Chapter 441: Life
Chapter 441: Life
Bruce took the food and bit into it.
His eyes closed without him deciding to close them.
The taste was, there were not words for it. It was the carriage food, again, but more. Deeper. Cleaner. The meat had the savory weight of an animal that had been living its whole life eating glowing leaves in this glowing forest, and that whole life was in the bite, packed in tight, generous and uncomplicated. The texture was tender. The juice, there was juice, somehow, in soul-meat, ran clean and slightly sweet. The faint bark-sweetness Kael had caramelized was on the outside of the slab like a thin crust, and it was the best part.
Bruce did not say anything for a long moment. He just chewed.
He swallowed.
He felt the energy of the meat go down into his soul-body and land. The wash of warmth was bigger this time than from the kill itself, much bigger. He had absorbed a small piece of essence automatically when the deer died. Eating its flesh was the rest of the meal. He could feel the difference between the two: the kill-absorption had been a sip; this was the full glass. The last of his fatigue eased. The healthy clean glow of his soul-body brightened another small step. He felt, in a way he had not felt since arriving in this realm, fed.
"Oh," he heard Theron say beside him. "Oh."
Theron had taken a bite. Theron’s eyes were also closed.
"Yeah," Kael said, grinning, taking his own slab and tearing into it. "Yeah. That’s what I’m talking about."
The three of them sat down in the hollow, Bruce on the moss, Kael perched on the end of the fallen log, Theron in the middle of it with his slab held in both hands, and they ate.
They did not say much at first.
The eating was the kind of eating that did not allow for conversation. Bruce worked through his first slab steadily, the way a man eats when he has been hungry for longer than he understood. Kael ate with more theater, broad, satisfied bites, with occasional sounds of approval at his own cooking. Theron ate with both hands, his bad arm forgotten, the food going down faster than Bruce thought wise but Bruce was not going to be the one to slow him.
Kael, after his first slab, cut three more from the second leg. He passed them around. Then three more from the back. Then he started on the second deer, working with the same calm low-flame technique, while Bruce and Theron kept eating.
After a while, when the worst of the hunger had been answered, Theron leaned back against the log and let out a long slow breath, the kind of breath a person lets out only after they have stopped feeling like they might die soon.
"I think," Theron said, "this is the best meal I have ever had."
"You died of a fever at thirty-two," Kael said, working on a flank. "Your standards may be skewed."
"My standards are not skewed. I had a life. I had favorite foods."
"What were your favorite foods?"
Theron thought about it. "My mother used to make a stew. With potatoes. And, there was a kind of bread, in the bakery near our house, that had honey baked into the crust."
"Sounds nice."
"It was nice." Theron looked at the slab in his hand. "This is better."
"It is better," Kael agreed cheerfully.
Bruce, half-listening, took his third slab and worked through it more slowly than the first two. The hunger was mostly gone now. The cracks in his soul-body, he checked, turning his hand in the light, were closed. Fully closed. No more hairline remnants. His glow was even, full, the way it should be. He felt, in his core, what he had not felt since arriving in this realm: a small surplus. He had eaten more than he needed. The extra was in him now, sitting ready, the reserves of a man who could spend energy and still have some left.
He could fight, comfortably, for hours on what he had eaten.
That was the point. That was exactly the point. The harvester had said the food healed and strengthened. Bruce had now experienced both, and he understood, with a working man’s clarity, what it meant.
This is how they were going to do this.
Kill. Eat. Sell. Repeat.
"Bruce," Kael said, around a mouthful, "what was your favorite food? In the place you came from."
Bruce thought about it for a moment.
"My wife makes a soup," he said. "In the winter."
"What kind of soup?"
"It depends on the winter. She tries different things every year. One year it was a fish soup with cream. One year it was something with peppers. One year it was just bones and onions and salt for two days and it was the best one she ever made. She still complains that she can’t get it right again."
Kael grinned. "She married a man who can do anything in any realm, and she’s mad at herself for not getting a soup right?"
"Yes."
"I like her already."
Theron was watching Bruce with quiet attention. "You have a wife," he said. "Back in the physical realm."
"Yes."
"And you came here on purpose."
"Yes."
"To get stronger."
"Yes."
Theron looked down at his hands.
"I don’t have anyone back there," he said. "I died. So I don’t, this is just where I am, now. There’s nothing on the other side waiting for me. Just this." He looked up at Bruce. "Is it strange to have someone waiting?"
Bruce considered the question.
"It is the only thing keeping me steady, most days," he said. "And it makes everything harder, because I miss her, and I don’t know when I’ll see her again. So yes. It’s strange. But it’s the strangeness I chose."
Theron nodded slowly. "I think, I would have wanted that. Someone waiting." He let the thought go. "Anyway. I’m glad I’m not alone here."
"You’re not alone here," Kael said. He said it lightly, but he meant it, and Bruce noted that. The guy had spent the morning making jokes at Theron’s expense. He was now, in his offhand way, also telling the young man that he had people. "You’re stuck with us, in fact. I’ve decided. We’re a hunting party now. You don’t get to leave."
"I wasn’t going to leave."
"Good. Because I’d find you."
"That’s very threatening."
"That’s the goal."
Theron actually laughed.
The conversation, after that, drifted.
Kael told them, with great enthusiasm and questionable accuracy, about Dagon, the friend he had mentioned in the mist, the bastard friend who didn’t know how to express himself, whose name kept coming up. Apparently Dagon was a lesser-branch dragon like Kael, only worse-tempered and worse-looking, and the two of them had run a small gang of trouble together in their last life.
Bruce was surprised that Kael wasn’t actually a demon but a dragon...
Kael did not say how he had died. Bruce noticed that and did not ask. The dragon was happy to talk about his life in general but stayed light on the ending of it. Fair enough. Some things did not get talked about in the first day.
Theron talked about his tax office, which sounded much more interesting than tax office implied. He had worked in a regional administration where half the job was investigating people who lied on their forms, and apparently there had been a small ongoing war between his department and a wealthy family who kept underreporting their grain stores. Theron had been in the middle of compiling the evidence to bring the family down when the fever took him. He still seemed annoyed about it.
"I had them," he said, shaking his head. "I had so much paperwork. They were going to fall."
"Maybe one of your coworkers will finish it for you," Bruce offered.
"They were all idiots."
"Ah."
"No, really. The whole department. I was the only competent one. My boss couldn’t read his own ledgers."
"And then you died and now they all live happily ever after with the grain family."
Theron looked stricken. "Don’t say that."
Kael was wheezing with laughter, though he asked with a blank face later on, "What’s a ledger, that wasn’t a word used in the dragon race galaxy after all..."
Bruce, asked his own questions, said less but enough. He had been a doctor, he told them, that was the closest word for surgeon that translated cleanly. He had once been a doctor in his old world, and then his old world had ended in a way he did not entirely want to explain, and then he had lived in a new world where he had become other things. He had a wife. He had a sister. He had a mother figure who was not really his mother but mattered like one. He liked plain food and he liked his work and he had been doing both for a long time.