The lightning came out of him whether he wanted it to or not for the first three days.
He would reach for a leaf cup and a spark would jump from his fingers and set the rim smoldering. He would sit down too fast and the discharge would hit the stone beneath him and leave a small black mark. He tried to sleep the first night after the slimes and woke himself up three times when his body discharged against the cave floor, each jolt enough to send him sitting up with his heart hammering and his hands crackling in the dark.
By the fourth day he had learned to keep his hands occupied. He held the stone dagger constantly, the horn dagger when the stone one was not in his hand, the bone spear when he was moving. The weapons grounded something in him, gave the current somewhere to go that was not into everything he touched.
The fifth day he tried to call the lightning deliberately and nothing happened.
He stood outside the cave with his right hand extended toward a tree trunk he had already marked twice during the uncontrolled discharges. He thought about the current under his skin. He felt for it the way he had learned to feel for the right branch when moving through the canopy, an instinct that lived somewhere below conscious thought.
Nothing.
He stood there for ten minutes, arm out, feeling increasingly foolish, and then gave up and went to collect water from the river.
The lightning came out when he was not thinking about it. He was halfway back to the cave with a leaf cup in each hand, his mind on the route he was planning to extend east tomorrow, and the cup in his right hand sparked against the water inside it. The discharge was small, a brief crackle that made his hand jerk and sent water slopping over the side.
He stopped.
He looked at the cup. He looked at his hand. He tried to feel what had just happened and felt nothing specific except the usual hum under his skin that he was beginning to accept as his new baseline.
He tried to do it again.
Nothing.
He walked back to the cave, set the cups down, and spent the next two hours failing to produce lightning on purpose while producing it accidentally four more times. Each accident happened when his attention was somewhere else. When he was thinking about the fire. When he was deciding which vine to cut for binding. When he was calculating how far east he had pushed his radius yesterday.
The lightning did not want to be told what to do.
He stopped trying to tell it.
The next morning he went out to extend his radius by the kilometer he had set as his daily goal, and instead of trying to call the lightning, he simply ran. He ran east at the speed the reindeer had given him, the speed that made the trees blur past and the ground disappear under his feet. He ran until he had covered the kilometer and then he kept running, because the hunger was with him now in a new way, a constant low demand that the rabbits and reindeer he had been eating could quiet but not silence completely.
He found a rabbit on the sixth day of training.
It was smaller than the first one, the black fur less dense, the horns less developed. He killed it with the bone spear from fifteen meters, a throw that was more accurate than any throw he had made before the reindeer. The spear went through the neck and pinned it to the earth.
He cooked it at the cave that evening and ate all of it in one sitting.
His stomach accepted the volume the way it had accepted the reindeer haunch, with the quiet efficiency of a system that had been upgraded to handle new inputs. The shaking after was brief, barely noticeable, a tremor in his hands that lasted maybe ten seconds before it passed. The rabbit gave him nothing obvious. No new speed, no new agility. But he woke the next morning and the hum under his skin was steadier, the current more predictable.
He ate rabbit four times in the next two weeks.
He ate reindeer twice more, finding them further out in the expanded radius, the massive animals grazing in the wider spaces between the trees. The first one he killed with the horn spear from a tree branch, dropping onto its back the way he had dropped onto the first one, the bone dagger in his hand already moving before his feet touched fur. The second one he ran down in the open, his legs covering ground at a speed that made the forest blur, and he killed it standing on the earth like a hunter instead of an ambush predator.
The meat kept him full for days at a time when he was not using the lightning.
When he used the lightning, everything changed.
He learned to call it on the twelfth day, and the way he learned was by not trying. He was in the canopy, moving between branches at height, his hands finding holds and his legs propelling him across gaps that would have killed him when he arrived in this forest. He reached for a branch and his hand closed around it and the lightning came out of him and into the branch and the branch exploded.
He fell.
He fell fifteen meters, hit the ground with his legs under him, absorbed the impact in a crouch, and sat there in the silence afterward with splinters of wood still falling around him like dark rain.
He looked up at the branch. What remained of it. A blackened stub where the branch had met the trunk, smoke rising from it in thin grey threads.
He looked at his hand.
He had not tried to do that. He had simply reached, the way he had been reaching for branches for weeks, and the lightning had come because his hand had been there and the branch had been there and the current had found a path.
He stood up.
He climbed another tree. He found a branch that was dead, already grey and brittle, and he reached for it with his right hand, his mind empty of everything except the fact of his hand and the branch.
The lightning came.
The branch cracked, split, fell. But it did not explode. He had held back without knowing he was holding back, some part of him that understood the current better than his conscious mind had moderated the flow.
He climbed down.
He spent the rest of that day on the ground, working with the lightning the way he had worked with the stone and the vine and the bone. He found a fallen log and sat in front of it and reached out to touch it, small touches, controlled, learning what it felt like when the current built and what it felt like when he let it go. He worked until his arms were heavy and his hands were shaking and the hum under his skin had dropped to a whisper.
The hunger hit him then.
Not the ordinary hunger. Something deeper, a demand from his body that was immediate and absolute. He had used the lightning for maybe an hour, small discharges, nothing like the explosion that had destroyed the branch, and his body was telling him in no uncertain terms that he had spent something it needed back.
He ate the remaining reindeer meat from the day before. All of it. He was still hungry. He ate the dried rabbit he had been saving for the extended radius runs. He was still hungry. He ate the berries and mushrooms he had gathered that morning, everything he had, and when his stomach finally settled he understood something about the lightning that the seizures had not taught him.
It cost.
The rabbit meat rebuilt him slowly over days. The reindeer gave him strength and density. The slimes gave him lightning, but the lightning did not run on nothing. It ran on him. On the food he put into his body, on the reserves he built up during the days he did not use it.
He adjusted.
He ate more. He hunted more. His radius expanded to three kilometers from the cave, then five, then eight. He found two more rabbit warrens and marked them on his mental map. He found a section of the forest where the reindeer moved through on a regular pattern, the ground showing the signs of their passage in trampled undergrowth and droppings. He ate one every four or five days, and on the days between he ate rabbit and foraged and let his body build the reserves that the lightning would draw from.
The lightning itself became something he understood in his body before his mind caught up.
He could call it now, consistently, by the end of the third week. He stood in the clearing where he had killed the first rabbit, the place where he had nearly died, and he held his hand out toward a dead tree trunk and let the current build. The arc that jumped from his fingers was not the thin blue-white thread of the first days. It was thicker, brighter, the crack of it loud enough that birds left the canopy in a wave of protest.
The trunk blackened where it hit. A line of char down the bark, smoke curling up from it.
He lowered his hand.
He tried again with the other hand. The left was weaker, the shoulder still not fully healed from the rabbit's horn, but the current came when he called it. A smaller arc, a thinner line of white-blue, but it came.
He worked both hands over the following days. The right hand was his weapon hand, the one that had thrown the spears and held the daggers, and the lightning from it was stronger. The left hand was slower, the current harder to call, the cost higher when he used it. But it worked.