50th of Winter, 517 AV
The start of the days had been weird lately. Carus had managed to keep his tent location away from Grisham so far, but he didn’t know how long it would last. Even so he usually just had an hour or so in the morning before Grisham managed to find him and then just followed him around all day. That the man was crazy was quite obvious, and it was exhausting to be around. There wasn’t too much that Carus had manage to get out of him, but he had gotten to know a few things. He now knew his name, and he knew that for some reason, Grisham thought Carus was his beloved wife. What had actually happened to his wife, Carus had no idea. But it was getting quite frustrating to have him around.
At the same time he didn’t know quite how to get rid of him, and even though he had some great thoughts about silently stabbing him to death, he just couldn’t get himself to do it. The man might be a real pain in the ass, but even so, he had saved Carus life twice now. He couldn’t really think of a good way to thank the man either, so for now he’d just have to go along with his life and have Grisham follow him around. Hopefully he would realize sooner or later that he Carus wasn’t Espalia - another thing he had managed to pick up from Grisham - and he would leave him alone.
Today however, he didn’t feel like having to go through all of that. He wanted a day for himself, not one where Grisham was at his heels all day. So when he took his first steps out of his tent that morning, he took them out towards the wilderness behind tent city, instead of the direction towards town. He was still in sorrow over the loss of Umbra, and he needed some time to think. And hunting had always been the way to go to get his mind of things in his youth. Granted he had alwaysed hunted with a bow before, but he was becoming better at using his knife and he figured lying in wait he should probably manage to get an animal or two. He would have to be careful though, he didn’t want to run into something large again, he thought to himself, his leg still stinging with each step from the wolfbite on his leg.
He reached the edge of some woods just a short walk away from tent city, and decided he’d try his luck in there. He navigated his way through the trees, looking for a good spot to lie in wait for some sort of animal. It wasn’t the kind of hunting he was used too, but they had done it this way once or twice in his youth as well. He soon managed to find a place, where there where a large patch of bushes next to a bit of a clearing that he could easily see from the bushes. So he crawled down on his stomach, lying in wait with his knife ready, looking out at the clearing.
As he laid there for quite awhile, his mind started to go over the past few days. It had been a crazy time. He could still hear the sound of Umbra’s whining as she died. He could still feel his knife go through the stomach of the man he had killed to protect her, and still had failed. He knew he would have been killed if he hadn’t manage to kill him, but it was still the first human he had killed, he found he had nightmares about that day every night since. He wondered to himself how long these feelings would go on.
As he had been sitting there for too long, he almost missed the small animal that had jumped out into the clearing. As his mind went back to the present he scanned the area with his eyes, looking for prey, as he finally spotted the rabbit. It wasn’t alerted, as Carus had been laying there quietly waiting. It was eating on something on the ground, focused on its meal. It was rather close to the bushes, and Carus thought he had a chance to get to it before it had a chance to run away if he could manage to quietly get to his feet and lunge, knife first towards the animal.
