The wound in my thigh took eleven days to close.
I counted, because counting is what I do. It closed slowly, a little each morning, and the Registry's number for my HP crept back up a point at a time, faster than I deserved. I spent most of those days limping between the creek, the fire, and the drying racks where I hung strips of boar over the smoke. I did not hunt. I did not build anything. I sat with my leg propped on a log and tried to understand what I had become.
I had a ledger. I had started it without thinking, the way I start everything: on a flat slab of bark, in charcoal, in neat columns. The Registry would not tell me what it expected of me, but it would not stop me from taking notes.
Day 14.
Level: 5
XP: about 600
Food: boar, smoked, six days' worth
Putty: a thumb's worth
Wire: eleven feet, by my forearm. No more snares. No more anything.
Open question: how much does each level cost?
That last question took an evening. I had two data points, and one guess. A hundred points had bought me Level 2, and the third level had arrived somewhere around two hundred and thirty. If each level cost a quarter more than the last, then Level 10 sat somewhere near three thousand. I did the compounding on a flat stone with a stick, and then I sat looking at the result.
I was at six hundred. I had nearly died twice to get there.
On the fifteenth night, the forest went quiet again.
I knew the quiet by then. It was not the dead stillness the skeleton had left, but it was close kin. The crickets stopped. The creek went on murmuring, but nothing else did. I was sitting by the fire with the doll on one side and the little wooden marionette on the other, and I felt the hair stand up along my arms.
I saw it only because it crossed the moon.
It was an owl. It was an owl the way a skeleton in a rusted breastplate is a man: technically correct, and nothing like it. It was almost the size of a pony's head, pale and flat-faced, with wings that stretched wider than I am tall, and it made no sound at all. It drifted over the creek and dropped to the water, and a fish that had been swimming there simply stopped swimming. Then it rose again, with something silver in its claws, and settled on a branch above my camp.
Hollow Owl Lv. 6
Six. I was Level 5.
One level above me. I had survived one level above me twice, with a stick of fire and a falling log, and I had enjoyed neither. The owl turned its head and regarded me with two large, black, flat eyes. Then it looked, very slowly, at the doll.
Her glass eyes were catching the firelight. They shone like two small moons.
I understood, with perfect clarity, what the owl wanted. Something small to fly off with.
"Shit!," I said. It did not seem to care.
I could not fight it. I knew that, in the part of my mind that does arithmetic. If the owl moved and struck from above, I had a dagger, a hobby knife, and a bad leg.
But the one thing I did have was the one thing I had spent thirty years learning how to do. While keeping a side eye on the owl.
I took the marionette. I tied two lengths of braided hide to its shoulders and one to its head, and I crawled out from the firelight to the bank of the creek, where a bent sapling hung over the water. I looped the longest cord over the branch. Then I crept back into the shadow of the overhang with the cords in my hands and the doll tucked behind me, and I laid the little wooden figure on the stones at the water's edge, in the moonlight.
And I made it move.
I do not know how to explain this to someone who has never done it. When you hold a puppet by its strings, you stop being a person holding a stick. Your hands become its hands. I made the marionette lift its head, and look around, and take two quick steps toward the water, and stop, and look over its shoulder as if it had heard something. The face was crude and faintly surprised. In the moonlight, from above, it looked exactly like a small, frightened animal creeping toward a drink.
The owl came off its branch without a sound.
I saw it only as a pale shape growing larger, wings spread, talons forward. I let the marionette take one more step. Then, as the claws came down, I pulled hard on the longest cord and yanked the puppet sideways into a tangle of loops I had laid in the stones.
The talons closed on empty air, and on a snarl of braided hide.
The owl hit the ground wrong. It screamed, a thin, tearing, furious sound, and its wings thrashed, and one foot came free, and the other did not. For three seconds it was the most dangerous thing I have ever seen.
I went in with the dagger.
It raked my shoulder with the free claw, four long burning lines through my hoodie. I did not feel it. I came in under the wing, where the feathers were thinnest, and drove the dagger in as deep as I could, and held on while the great wings beat the air and the stones and my face. Then it stopped.
I knelt there, panting, with feathers stuck to my sweat. The marionette lay on its back in the shallows, one arm bent at a terrible angle, looking faintly surprised.
Deed recorded: First time defeating a hollow owl.
Experience gained: 80 XP (Hollow Owl, Lv. 6)
First-time-defeat bonus (Hollow Owl): +220 XP
LEVEL UP. Level 6.
Max HP: +2 HP 12 / 22
Three hundred points of experience for a single night. I read it twice. Then another panel unfolded below it, quiet and neat.
Deed recorded: Lured prey with a puppet.
Experience gained: 0 XP
I stared at that line for a long time.
Zero experience. Of course. But it had written it down. The Registry had noticed that I had taken a crude wooden figure and made it move like a living thing, and that I had done it well enough to kill something that should have killed me. It had put the deed in its book, beside the doll and the hinges and the face. This chapter is updated first at novelping.com.
I sat in the creek, bleeding down my arm, and found that I was smiling.
It was not the nervous, ragged laugh of the boar night. It was something quieter and stranger. When the owl had dived, and I had felt the cord run through my fingers and pull taut, I had not been afraid. For about four seconds, in the middle of the worst night of my life, I had felt like a man who was very good at something.
I had not felt like that in twenty years.
I mended the marionette's arm before I mended my shoulder, which says something about me that I will not examine. A strip of hide, two splints of green wood, and a patient hour. It would never be as good as it had been, but it moved. Its face still looked surprised. I thought that was probably fair.
Three scratches ran across the puppets left cheek, where the owl's talon had grazed her when it first dropped. I held her up to the firelight and ran my thumb over them. They were shallow. I wish I had paint.
I added a line to the ledger, in charcoal, and looked at it for a while.
Day 15.
Level: 6
XP: about 900
Wire: eleven feet
Putty: nearly gone marionette puppet: three scratches, left cheek. Needs paint.
Doll: need to think of a name for her
Level 10: about two thousand more.
By morning, the owl was gone.
I did not even look surprised. There was only another thick black root, wet with dew, lying across the gravel where it had fallen, and the ground beneath it smooth and clean. It had become a pattern. Something took away the dead in my corner of this forest and tucked them in, quietly and without being asked, and then left no trace.
I stood over the root for a while, with my arm in a sling made from the sleeve of my hoodie.
"Thank you," I said.
The Registry said nothing. The forest said nothing. But a breeze moved through the leaves overhead, very softly, and I could not tell whether it was an answer.
Four levels to go. Then the Registry would have to tell me what I was.
I had begun to suspect that it had already decided.