Broken Chains

Every muscle, every bone, and every single joint of his body seemed to be out to kill him.

With every single step, his left foot gave way a little, and his left knee seemed to refuse to bend more than the barest minimum.

His lungs screamed at him that they had not enough space and that his body had not enough oxygen, but still, Puck needed to keep going; he couldn’t stop.

Puck’s only relief was the hooked and crooked cane, created out of one of the innumerable pieces of old wood enclosed in the eternal ice in a wood mine some hundreds of meters from Scarlet’s den.

Thinking about Scarlet’s den, Puck became thoughtful. Unlike the other Gremlins who liked to live in great caverns where the ceiling was nearly too high to see, Scarlet lived in a small cavern in a hidden part of the ice.

He knew, though, that that wasn’t because she liked enclosed places; in fact, it was the opposite. What she had told him about the surface, … No, Scarlet lived here because she couldn’t bear to return to the normal processes of the Gremlin village day in and day out.

It had been on the second day of the week Scarlet had given him for the first task that Puck went to fetch his cane. Truly, the part of the eternal ice where the old pieces of wood, a very valuable material to the Gremlins, had been enclosed wasn’t far from the den.

Only a few hundred feet. After getting up from bed alone, Puck had already nearly been ready to give up, but then then remembered all his dreams and his will to change hist destiny and he kept going. It had been a grueling day; for hours over hours, Puck had made his way towards his destination.

It had been only in the middle of the day and many shed tears later that he finally managed to reach a fitting log that could be extracted from the wall. But that had only been the start of the torture; it had taken him nearly the whole rest of the day to get the log out, and it was only many hours after that still, that Puck came home.

The log though, truly had helped tremendously; after acquiring it, the way back had been nearly as well as the way there, even though his body was in that much worse a state.

It wasn’t even that he bled or his wounds reopened, no, after months of recuperation, something like that didn’t happen anymore. Instead, it was only the very worst wounds like broken bones that truly still hurt. No, the most problematic were things that came from him not moving for what felt like eons.

Whether it was his muscles, joints, or his lung, everything seemed to have taken off duty and was unwilling to start working again.

When he had finally returned on that second day, Scarlet had still been awake, and even though she said she wouldn’t care for him anymore, she still had been ready for him with a great amount of soup and mushrooms.

It was now, another few days later, that Puck had finally felt it was time; he would go get his things. He would bring his body to his true limits and go all the way to the great cavern his old tribe of Gremlins resided in.

And yes, it was his old tribe. Even though the last days of getting his body back to shape had been the most grueling he had ever undergone, Puck had become clear of something. He would never go back. There was nothing in his old village that held any appeal to him anymore. At least nothing other than what he was going to fetch today.

It was already late by the standard Gremlin time, and Puck was still some way from the village, but he had mastered the greatest part of the way. Even though every part of his body had been pushed even farther than before, he would make it; he would be able to reach the Gremlin village.

Of course, there was no chance he would be able to push his body so far as to return all the way to Scarlet’s home, but he also wouldn’t need to. Over the last two days, he had gone and taken pelts, mushrooms, and all the other things he would need to survive the night to a cavern near the village where he prepared a spot for the night after getting his things.

He had thought about taking all the things with him on the same day he went to the village, but that would have been way harder, now, after he made the trip on one day, he knew he had made the right decision. Even with a place near the village where he would be able to sleep, the challenge still felt near insurmountable.

After offering up a great amount of willpower to move another few hundred meters forward, Puck decided it was time. He would give himself two hours to rest and recuperate; then he would sneak into the village and get his stuff back.

Scarlet was impressed. How was he able to hold on? The task of retrieving his things should have been one where he would fail miserably, clearly showing him the limits of his body.

But as she had watched over Puck from afar as he made his preparations and finally set out to solve his task, she saw another person than the one who had been lying in her bed for the past months.

Even though she knew just how grueling the last week must have been for him, he never asked for reprieve, and he never hesitated to push himself further.

Truly, she hadn't thought Puck would be capable of something like this. At least not at the start. She had thought that with enough training and some transformation, he would develop a new mentality. But something like that shouldn’t change in the span of a single week!

She had heard the story of his past, but hadn’t been all that taken aback. However, as she witnessed his drive to change himself over the past week, Scarlet started to think Puck either hadn’t told her the whole truth or had downplayed how bad his life had been until now.

As Scarlet watched from afar as Puck took a break after another few hours of grueling progress, she winced. Every movement seemed jerky and took ages. It took him a long time to find a good place to rest where he thought he wouldn’t fall asleep.

Of course, she thought he would fall asleep anyway, but perhaps he would surprise her again. And if not, she would wake him up in time with a thrown stone. He had earned at least that much.