For the next few days, we worked on leveling up our survival skills training under Earless. He taught us how to field dress our kills, amongst other survival skills. He had a wealth of knowledge regarding the forest we were currently in but only dispensed that knowledge when he was pleased.
At first, he was confused by what we were doing when he saw us watching him while he worked, but then he understood that we wanted to learn from him when he saw us trying to copy his methods and work. At first, he was hesitant to show us his ways, 'the ways of a fake goblin,' but he eventually caved in after he saw us making a mess of a deer. When he saw us ruin the deer, he yelled at us and spurred a volley of what I assumed to be insulting words. He then took the tools we were working with and began to show us how to field dress a dear.
Watching him work made me question what type of lifestyle he led with his now-deceased companions. The knives they attacked us with weren't made for fighting. They were made for hunting; I learned this when I saw him throw away one of the knives Anna made and start making one like they originally were. Anna had extended the handles for the knives so they could reach further when slashing at their intended target. The knife that Earless had now made was shorter and had a curved hook at the tip. The knife was only a small sign that he wasn't a killer; the biggest was his eyes. They were the eyes of someone who had never killed another person.
When Earless and his companions first attacked us, it wasn't with the intent to kill us; it seemed more like a matter of survival when I think back to that day. They attacked us without a sense of unity or experience, like it was their first time-fighting people, and tried to run away when the first of them fell. My biggest question was the fear in their eyes when they looked at us; they looked at us with terror, like they had run into a pair of monsters. As I kept thinking about that day, I started feeling guilty; in the beginning, I felt numb to the fact that we had just killed three people, but I justified it by telling myself that it was them or us, that they were going to kill us if we didn't kill them.
Feeling this guilt brought back even more memories of that day, memories that I tried to forget and had blurred in the heat of the moment. Memories like when I ripped off Earless's ear. I had never done something like that to someone before. I had broken plenty of noses and ribs from my days in the cage, but never ripped off someone's ear like that. The scariest thing was how easy it was, too easy. I then forced myself to bury the feeling I felt when I did that to Earless because I couldn't accept that I felt that way.
I turned my head towards Earless with guilt weighing heavily in my gut as I observed how injured he was. We had scarred him for life, both physically with his missing ear and psychologically, by killing his friends in front of him, and still, he chose to trust us and teach us his way of life. As I kept observing him, I saw how he was limping all around the place and offered to carry him anywhere he needed to go as an act of atonement and to ease my guilty conscience.
He acted like a toddler getting a rider from his parents and would hit me in the sides with his legs to tell me to speed up. My efforts eventually paid off as Earless showed us which berries, nuts, and mushrooms we could or couldn't eat. He would point to whatever we found and act like he was choking when he pointed at specific ones to tell us they were dangerous to eat. I learned what we could or couldn't eat and what bears, deer, birds, and other animals were in his language. While I still couldn't converse with him, I could at least better understand him.
While I carried Earless around learning his language and what was edible and dangerous in the forest, Anna got to work making a proper shelter. She could see that we would most likely live in this forest for a while, so she started planning to build a makeshift log cabin. It was easier for her to design it as she was an engineer, but building it required a labor force, and her labor force consisted of me and Earless. She wasn't afraid of hard work but felt guilty about leaving me out of her project, so she 'kindly recruited' me to help her, definitely not at the tip of a spear.
With that extra workload, I spent my mornings cutting down trees and dragging them to camp for her and my afternoons carrying Earless around and learning from him. We had gathered more than enough food to last us a week, so we no longer had to spend time collecting food and could focus on making the log cabin for now.
As Anna and I worked on the log cabin, I kept thinking about the village we saw the first day. It wasn't too far from here, so we could quickly get there. The only problem was that we still didn't have cloaks to protect our skin from the sun. I proposed returning to the village to search it for tools, clothing, and maybe 'cough,'' cough' 'collectibles.' Anna quickly jumped on the idea of returning to the village, expressing her desire for better tools to work. So, she made an executive decision to return to the town.
A day after she decided to return to the town, we set off towards the village, taking weapons to defend ourselves. Anna took a spear, while I took both knives. I left a spear with Earless so he could protect himself and the camp while he continued working on turning the bear and deer hide into gear and clothing we could use.
To avoid getting lost, we followed Anna's markings that she had made to the village. Along the way, we found a bear carcass that looked like it had been torn apart; the bear was against a tree like it was thrown at it, and its side was ripped apart with all of its organs missing. It was unnatural how the bear was killed with the claw marks all around its body, avoiding the fatal points and focusing on the eyes as if whatever killed it wanted to blind it and torture it. Then there was the question of where its organs were; they were all gone, and if you looked inside the carcass, you could see that it was hollow. While we were disturbed by the bear carcass, we still had to get to the village, so we kept moving, trying to ignore the dreadful feeling in our stomachs.
***
I thought this place was depressing enough when I first saw it, but now it was heartbreaking. It was like a dead animal you saw on the side of the road, and you saw it again the next day with only the bones left. The bodies left lying around were picked clean to the bone by scavenger birds. We scared the birds from the bodies and got to work, sifting through the ruins, desperately looking for anything that could have survived the fire. As Anna started searching through the wreckage, I took a closer look at the bodies of the villagers and began finding questions.
The bodies of the villagers were little more than burnt bone with little flecks of meat here and there. This exposed the deformities some of them had; their skulls were lop-sided or had only one eye hole, and their limbs were twisted like a tree that grew up sideways. The rest of the bodies were small, like children's, but had features that made me doubt that they were children.
While looking at the strange bodies, Anna called me over, " Is it just me, or do those doors look small?" she asked as she pointed at them. She was right. They were small, no more than five feet tall, and as we looked around, we saw that most of the doors were around that height.
Even though we were perturbed by the oddities we kept finding in this village, we needed to ignore them and find what we were looking for to return to camp before morning. Anna called me over as I searched the intact buildings with regular-sized doors. " Hey, can you hold this up so I look under there? I think this was a blacksmith's house," she asked me. I looked around where she asked for my help and saw a smithy in the back. It was broken and collapsed in on itself, no longer capable of producing the heat necessary to work with metal. With any luck, maybe the blacksmith had a store inside his house.
After confirming that it was a blacksmith's house, I bent down to lift the frame where the door initially was so Anna could crawl under it. This house had smaller doors like all the others we'd seen and was falling apart, so I had to bend down low to lift it and hold it in place so it wouldn't drop the building on Anna. When Anna called me, I was already holding the frame in place with difficulty for about 3 minutes. "There's someone alive down here!" She yelled out to me. I then heard shuffling back toward me as she dragged the survivor. I was already at my breaking point holding the door frame; the awkward angle I had to keep it at was unbearable on my back and legs, and I was close to dropping it when Anna finally dragged the survivor to safety.
I fell on my but and tried to catch my breath after holding the frame up when the survivor Anna saved woke up. It was a young boy with sky-blue eyes and ashy black hair, though his hair could've just been ashy because of all the ash covering it. He looked around at us and immediately tried to run away but fell as soon as he got up. His ankle was severely twisted and dark purple.
He looked up at us and tried crawling away with a look of terror in his eyes like he had seen a monster. " We're not going to hurt you," Anna told him without even thinking if he would even understand us. He stopped crawling and turned to look at us with confusion and fear in his eyes. He opened his mouth and asked us, " Y-you're n-n-ot Wr-wr-aiths?" He stammered out. Anna and I looked at each other in question about what he meant by Wraiths and turned to ask him, "What's a Wraith?"