Chapter 440: Eating To Heal
Chapter 440: Eating To Heal
He looked at the three dead deer.
"We need to butcher them," he said. "We need to eat. And we need to take what we can carry back to the Guild and sell it for points." He paused. "And then we need to come back and do it again."
"And again," Kael said.
"And again," Theron agreed.
The three of them, Bruce Ackerman of the physical realm, Kael, and a young man called Theron who had once been a tax clerk, stood in a glowing forest that did not exist anywhere in any world Bruce had known before, and they understood, all three of them at once, exactly what their path was going to be.
The path was this. Every day. For as long as they were here.
Bruce drew a slow breath. He smiled, the small dry smile.
"Let’s eat," he said.
And the three of them got to work.
---....
The first thing they did was move the carcasses.
Bruce did not want to eat where they had killed. The smell of three downed deer-things, the slow drift of dimming light from their bodies, the trampled moss, all of it was loud, in the quiet way a hunting scene is loud, and loud places attracted attention. Other beasts further in the forest would have heard the brief fight. Other hunters might pass. The clearing the deer had walked into had open sightlines on too many sides.
He pointed at a small hollow off to the right, a dip in the soft ground between two large pale trunks, partly screened by glowing shrubs, with a fallen log laid out almost like a bench. It was the closest thing to a quiet table the forest was going to offer them.
"There," he said.
"Why there?" Theron asked.
"Cover. Sightlines. If something else comes hunting, I want to see it before it sees us."
Theron looked at the hollow with new eyes. "Oh."
Kael was already lifting the first deer-thing by its slender bark-plated forelegs. The carcass was lighter than it looked, fresh souls, even dead, had less mass than a body of the same size in the physical realm, and the guy hauled it across the moss easily. Bruce took the second. Theron took the third, working one-handed with his bad arm tucked against his side.
They laid the three carcasses out in the hollow. Bruce went around the trunks once, checking the angles. He came back satisfied.
"Now what?" Theron asked. He was looking at the carcasses like a man who had never butchered anything in his life, which Bruce suspected was the truth.
"Now Kael cooks," Bruce said.
"I cook?" Kael said.
"You’re the one with fire."
"This is the one useful thing about you, Writer." Kael cracked his knuckles. "All right. Step back, both of you. I haven’t cooked for a while since I died."
"You don’t seem like a person that likes to cook?" Theron asked.
"In life," Kael said, with great dignity, "I cooked many things."
He set himself in front of the first carcass and lifted both hands.
...
Bruce had not yet seen Kael do anything carefully with his fire.
In the mist, it had all been wide explosive throws, fireballs hurled at the horde, ring-bursts off the body, the close-fight wrapping of his fists in flame. Kael fought like a man who enjoyed bigness. He did not seem to have a gentle setting.
But now, standing over a carcass that he wanted to eat rather than blow up, the guy’s hands moved differently.
Flame gathered between his palms, not in a ball, but in a flat sheet, thin and even, the color of the fire shifting from the hot orange of his fighting-flame to a softer, deeper red. He held it for a moment, studying it. He frowned slightly. He brought his palms apart, and the sheet of fire spread out under them, hovering a hand’s width above the dead deer-thing’s flank like a low slow grill.
The bark-plates of the carcass began to crackle.
It was not a fast cooking. Kael was clearly working at it, Bruce could see the slight tightness in the guy’s jaw, the focus on his face. Holding flame at the right temperature was, apparently, harder than throwing it as hard as possible. The sheet of fire wavered when Kael’s attention drifted and steadied again when he pulled it back. He moved his hands slowly along the flank, sweeping the flame in long even passes, and the bark-plates blistered and split where it touched, opening like the skin of a roasted potato to show the deep glowing meat underneath.
The smell hit Bruce after about thirty seconds, and his soul nearly buckled at the knees.
It was the same smell as the carriage food, but better, fresher, more alive, the smell of meat that had been killed minutes ago by the same souls that were about to eat it. The savory note was deeper. The faint sweetness of the bark caramelized as Kael’s flame passed over it, and the smell of that was a thing Bruce had never encountered in any realm. He had to consciously close his mouth and keep it closed.
Theron made a small involuntary sound. "Oh no," the young man said, half-laughing, half-pained. "Oh no, that’s not fair. We have to wait for that?"
"You can have it raw if you want," Kael said, not looking up. "I won’t judge. Actually, I will judge."
"I’ll wait."
"Wise."
Kael moved the sheet of flame down the carcass, working the back leg next. The meat there cooked through in slow even waves, the glow of the fresh soul-flesh shifting from a soft blue-pale to a warm, rich gold under the heat. When Kael decided a section was done, he closed his fingers slightly and the flame above that section thinned, fading down to a low simmer-glow, leaving the cooked meat steaming gently in the cool air of the forest.
He worked for several more minutes. Bruce watched him, mostly to make sure Theron did not give in to temptation and start chewing on raw soul-beast. Theron sat on the fallen log with both his hands clasped between his knees, leaning forward, staring at the deer with the slightly desperate fixation of a man who had just realized he could smell again.
"How are you doing this?" Theron asked, after a while. "With the heat. You weren’t this, controlled, in the mist."
"In the mist I was trying not to die," Kael said. "You’ll find that significantly affects technique."
"Fair."
"Also," Kael went on, "fire isn’t just one thing. Most awakened souls with fire-talents think it is. They throw fireballs because fireballs are easy. But fire is, heat, light, fuel, motion, color, temperature, all separate variables. A good fire-user separates them. Cooking is just" He moved his palm slowly along the meat. "low temperature without flame. You hold the heat at a level the meat likes. You don’t burn it. You don’t smoke it. You cook it." He flicked a glance up at Bruce. "Same principle as your ink. You don’t just shoot bullets. You shape what the substance does. Right?"
"Right," Bruce said.
He had been having the same thought, watching Kael work. The two of them had been treating their talents, the first day, as weapons. But it wasn’t just their talents were not weapons, Bruce who had Godly healer back at the physical realm knew this. They were materials, ink, in Bruce’s case, and flame, in Kael’s, and the uses of those materials were as wide as the user’s imagination. Kael could fight with fire and he could cook with fire. Bruce could fire bullets with ink and he could, Bruce thought for a moment about what else ink could do, and the list got long fast, and he could write, presumably, since the talent was called what it was called. He had not yet tried writing with it. He filed that thought.
The first leg was done.
Kael let the sheet of flame fade. He drew a small, ordinary-looking knife from somewhere inside his clothes, Bruce had not seen him pick it up at any of the Guild stalls and decided not to ask, and made a neat cut along the cooked seam of the bark-plates. The skin came off in one long piece. Underneath, the meat was a rich gold-pink, steaming, perfectly cooked through.
Kael cut three thick slabs off the leg, set them on a flat stone he found at his feet, and stepped back with the air of a man who had just delivered a small miracle.
"Eat," he said. "Carefully. It’s still hot."
They ate.
Bruce took the first piece because he had decided, somewhere along the way, that being the cautious one of the group was apparently his job now and the cautious one ate first to make sure the food was safe. The slab of meat was warm in his hand, slightly heavier than it looked, and radiating. He could feel the soul-energy still alive in it, faint, contained, waiting to be taken in.
He bit into it.
His eyes closed without him deciding to close them.