Food was going to be a problem. The boy still had to eat. Resonance could fuel his mind, but it could not fuel his body. All living things required the ingestion of Memory for sustenance. Seeing as he wasn't a tree, and couldn't simply draw it up from the ground, the boy would have to hunt. The older and stronger his prey, the better. He was no longer sheltered by his home and meadow; he couldn't afford to eat preserved rations or conserve his strength. His body needed fuel, and in the desert, he could not be picky about the source.

Selene favored him, tonight, casting a soft glow across the desert sands. The boy trudged across the rolling dunes, dragging his feet through ankle-deep sand. It very quickly occurred to him that he should have asked his teachers about his surroundings. He didn't even know the name of this place, much less the kind of creatures that inhabited it.

It was a disappointing mistake. He resolved to never make it again.

Fortunately, the world provides, even for idiots. The boy knelt down, and shoved his hand into the sand.

All thinking beings, so far as the boy was aware, were capable of reading Memory with a touch. There was no Talent or manipulation involved here, so much as a simple quirk of existence. It was something innate, a part of the world, though one's ability to read could be honed with time and effort. The boy judged himself to be slightly above average at the skill, as a natural consequence of his training, and some not inconsiderable innate talent.

The sand whispered its secrets into his mind, and the boy saw—

Not much of anything, really. It was sand. It had been sand for a long, long time. Far longer than the boy was capable of reading. Hundreds of thousands of grains, packed into the small clump that he'd touched, all of them ancient. Their Memory was weak, even combined together. The impact that they had made upon the world was minor, at best. Unlike an evertree, which weathered all that befell it, the sand simply gave way. It was frustrating to delve into, but it made the occasional odd occurrence stand out all the more.

Hard scales brush against the grains, dragging some forward, pushing others aside. They move, swept along in the wake of something monstrous. Vibrations sweep through the earth, and entire dunes shift. The grains catch on something wet, and clump together. Blood.

The boy's hand jerked free of the sand, as the image of an enormous serpent flashed briefly through his mind. That Memory was... recent. Some small part of him hoped that it was simply perspective that made the snake feel so huge; everything was large compared to a grain of sand. The rest of him knew better. Dunes were not so easily disturbed.

Regardless, the boy was officially on his guard. His eyes were fixed firmly downward, as if he could pierce the desert sands by squinting hard enough. An unfamiliar tremor ran through him: fear of the unknown. He'd never faced something like this before. It struck him, then, just how far from home he was.

But he was his father's son, so he took up his sword and stiffened his spine, and moved forward with purpose. There was at least one creature nearby, one thing alive among these desolate sands. He was going to kill it, and eat it.

He scaled the next dune with caution, probing the soft ground with his sword before each step. He was unused to this terrain. The Red Barrens were mostly packed earth and hard stone, with a surface layer of dust that got into just about everything. The boy could tell, already, that any sort of pitched battle would see him quickly lose his footing. He hadn't noticed it nearly as much during his spars with Eurya, brief as they were. The boy was certain that at least one of his teachers had been responsible for that, most likely the Keeper using his ability to cast, somehow.

The boy suffered a moment of brief insanity, as he contemplated attempting the same feat, without training. He knew the theory, more or less, and it was bound to make life easier for him. Then he remembered being caught up in the Memory of his teacher's sword kata, being swept away by the Memory of his ancestors, being warned over and over, to take things one step at a time. He sighed, allowing his common sense to reassert itself. The last thing he needed was to lose himself in the Memory of a rock, or dirt, or some other solid foothold. That would be an embarrassing way to die.

He could almost picture himself hunched down and perfectly still, imitating a boulder while slowly starving to death. His ancestors would never forgive him. And he'd probably hear his teacher laughing at him, all the way from beyond the afterlife.

The next dune was a slog, even for the boy's trained body. It towered higher than any other, almost a small mountain, rather than the rolling hills that they normally appeared as. He reached its peak, huffing for air, and cautiously gazed out upon the desert.

It looked beautiful beneath the light of Selene. The angry orange and yellow sand was cast in soft white, like a far-flung blanket across the ground. Shapes moved in the darkness, shadows and shifting sand. From here, he could see the desert alight with life. Or, at least, movement. And, lying just beyond the base of his current dune, buried in the sand, was the strangest sight.

To the boy's eyes, it was obvious. A forked tongue, protruding at an angle, and softly wiggling. It was as thick as his thigh, almost as long as he was tall, and bright, bright red. Perhaps a dumber creature might mistake it as a worm of some kind, or just a defenseless pile of flesh. The boy, however, knew a lure when he saw one. Furthermore, he knew exactly what was attached to the other side of it.

His next meal.

He carefully descended from his perch, taking each step with utmost caution. The serpent was enormous, if its tongue was anything to go by, and it was entirely possible for him to stumble upon some other part of its body by complete accident.

The boy didn't have a plan, exactly. His goal was mostly to get as close as possible, then work something out from there. Simply taking a swing at the thing's tongue didn't seem like the greatest idea. Bait generally liked to be attacked. Never strike where the enemy is strongest, as his father used to say.

But there was a problem. A minor one. More of an inconvenience, really.

The boy just didn't know all that much about snakes. Like most things, he knew that they would die once stabbed a sufficient number of times, but he knew little about their habits and less about their anatomy. Snakes did poorly in the Red Wastes. Nowhere to hide, really.

There were a few, of course, that would wedge themselves beneath rocks and cracks in the earth, but only one had ever wandered into the meadow. His father had dispatched it rather easily. The poor, doomed creature had been shorter than the boy's arm. He'd received a clipped warning about venom, and not letting himself get bit, but he didn't need his father to tell him that. Avoid getting bit was pretty basic, as far as advice went.

It was understandable, then, that the boy decided to simply observe his prey after closing the distance. He dug himself a little hollow, and bedded down, keeping a good twenty paces between him and his slowly swaying target. It was enough space that he was fairly confident he could make good on his escape, if necessary, but not so far that he couldn't lunge across it in a heartbeat. He kept his eyes rooted firmly on his target, watching its movements, piecing together its hunting strategy minute by minute.

His focus was utterly consumed by the serpent, which, to him, made it perfectly reasonable that he missed the bird. Three things happened in rapid succession. The first, a shadow flashed across the ground, covering it completely. The second, the serpent's tongue retracted, and its entire body jerked backwards in a violent eruption of sand. The third, a pair of dark wings and massive talons came crashing down upon the desert, piercing into the dune. The impact flattened the sandy hill, and scared the absolute shit out of the boy.

A shrill scream echoed through the night, whether it was the bird or the snake, the boy could not tell. He dug himself deeper into his little cubby-hole, shrinking away from the violent riot of feathers and scales. Great waves of sand were flung in every direction, and the once towering dune was quickly reduced to a flattened basin. The ground quaked, and the roof of the boy's small shelter rained down upon him. He clutched his sword close, as he stared at the tumultuous result of the local predators clashing. He could see nothing; nothing more than the occasional flash of movement, from inside a growing ball of dust and sand.

Two enormous wings emerged from within the dust cloud, then surged downwards, blasting debris in every direction. The bird, a roc, some part of the boy's mind gibbered almost incoherently, rose up, with a thrashing, squirming serpent clutched in its talons. The latter was easily seventy feet long, and twice as thick as the boy's birth-tree. HIs heart skipped a beat, as he realized the sheer size of the thing he had wanted to hunt.

The roc was even larger. It could have used his entire meadow as a cramped nesting ground. Each flap of its gargantuan wings scoured away layers of sand from the surrounding dunes, nothing less than a localized tornado. The snake, caught in its claws, flailed impotently. Its fangs, each longer and thicker than the boy's legs, snapped at its foe. Liquid sprayed out of its mouth, a thick black fluid that melted the sand into glass wherever it landed. It splashed against thick feathers, and ignited.

The roc screeched in fury, and let itself descend, still clutching the snake. It slammed their combined bulk into the packed earth, shaking the ground for miles in every direction. The snake, briefly dazed, could put up no defense as the roc's sharp beak jabbed downward. With a flash of yellow keratin, the snake's head was ripped free of its body. The head, larger than the boy's cabin, was cast carelessly aside as the roc screeched out its victory. Its wings beat, kicking up another storm of sand, and it vanished before the disturbance settled.

The boy stared upwards, trying desperately to pick out the creature's outline against the clouds.

He failed.

That unfamiliar fear stole over him once more, but he pushed it willfully aside. He'd meditate on this later, when he practiced his casting. He would wait to come to terms with this latest brush with death, until then.

His eyes dipped downward, to the snake's head. It hadn't been severed cleanly at the stem, a good four of five feet of meat separated its neck from its skull. The boys stomach rumbled, and he licked his lips. The creature's Memory would be immensely nourishing, judging from its size alone. He had no fire to cook it, but all that did was improve the flavor. He'd certainly stomached worse. Not that he had time for a fire; there were bound to be scavengers incoming.

The boy picked up his sword, steeled himself, and went to work.