Victor survived the first week on hatred alone.
He found shelter in a hollow oak tree two miles from Ashfeld, deep enough in the forest that no one from the village would stumble across him. The space was barely large enough for his small body, dark and damp and crawling with insects, but it kept the rain off.
Food was harder.
He knew which plants were edible, his mother had taught him that. Wild garlic grew near streams. Dandelion roots could be eaten raw, though they tasted like dirt and bitterness. Acorns needed to be boiled to remove the tannins, but he had no pot, no fire, no way to boil anything. He ate them anyway and spent a night vomiting until his stomach was empty and his throat was raw.
He learned from that mistake.
The forest had rabbits, squirrels, birds. Meat. Protein. Calories. Everything his growing body needed and wasn't getting. But catching them required traps, and traps required materials he didn't have and skills he hadn't developed yet.
But he tried anyway.
And predictably, his first snare was a disaster, poorly constructed, placed in the wrong location, using rope he'd braided from grass that fell apart after the first rain and nothing came near it.
His second snare was better. He'd studied the paths animals took through the underbrush, had noticed the small highways of compressed earth where rabbits ran. Then he placed his trap there, using stronger cord he'd stolen from a farmer's field in the dead of night.
The rabbit that died in his snare was small and thin, barely worth the effort. Victor had never killed anything before. He stared at the creature for a long time, watching its chest rise and fall in panicked breaths, seeing the terror in its eyes.
Then he thought of his mother's face, blood-covered and broken, and he snapped its neck with a quick twist.
The rabbit died instantly and Victor felt nothing.
He tried to start a fire using friction, the way he'd read about in books. Rubbing sticks together, creating heat through motion, applying physics to produce flame. In theory, it was simple. In practice, his eight-year-old hands lacked the strength and coordination to maintain the pressure and speed necessary. After three hours, all he had were blisters and wood shavings. Leaving him no choice but to eat the rabbit raw.
The meat was tough and gamey and probably riddled with parasites, but it was protein. His body needed it more than it needed safety. He chewed hard and swallowed without tasting, while trying not to think about the warmth of the blood in his mouth.
That night, he dreamed of his mother's cooking. Stews thick with vegetables and herbs. Bread fresh from the oven, steaming and soft. The way she'd hum while she worked, happy in her element, never knowing that her kindness would be repaid with stones.
He woke up crying and hated himself for the weakness.
The second week was even harder.
His snares caught nothing. The edible plants he knew were growing scarce as autumn deepened. His body, already thin from a lifetime of poverty, began to consume itself. His ribs pressed against his skin like prison bars and his face took on a hollow, skull-like quality. However his mind remained sharp.
That was the cruelest part. His body was failing, but his brain still worked perfectly, taking note of every sensation, every decline, every step closer to death. He understood exactly what was happening to him, understood the biochemistry of starvation, the way his body was breaking down muscle for energy, the manner in which his organs would eventually begin to fail.
Knowledge didn't help. It only made the dying worse. And so he started taking more risks.
At night, he would creep to the edge of farmland and steal. Turnips from root cellars. Apples from orchards. Once, gloriously, an entire loaf of bread left cooling on a windowsill. The farmer's wife had screamed when she noticed it missing, and Victor had run through the darkness with bread clutched to his chest like treasure, laughing with a hysteria that frightened him.
But the farms were growing more cautious. People locked their doors, brought their harvests inside earlier, set dogs loose at night. Word had spread of a thief, probably a vagrant or a wild child. They were taking precautions.
And this meant Victor's supply lines were drying up.
By the third week, he was eating things he knew he shouldn't. Mushrooms he couldn't properly identify. Berries that were probably poisonous. Tree bark stripped and chewed until his gums bled. He was past caring about safety. Starvation was certain if he didn't eat and poisoning was only probable.
Luckily for him, the mushrooms he ate made him sick but didn't kill him. The berries gave him diarrhea that left him weak and shaking. The bark provided no nutrition but filled his stomach enough to quiet the constant gnawing hunger for a few hours.
It wasn't enough. It was never enough.
His thoughts began to fragment. Time lost meaning. He would wake in his hollow oak and not remember falling asleep. Would find himself at the edge of Ashfeld village with no memory of walking there, staring at the houses where people ate and lived and laughed, hating them with an intensity that felt like fire in his veins.
Once, he saw the old woman. She was in the market, shopping for vegetables, chatting with a farmer like she was normal. Like she hadn't set everything in motion or thrown a stone at his mother's dying body.
Victor watched her from behind a wall, and something in his expression must have been feral because a passing man took one look at him and hurried away, making a sign against evil.
The old woman never looked in his direction. But she smiled, small and satisfied, as if she knew he was there. As if she was pleased.
Victor stumbled back into the forest and tried to remember why he wanted to survive. What was the point? His mother was dead. He had no future. Even if he lived through winter, what then? A life of stealing and hiding, always on the run, always alone?
But he couldn't make himself give up. Some stubborn core of him refused to quit, refused to let Ashfeld win, refused to let his mother's death be meaningless.
If he died, the people who'd killed her got to be right. Got to have their comfortable narrative about purging evil and protecting their children.
But if he lived, he could prove them wrong, and that thought kept him going.
The fourth week brought cold rain that soaked through his inadequate clothing and left him shivering in his oak hollow, teeth chattering, body temperature dropping into dangerous ranges. He knew the signs of hypothermia. Knew that confusion and sleepiness came before death and knew that he should move, should exercise to generate heat or better yet, find better shelter.
Alas, he was too weak to care.
He lay in the dark, feeling his body shut down by degrees, and found himself thinking about physics. About thermodynamics. About the way heat transferred from warm objects to cold, always seeking equilibrium. His body was warm. The air was cold. The universe was trying to balance out, and he was on the wrong side of the equation.
It was almost funny.
He'd spent his whole life trying to understand how the world worked, trying to master the principles that governed reality. And in the end, those same principles were killing him. He was being murdered by entropy, by the second law of thermodynamics, by the simple fact that disorder always increased and life was just a temporary aberration in the universe's march toward heat death.
His mother had tried to teach him that healing wasn't just about efficiency. That it was about the whole person, about caring for more than just the measurable parts.
He'd thought she was being sentimental.
Now, dying alone in a tree, he wondered if she'd been right. If maybe there was something beyond the equations, something his brilliant mind couldn't quantify.
But if there was, he couldn't see it. Couldn't feel it. There was only cold and hunger and the slow shutdown of biological processes.
The rain stopped eventually but Victor didn't.
By the fifth week, he was hallucinating.
His mother appeared sometimes, sitting beside him in the oak hollow, telling him about herbs and healing. The old woman appeared too, offering him books filled with knowledge he could barely comprehend. The chief's son, the boy Elara had saved, stood at the edge of his vision and wept blood.
Victor knew they weren't real. His rational mind, still functioning despite everything, understood that his brain was failing, that starvation and dehydration were causing neurological damage. But knowing that didn't make the visions go away.
Sometimes he talked to them. Had long conversations with people who weren't there, about subjects that made no sense. His voice was a croak, barely human, and the words that came out were often gibberish.
But sometimes, in moments of clarity, he would remember himself and who he was, what had happened, why he was here.
In those moments, the hatred returned. Pure, cold and sustaining.
He tried to stand and found his legs wouldn't work properly. The muscles had atrophied, consumed by his starving body for fuel. He crawled instead, dragging himself out of the oak hollow, through the forest, toward the road.
He didn't have a plan. Didn't have the cognitive capacity left for planning. He simply moved, driven by instinct and spite.
The road, when he reached it, was empty. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees, beautiful, golden and indifferent to his suffering.
Victor collapsed at the roadside and lay there, unable to move further.
His heartbeat was slow and irregular. His breathing shallow. His body temperature had dropped below the point where shivering was possible. These were the end stages. He knew that. His medical knowledge, absorbed from books and his mother's teachings, told him exactly how long he had left.
Hours. Maybe less.
He stared up at the sky and tried to feel something about dying. Fear, regret, sadness, anything. But there was only emptiness, cold and vast.
His last coherent thought was that he'd failed. Failed to survive, failed to prove anything, failed to make his mother's death mean something.
Ashfeld had won after all.
His eyes closed to embrace death as time passed. He didn't really know how much. Could have been minutes, could have been hours. What he did know was that his consciousness was fragmenting and it was almost time.
Then voices. Distant at first, then closer.
"...think it's dead?"
"Looks dead. Skinny little thing. Probably been out here for weeks."
"Should we check?"
"Why? What are we going to do with a dead vagrant child?"
Victor tried to open his eyes, tried to speak, tried to signal that he was alive. But his body wouldn't respond. The connections between brain and muscle had deteriorated too far.
He felt hands on him. Checking for pulse, probably. He tried to focus on the sensation, to prove he was still present, still alive.
"Wait. I've got something. Barely there, but..."
"You're joking."
"No, look. See? Pulse. Weak as hell, but it's there."
"What do we do?"
There was a pause and Victor could feel someone staring at him, weighing options.
"We take him to the city. Hospital might be able to do something. If he dies on the way, we dump the body. But if he lives..." Another pause. "Could be worth something. Orphans always are, if you know who to sell to."
"Sell him? That's..."
"That's business. You want to just leave him here to die?"
"...no. No, I suppose not."
Hands lifting him. The world tilting, spinning. Pain everywhere his body was moved, bones grinding against each other, muscles tearing from the slightest pressure.
Then absolute darkness.
Victor Morningstar, eight years old, brilliant and broken, slipped away from consciousness with the sound of wagon wheels creaking in his ears and he never saw Ashfeld again.
In the village, life continued. The harvest came in. Winter preparations were made. People married and gave birth and died of natural causes. The square where Elara Morningstar had been stoned to death was used for markets and celebrations, and no one spoke of what had happened there.
The chief's son grew strong and healthy, and his parents thanked God for sparing him from the witch's curse.
The old woman disappeared one day, her cottage empty, her belongings gone. Some said she'd moved on. Others whispered darker theories.
No one made mention of the boy. The witch's son, who they believed had either died in the forest, as predicted, or moved far away. Either way, the problem was solved.
They were wrong about that too.
But they wouldn't know for a very long time.
And by then... meh.