All good things come to an end…

When I returned from the hunt, the forest seemed strangely quiet. The blood of the pantheress was still beneath my nails, her pelt secured with the rest of my kill, but there was no fire burning in the cave and no familiar figure waiting beside it. I stopped at the mouth of the cave, studying the ground before me, already knowing what I would find before I stepped inside. Scar was gone. His things were gone. Even the sleen pup was gone.

For a long moment I simply stood there, staring at the empty sleeping shelf and the cold remains of the fire. I did not cry. I had shed enough tears in that cave to fill the creek below the waterfall. Instead, I set down my weapons and examined the ground outside, searching for whatever trace he might have left behind. There were tracks, faint but readable to one who knew the forest well. I followed them through the trees until they brought me to the babbling creek, where water and stone had erased everything beyond it. I searched both banks, moving upstream and then down, crouching to examine mud and broken grasses, but the forest offered me nothing more.

Eventually I turned back. There was nowhere for me to go. Etna’s camp was no longer mine. I had left that life behind long before I ever walked into Scar’s cave, and I knew better than to pretend I could simply return as though nothing had changed. Whatever I had become since leaving the Panther Girls, I could not become the woman I had once been again. The thought should have frightened me. Instead, standing alone beneath the trees with the forest stretching in every direction, it felt strangely simple.

Then I remembered the wagon.

I returned to it without hesitation and began sorting through what remained. I took only what I could use and what I could store, refusing to let grief make me careless. Food, useful tools, supplies, anything that would serve me through the coming winter went into my pack. I stripped the wagon of anything practical that could help me survive, and when I came to the wagon covering, I knew exactly what I would do with it. It would not remain with the wagon. I would take it back to the cave and use it to cover the entrance, keeping the worst of the winter wind and cold from reaching the place where I would now sleep.

The rest was different. I stood beside the wagon for a long time, looking at the things that had accumulated around a life I had once believed might continue. Things that carried his touch. Things chosen because of him, made for me because of him, reminders of days that had somehow become both precious and painful. I did not need them. More importantly, I did not want them following me into whatever came next. One by one, I placed them inside the wagon.

I kept only two picture books. One had belonged to my grandmother, and no man, no place, and no ending could take that from me. The other was the book Scar had made for me, and although it belonged to a chapter I was closing, the memories within its pages belonged to me now. I kept the oilskin winter gear he had made for me as well. That was not sentiment. It was practical, and winter did not care where something had come from. If it kept me alive, I would use it.

Everything else went into the wagon. When I was finished, I stood looking at it and felt something inside me settle. There was no need to burn it. No need to smash anything. No need to make a spectacle of leaving. I had simply separated what was mine from what was not, and what remained with me was enough.

I hitched the bosk to the wagon and started toward the checkpoint. The journey was quiet. The traders and hunters who used the checkpoint knew it as a place where goods changed hands, where hides, meat, tools, weapons, and supplies passed from one traveler to another. When I arrived, I brought the wagon to the place where such things were left, but I did not offer it for trade. I unhitched the bosk taking it to the pen, nodding at the one older Trader I saw before I went back and stood beside the wagon for a final moment, knowing that almost everything that reminded me of Scar remained inside it. I silently said thank you for the lessons and a final farewell, then walked away.

I left the wagon there without asking for coin, goods, or favor in return. Let someone else decide what its contents were worth. I had no use for their value. I only needed the freedom of walking away without carrying the past upon my back. Then I turned toward the forest.

The walk back to the cave felt different from the one I had made that morning. There was no wagon behind me, no bosk pulling against the traces, no burden except what I had chosen to carry. By the time the cave came into view, the light was already beginning to fade between the trees.

I entered alone. I brought in the things I had kept and laid them where they would be useful. The picture books were placed carefully in a dry place. The winter gear was folded nearby. I hung my weapons within easy reach, arranged my supplies, and began preparing the cave as though I had always intended to live there alone.

There would be work to do. Wood to gather. Meat to preserve. Tallow to render. The cave entrance would need covering before the true cold came. Traps would need setting, trails learned, water watched, and food secured. The forest had never promised me an easy life, but it had always offered me one that was honest.

I built the fire, then sat before it and listened to the familiar sounds of the cave around me. For the first time since I had entered that place, every decision before me belonged entirely to me. I had lost Scar. I had lost the life I thought I might have beside him. But I had not lost myself, and tomorrow I would begin again.