We had decided not to return to the horses but instead to go deeper into the forest, heading east.
Two days passed. The record would have said nothing happened. No ambush. No blood spilled. No traps sprung from the dark. No revelations in the sky, no beasts in the undergrowth, not even the faintest rustle of wings.
Just walking. Just silence. Just three bodies breathing the same air until breath itself became a kind of weight.
But absence was not nothing. Absence was a kind of event. Two days of absence had been enough to strip away noise and leave me with nothing but the shape of myself.
So yes, nothing had happened when we finally reached the end of the forest.
But absence was not nothing. Absence was its own kind of event. Absence stripped you down. Absence left me alone with yourself.
And what I found when I was left with myself was not something I wanted to see.
As we moved through the forest, I realized I was learning more about who I was: fragments surfacing where memory had left me empty.
The body remembered things the mind would rather forget. Two days of silence had left me with no distractions, and so my body had begun to speak louder. My legs ached from twelve hours of walking. The ache was constant, deep, a slow grind that made my muscles feel heavy. My stomach knotted, folding in on itself, a cramp pulsing like a second heartbeat. Hunger had a rhythm: sharp in the morning, dull by noon, searing by evening. I had chewed leaves at times, just to trick my jaw into believing it was eating. The bitter taste had lingered on my tongue.
My hands curled differently by then. I noticed it when I stretched my fingers: they wanted to close, to grip, to hold weight. They remembered the rock from that night, the warmth of a throat beneath them. Hands remembered the exact angle of pressure needed to collapse a windpipe. My hands did not flinch from the memory. They flexed into it, as though recalling a form learned too well.
That was what frightened me. Not the pain, not the hunger, not the fatigue. The ease with which my body remembered violence.
Because my mind told me it had been survival. But my body remembered the joy of fighting.
It remembered the pressure of bone giving way, the warmth of a throat beneath my grip, the way strength had surged through me as if I had always been waiting for that moment. My hands had not shied from the memory: they had curled around it like something familiar. When I stretched my fingers, they didn't relax, they wanted to close, to hold weight again. They knew the angle, the force, the precision needed. They knew, and they did not flinch.
My mind had tried to insist it was survival. A necessary act, nothing more. But survival did not explain the exhilaration that had spread through me like fire. It did not explain why the memory lived in my muscles with such ease, why my body recalled it with something dangerously close to pleasure.
That was what unsettled me most: not hunger, not fatigue, not pain. The ease. The familiarity. The quiet joy that hummed beneath the memory of violence.
Each hour of walking stripped me down further, until my body itself began to confess. My shoulders hunched forward not only to endure but to push, to claim space that no one had given me. My spine stayed rigid even when exhaustion clawed at it, as though some part of me refused to bow. My steps pressed hard into the soil, not just for balance but to leave proof behind: I was here. I existed. This ground was mine for as long as I stood on it.
Hunger should have weakened me, but instead it sharpened everything. My stomach twisted in on itself, a second heartbeat beating pain into my ribs. My muscles trembled, yet the trembling made me feel every fiber alive, every nerve awake. Hunger pared me down to edge and bone, stripping away all softness. I should have resented it, but I didn't. I felt closer to myself like that, carved down to nothing but necessity and will.
Then I remembered the first test. The first test had been agility. At the time it had seemed simple: a test of speed, of whether I could move quickly enough, light enough, sharp enough to escape the bullet that threatened me. But I realized it had revealed more than quick feet. It had shown me something fundamental.
I remembered the moment my weight shifted. My heels had barely touched the earth, ready to adjust at the smallest change. My knees had bent low, almost without thought, giving me balance as though my body had known the ground could betray me at any instant. My arms had flared slightly, not wide like panic, but tight and controlled.
Breath had been the quietest ally. And my eyes: my vision had narrowed like the focus of a bullet. The world had blurred into unimportance except for what lay immediately ahead, the opening I had to reach that demanded split-second calculation. My mind hadn't had time to argue with itself, and so my body had led, instinct without hesitation.
That was the essence of agility: not just swiftness, but the shedding of everything unnecessary. No hesitation. No doubt. No backward pull.
The strange thing was how effortless it had felt. My pulse had not spiked in panic, my throat had not closed with fear. Instead, I had moved as though movement was the only truth I had ever known. There had been a clarity in it, a lightness, as if something in me had always been built for escape, for cutting through space with precision and not looking back.
And when it was done, when I stood breathing evenly, steady on my feet, I realized what unsettled me most. Not that I had succeeded, but that it had felt natural. That agility lived in me not as a skill to be forced, but as something instinctive, something ingrained. My body had not questioned whether it could adapt, pivot, leap: it simply had.
The test had seemed to measure my speed. But really, it had measured my willingness to abandon. To sever what clung to me and move without hesitation. My body had passed easily. Too easily.
On the edge of the forest, I understood how light I had become. Lighter than feather, lighter than rain. My body did not cling. It did not ache for what was lost. That was my first confession: I was built for killing.