ولد أكل

He could feel the rhythm of his pulse in his fingertips, and it soothed him. He invented a tune, and then a song, using the beat as a base to the music, made a song. The words were unintelligible, but they told the tale of such heartbreak that if one could extract a meaning from it they would surely be in tears. Who needed romance when there was family there to make one feel so hopeless, to break ones heart?

He wished there had been something available to collect water when he had been in the marshes, but at least his thirst had been quench, and, even more importantly, at least his vision had returned. He wasn’t sure if it was the water he had drunk- either that in the marsh, or that that he had stumbled upon in the desert, when the nightmare of his imagination was even more vivid that the nightmare of his reality. Perhaps it had just been the passage of time that had healed his vision, or maybe it wasn’t even his vision at all- maybe the world had been a blur, just another trick of the game makers.

The passage of time had not occurred at all in his thirst and blindness-induced haze, or perhaps it had occurred far too quickly. At any rate, he could not record the period correctly, only snippets. One echoed through his mind in particular, reverberating through his skull and representing itself again and again in front of his eyes. A person on a hill in front of him, someone who gave him strange-tasting water and did not attack him. Someone who, surely, could only be Yaron. Someone who was alive. Surely, any other person in the arena would have killed him instantly, in his period of weakness.

When he awoke, he had found himself in a forest. Everything was still. He didn’t like that about the arena- the stillness, the stagnancy, the bearing feeling that something might attack at any moment. The calm before the storm. He lay, semi covered by pine needles, on a floor that stretched on for miles. All around him were proud, straight pines, in straight lines corridors to nowhere. And of course, their fruit.

Three colours surrounded him as he lay in his temporary bed. The green of the tops of the trees, the brown of the old needles, trunks and cones which littered the ground like confetti after a wealthy wedding, and the silver-grey of the mist that danced through the trees, tantalizingly touchable and yet so far away. He sat up slowly, head spinning vaguely from his previous day’s antics, and grabbed the nearest pinecone. It had fallen for a reason- most of its nuts had already gone to seed- however there were still a handful that were edible. Until now, his hunger had been containable, however at the promise of food it ravaged him. He forced the nuts into his mouth with speed as never seen before, cracked them in his teeth, spat the splintered husks onto the ground and felt the soft white flesh of the edible parts melt between his pre-molars. He gathered all of the nuts within a few steps distance, and pulled out their unshelled nuts until he had a pile large enough to hold in his two cupped hands, and shelled these. He let them trickle into his mouth, forcing himself to chew them slowly, to savour the unsavoury taste. He had almost forgotton what it was like to eat up to this point, but now he was greatful for the little he had. He spent a few hours now gathering and shelling pine nuts, eating until his hunger was satisfied and then some, and then collecting them until he could did not want to shell another nut in his life, but had enough to keep for another semi-meal.

{Shrol eats and collects pinenuts in the coniferous forest. }