality of passing her genes on to the next and brighter iteration of his lineage. His wife’s head rotted in a garden that she had never seen. She insisted but finally ended by trying to fuel his hallucinations so they could move out where gardens were supposed to be located. A while they wrestled with these ideas, then a sudden thrill and a self-deceiving recognition that his wife had finally decided to live a life full of meaningful experiences led him to the wilderness as a natural conclusion. He desired to be brave once again, and she desired to see nature, so this must be the correct train of thought, they both thought in secret. By the time they decided to depart for the wilderness, their daughter was 27 and their son was 9. Her father had abandoned the idea of passing on his genes to a fruitful new iteration of his lineage because his daughter had enlisted herself in the military and had decided to follow a dream that would fill her up with love for a walled country; in other words, her father had fathered in her a patriotism for those humans one is accustomed to calling neighbours. Her daughter died in combat with the northern beasts –a special oviparous whose wings won’t be break even under heavy shelling. She died by madness when she found herself alone in the wilderness her father dreamed to visit. Her crew had lost against these beasts, humans had not what would require shooting down beasts that barely moved but stayed still, singing songs of death. Had been theorized that these songs conveyed chunks of information and could have been labelled it as talking. She tried to send a quick message to her parents when she was about to press “send” she didn’t know what she was doing and flight off a nearby cliff. Dying after a few seconds.

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The kid knew everything too well for his age; he thought about what a man he would be soon after their jiffy in the wilderness finished. He, though, as he is in Viktor’s jaw likely that he will be no man. He won’t have a girlfriend nor understand the pleasures men find in women; a virgin, a saint, commonly reverenced in Christianity. He is ignorant of pleasure; his head, though, is teemed with fiends that his father left. Dreams that soon are decaying for Viktor’s fangs are jabbing into him a lethal dose of putrefaction. The kid falters, his consciousness wading out his messy head fraught with desires while weeping for a longing past he now recognizes as the Eden her mother meant. “It w...” the kid thinks, “...as the past, we didn’t love enough. Maybe in the present, so later we will regret it and create a futile illusion to cope with the loss of happiness."

Sweet dreams, kid. Bye for now.