Water had solved one problem, but it had only made the other more acute. With his thirst quenched, the gnawing ache in Kael's stomach became a roaring, demanding beast. He had eaten his last sliver of dried crystal-fruit that morning, and the temporary energy it provided had long since burned away. Hunger was a different kind of desperation than thirst. It was a slower, duller panic, but it fogged his thoughts and made his limbs feel heavy and useless.
The Grey Wastes, which he had thought utterly devoid of life, began to reveal its secrets to his newly desperate eyes. He started seeing movement, flickers at the edge of his vision that he had previously dismissed as tricks of the light. They were small, fast creatures, about the size of the hares his father had sometimes described from his travels. Kael dubbed them "Shard-Hares" in his mind. They were skittish, nervous Echoes made of a mottled, brownish quartz-like crystal, and they darted with impossible speed between rock formations, their crystalline feet making sharp, clicking sounds on the stone.
They were food. And he had to catch one.
His first attempts were a pathetic comedy of failure. He was not a hunter. He was a boy from a village where food was sung from the ground, where the concept of chasing and killing for a meal was a barbaric story from a forgotten age. He tried throwing rocks, his aim clumsy and slow. The stones would clatter uselessly against the ground long after the Shard-Hare had vanished into a crevice. He tried a direct approach, his crude obsidian knife held out like a weapon. He would creep towards one, only for it to sense him, its crystalline ears twitching, before it would bolt in a flash of brown light.
He spent hours engaged in this futile pursuit, his frustration mounting with every failure. The hunger was making him weak, his movements sluggish. He knew, with a certainty that settled like a cold stone in his gut, that he would starve to death long before he ever managed to catch one of these creatures by conventional means.
He collapsed behind a low, jagged outcrop, panting for breath, his body aching with useless effort. Across a small clearing, another Shard-Hare emerged. It seemed less skittish than the others, and began to nibble at a patch of lichen-like crystal growth on the side of a rock. It was his chance.
He knew what he had to do. His Dissonance was his only real tool, his only real weapon in this silent, brutal world. But the thought of using it on a living creature, even one as simple as this, made his stomach churn. He remembered the explosive force he had unleashed on the boulder in the Boneyard. If he did that to this small creature, it would be vaporized, an expanding cloud of dust and gore. There would be nothing left to eat. He needed precision. He needed the scalpel, not the sledgehammer. He needed to cripple it, not annihilate it.
The thought was cold and pragmatic and utterly horrifying.
He took a deep, steadying breath, letting it out slowly. He peered over the edge of the rock. The Shard-Hare was still there, preoccupied with its meal. Kael focused his gaze on the creature's back leg, on the complex joint where it met the body. He hummed, keeping the sound entirely internal, a silent, focused thread of power that he channeled down his arm. He wasn't thinking about violence or killing; he was thinking with the detached focus of a craftsman, visualizing a single, specific point of failure.
The Shard-Hare froze. Its head snapped up, its multifaceted crystal ears swiveling, trying to locate the source of the unnatural vibration it must have felt. It was too late.
Kael pushed his dissonance into the leg joint, a sharp, focused pulse of wrongness. He felt it in his mind, a psychic echo of the physical event: a clean, sharp snap.
The creature let out a high-pitched chitter of pure, crystalline pain. Its back leg collapsed under it at an unnatural angle, the brown quartz splintered and fractured. It was crippled, but it was still alive, its front paws scrabbling at the ground as it tried to drag itself away.
The hard part had just begun.
Kael rose from behind the rock, his obsidian knife feeling heavy and clumsy in his sweat-slicked hand. He walked slowly across the clearing. The Shard-Hare stopped struggling and simply watched him approach, its multifaceted crystal eyes showing no emotion he could recognize as fear, only a deep, primal confusion and pain.
There was no glory in this moment. There was no thrill of a successful hunt. This was ugly. It was pathetic. It was necessary.
He knelt beside the wounded creature. It didn't flinch. It simply lay there, its side heaving with shallow, rapid breaths. He could see the intricate, beautiful patterns in its crystalline fur, the way the light caught in its unblinking eyes. For a moment, he hesitated. This was a life. A small, simple life, but a life nonetheless. Then, the gnawing hunger in his belly clenched, a brutal reminder of the stakes. It was this creature's life, or his.
He closed his eyes, unable to watch. He gripped the hilt of the knife with both hands, aimed for the spot where he guessed the creature's life-crystal would be, and drove the blade down.
The sound was not the clean cut he had hoped for. It was a sickening crunch, a splintering, grinding sound of crystal being brutally fractured. The creature gave one last, violent shudder, and then was still.
Silence returned to the wastes.
He opened his eyes. His hands were shaking. He had done it.
He prepared his first real meal of the journey through a grim process of trial and error. He built a small, pathetic fire using a patch of the same dry crystal-moss the hare had been eating. He butchered the creature with his crude knife, discovering that its "flesh" was a type of semi-translucent, resonant crystal. When he held a piece of it over the small, weak flame, it didn't burn. Instead, it slowly softened, becoming pliable and opaque.
He took his first bite. The taste was bland, utterly forgettable, like eating a slightly warm, chalky stone. But it was sustenance. It was fuel. It quelled the aching emptiness in his stomach.
As he sat there, methodically eating, he looked at the fractured, discarded remains of the Shard-Hare. Its beautiful, multifaceted eyes stared blankly at the pale sky. He was no longer just a boy who could break things. He was a boy who could kill. He had taken a life to preserve his own, a fundamental transaction of the wild that the harmony of Lumina had insulated him from.
He had survived another day. But a piece of his innocence, a part of the boy who had left the village, lay shattered on the grey dust beside him, lost forever.