Chapter 12: Kindling

By the time Shreya stabilized her shelter, night had fallen. Cicada music droned on in the background, a loud undulating buzz. Crickets chirped in the distance. Whatever bugs that had been biting her had come back in full force, the mud no longer enough to keep them off of her.

She shivered, the stick she was working with slipping out of her hand. She'd lost a layer of skin trying to work up enough friction to light a fire. Dried mosses acted as tinder, ready to ignite over the sticks they were draped over. Off to the side sat more sticks for the kindling.

Shreya spun the stick against the notch in her fireboard, a thick piece of bark from a dying tree.

If the Elders had wanted her to realize that being a lone wolf sucked, she more than understood that at this point. Even in the best of circumstances, there still wasn't enough time to cover everything that she needed to. Water had become a lost cause. Food hadn't been on the agenda in the first place—the impossibility of that had been clear from the start. Dealing with the shelter had taken up all the daylight.

Shreya let go of the stick.

Giving up would be simple. All she'd have to do would be to go back to sleep. She could curl up under her lean-to, shut her eyes, and wake up in time for her mother and the others to pick her up. She'd leave exile with her edges worn down and a newfound appreciation for her wolfishness.

And the Elders—Elder Ilkay, Elder Haneul, Elder Calanthe and all the rest—would be so smug about it. They'd look at her, knowing that they were able to bring her back down to her knees. Another wolf back in line with the crowd.

She couldn't give them that satisfaction. Shreya picked the stick back up and got back to work on spinning it. She wished that her streak of determination would've coincided with a spark of convenient fire, but that wasn't the case. It took at least another hour of scraping her skin open for the fire to bloom.

Shreya didn't waste time. She tossed in the kindling, breaking the sticks up into smaller pieces. Happy to be fed, the flames continued to grow. Its bright colors danced before her, the heat welcome near her cold form.

Something else came with the fire: a memory from her younger years, when she was sitting near a fire like this one. She remembered the crackling flesh over flame. The chopped up parts. The skin peeled off of bones. The butchering, and then the realization that what they were eating had been a person only hours before.

Her shift in thinking built up over time. She'd just been too young to realize her part in what they were doing until she was older, older and smart enough to reflect on the fact that the man, the woman, the whoever they were sharing pieces of had been someone she had a hand in killing. The tipping point had been—

Shreya tore herself away from the fire, but still stayed close enough to bask in its warmth.

Sometimes, she thought to herself that she should've stayed ignorant. She could've cloaked herself in that ignorance, warm and cozy while she acted like any other wolf. Shreya could've been dancing by the roasting fires, celebrating all of the triumphs the wolves had rewritten themselves to have earned.

But the thing was that she couldn't be that way. It was too late for her.

She dug her fingers through the dirt, the soil rough on her skin. What if she disappeared? What if she ran off into the night and left them before her misgivings consumed her? Her Otherness was doomed to get worse, wasn't it? If this kept eating away at her, she was at risk of going the way of Loupe: messed up, demented, and in denial of reality.

That was the type of thinking that gave birth to curses. Shreya had told Shanti that curses were myths, but she knew there'd been hesitation in her voice when she'd said that. Bad things happened to the outliers.

Shreya couldn't sleep after that. She stayed awake, tending to the fire all the way into the morning.

~ * ~ * ~

------------

A/N: Voting for the latest chapter (Chapter 21) will end on Wednesday at 11:59 PM EST on the main site. There is also a new Interlude chapter posted there.

The next RRL update will be Chapter 12.2.