The tribe is sleeping and the cold thing in my hand is awake.
It is not fire, but it glows like the last coal, blue and dead, warming nothing. I hold it close to my face in the dark den. My thumb moves down, down, like I am scraping fat from a hide, but there is no hide, and there is no end to the hide.
Inside the small bright window, other humans. Far ones. One shows teeth. One shows a child. One shows a mountain that is burning. One shows a great water rising to swallow a shore I will never walk. Threat after threat after threat, and I cannot smell them, cannot run from them, cannot throw a stone.
I only see them. I feel my chest tighten the way it does before the hunt, my breath goes fast, my body says danger, danger, ready your legs. And I do nothing. I lie still. I scrape the hide.
A good hunter watches the dark for what moves. But this dark shows me every danger in the world at once, dangers from lands past the far ridge, dangers already finished, dangers not yet born. My body cannot tell them from the beast at the mouth of the cave. So it stays awake. It guards against all of it. It guards against nothing it can touch.
The real dark, the true night outside, holds only wind and sleeping tribe. That dark would let me rest.
This glowing coal is a poison that tastes like watching. I keep drinking. I cannot put it down.
This is a trap that catches the hunter and calls it rest.