Carrying the small fish, Cadogan started back to the Raven Tower. The walk was hard; his senses were very sharp, and his arms and legs hurt. Each sound, like a twig breaking, or any unclear shadow, made him more alert. He moved very carefully, his eyes always checking the quiet, still woods around him. He reached the tower as the light began to fail, barricading himself inside with a new sense of urgency. He was exhausted, his hunger a raging fire despite the anticipation of the meal to come, but he had succeeded. There was no question of a proper fire. He still had a few splinters of charred wood from the tower's collapse, hoarded like gold. With painstaking care, using the last of his tinder and a piece of flint, he managed to coax a tiny, almost smokeless flame to life in the sheltered lee of a fallen wall segment. It was a pitiful fire, barely enough to offer more than a token warmth, but it was enough. He cleaned the fish with his rusty knife, the process clumsy but focused. He impaled it on a thin, sharpened stick and held it over the tiny flames. The smell of the cooking flesh, faint as it was, was intoxicating, making his stomach cramp with an almost painful desire.
He ate it slowly, reverently, savoring each tiny flake of white meat. It was, perhaps, four mouthfuls in total. The bones he crunched carefully, swallowing them too – nothing could be wasted. It was gone far too quickly, a fleeting sensation of warmth and protein in the vast emptiness of his hunger. The immediate, desperate edge of starvation was blunted, but only just. His body, starved for so long, cried out for more. But his mind, clearer now with even that tiny influx of sustenance, felt a surge of something that had been absent for days: a grim, determined hope. He had provided for himself. He had faced the wilderness alone and wrested a meal from it.
As the "Calon" stone in the center of the flagstone spiral began its soft, nightly glow, Cadogan sat before it, not with the earlier despair, but with a new, calculating intensity. One small fish was not survival. It was a stay of execution, nothing more. He needed a plan, a sustainable way to feed himself in this desolate, hostile valley. The "others." He wondered if they had seen him at the stream. Had they let him take that single fish? Was it another test? Or were they simply indifferent to his pathetic attempts at survival, confident that Glyndŵr itself would eventually claim him? He couldn't know. He could only assume the worst: that any foray outside the tower was a gamble with his life.
He took out his charcoal and the flat piece of slate that served as his journal and sketchbook. By the faint, reddish glow of the Calon stone, he began to think. His first attempt at snaring had been a failure. His technique was poor, his materials inadequate. Could he improve them? Perhaps. But the "others" knew he had tried there. They might be watching such spots. Fishing. He had succeeded, however minimally. The stream, the Calon y Cwm, was a known source. But his spear was crude. The fish were small and quick. He needed a better way. He tried to recall every detail he had ever read or seen about primitive fishing techniques. Weirs? Traps made of woven branches? A gorge hook, perhaps, a small, straight piece of bone or hardened wood, sharpened at both ends, with a line tied to its middle, baited and left? He sketched a few designs, his 21st-century mind grappling with the limitations of Stone Age technology. He had bone – from the rabbits Madog had caught, perhaps even from the fish he had just eaten. He had salvaged strips of linen for cord. He had his knife, the iron bar, the mallet.
The task of merely surviving, he realized, was itself a form of kingdom building on the most elemental scale. He had to establish his "domain" – this ruined tower – as a secure base. He had to manage his "resources" – his own failing strength, the few tools he possessed, the dangerous bounty of the valley. He had to develop "industries" – tool making, food acquisition. He was a kingdom of one, besieged and starving, but a kingdom nonetheless. And its first, most urgent law was: Endure.
He thought of the "others." Their patience, their silence, their intimate knowledge of this land. They were the apex predators here. He was an anomaly, an "Estron." His attempts at "mending" the tower, at performing their rituals, had bought him a fragile, uncertain tolerance. But it had not fed him. It had not made him safe. If he was to survive, truly survive, he could not rely on their forbearance, nor on their cryptic guidance. He had to rely on himself, on the restless, analytical mind that was his only true inheritance from the world he had lost. The night was cold. His hunger, though briefly assuaged, was returning. But as Cadogan sketched another design for a fish trap, a new determination settled in his heart. Glyndŵr had tried to break him. It had taken his men, his health, his hope. But it had not taken his will. He would learn its secrets. He would find its sustenance. He would, somehow, endure its trials. The forging of his own survival had begun. And that, he knew, was the only foundation upon which any future, however improbable, could be built.