Weight

Recap:

Dick was left gasping in the dirt, realizing that in a world without an audience, his 'velocity' was nothing more than noise. Thrall walked away, leaving the broken thing behind, not realizing he had just encountered a parasite that would soon consume his entire tribe.

Act I: Rejection

The forest did not care about the 'Smooth-Thing,' and neither did Thrall. After dropping the vibrant-skinned noise in the mud, Thrall simply turned away. The hunt was a jealous master; it demanded a mind stripped of distractions.

He spent the next several hours in a slow, rhythmic pursuit. The sun moved across the sky with a heavy, honest pace that mirrored Thrall’s own. He tracked a stag through the dense undergrowth, his breath steady, his movements a part of the wind. When the kill finally came, it was quiet and certain—like the weight of his spear.

By the time Thrall returned to the cave, the sky had bruised into a deep purple. He carried the stag across his shoulders, its warmth a familiar, grounding pressure against his spine.

But as he approached the entrance, the silence he expected was gone.

A rhythmic, slapping sound echoed against the stone walls, punctuated by high, sharp bursts of the Smooth-Thing’s voice. Thrall stepped into the light of the fire and stopped.

Dick was there, standing in the center of the communal space. He was moving in frantic, repetitive jerks—dropping to the ground, pushing up, and leaping into the air. His skin was slick with a thin, greasy sweat, and his white teeth flashed in the firelight.

The tribe was gathered in a semi-circle, their usual tasks abandoned. The women weren't scraping hides; the men weren't knapping flint. They sat with their mouths slightly open, watching the 'velocity' of the intruder with a vacant, hypnotic intensity.

Thrall felt a sharp prickle of annoyance—a low, buzzing heat behind his eyes. To him, the Smooth-Thing was a blemish, a waste of calories that signaled nothing but danger. He dropped the stag with a heavy thud that should have commanded the room.

No one looked up.

The Patriarch sat nearby, his eyes tracking Dick's movements with a look of tired curiosity. Thrall moved to the back of the cave, his jaw tight. He kept to himself, butchering the stag with aggressive, precise strokes of his hand-axe. Every time the Smooth-Thing let out a triumphant shout or a clap, Thrall’s grip on the stone tightened.

He was home, but for the first time, he felt like a guest who had stayed too long.

Act II: Drift

The back of the cave had always been Thrall’s sanctuary, a place where the history of the hunt was etched into the very bones of the earth. He took a piece of charred wood, the carbon staining his calloused fingers, and began to work.

He drew the bison. It was a manual of survival: the curve of the hump, the vulnerable pocket behind the shoulder, the specific angle of the spear’s entry. Each stroke was a heavy, honest record of how to stay alive.

But when he returned the next day, the gravity of the wall had been vandalized.

A group of younger males—men who should have been out scouting the migration—were huddled by his drawings. They weren't studying the kill-points. They were using wet clay and crushed berries to 'update' the stone. They had smeared over the bison's vitals, replacing the map of the hunt with a crude, vibrant depiction of the Smooth-Thing.

They had painted Dick’s puffed-up chest, his jagged beard, and the strange, triangular shape of his 'optimized' torso. They had even tried to replicate the 'Electric Cobalt' of his shirt with blue mud. To Thrall, it was a desecration. They had turned a manual for survival into a mural of performance.

Thrall’s chest tightened. He looked at the boys, but they didn't flinch. They didn't even look at him. They were too busy admiring the 'moment' they had captured on the wall.

The drift became a chasm during the next meal.

Thrall sat by his kill, his legs crossed, the stag’s haunch before him. It was the prize of his labor, the currency of a hunter. When the Smooth-Thing approached, his hand reaching out with a casual, unearned entitlement, Thrall didn't hesitate.

He didn't snarl. He simply moved. His hand, thick and scarred, clamped around Dick’s wrist like a vise, pinning the soft limb to the dirt.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Thrall expected the tribe to roar in approval, to see the intruder’s hand stayed by the provider. Instead, he felt the weight of their judgment. The tribe turned as a single organism—a hive mind of confused dissent. They didn't see a hunter protecting his kill; they saw a disruption of the 'vibe.'

The Patriarch looked away, his silence a heavy, disappointing blanket.

They began to move, their bodies shifting away from Thrall in a slow, synchronized retreat. They didn't fight him; they simply withdrew their attention. They formed a new circle ten paces away, huddled around the Smooth-Thing, sharing the meager scraps of gathered roots and berries, leaving Thrall alone with his mountain of meat.

He took a bite of the stag. It was rich and warm, but as he watched the tribe mimic the Smooth-Thing’s hand gestures in the distance, the food felt like ash in his mouth. He was the only one eating, yet he was the only one who felt the hunger of being forgotten.

Act III: Weight of the Spear

The cave had become a theater of ghosts. Thrall stood in the shadows of the rear gallery, watching the tribe's final surrender.

He looked at the walls one last time. His drawings of the bison—the maps of bone and blood—were almost entirely obscured by the chaotic, colorful smears of the 'New Way.' The youth were no longer honing their senses and skill. They stood with their chests out and stomachs in, glancing at each other with a desperate, hollow need for approval that the earth would never give them.

Thrall realized then that he wasn't just losing his family; he was watching the decline of the human animal. The "Smooth-Thing" had brought a luxury more lethal than a drought: the belief that looking like a hunter was the same as being one.

He looked at the spears leaning against the cave wall. They were dusty. The flint tips were chipped and unsharpened. The younger men didn't reach for them anymore.

Thrall walked to the rack and picked up his own spear.

It felt immense, yet it was the weight of the truth.

He didn't make a speech. He didn't look for a 'moment' to capture. He simply turned toward the mouth of the cave.

As he crossed the threshold, he felt the air change. Outside, the world was still vast, cold, and brutally honest. It was a place where 'velocity' meant the speed of a predator's strike, not the rhythm of a clap.

He stepped into the tall grass, his feet finding the familiar, uneven texture of the real world. He did not look back at the entrance. He didn't need to. He could already feel the distance growing.

He was a hunter walking into a world that was becoming a wilderness again, carrying the only thing left that had any gravity.

Epilogue:

At the edge of the treeline, where the shadows of the forest loomed taller than the hills, Thrall stopped. He couldn't help himself. He turned his head just enough to steal one last peek at the cave's mouth.

In the distance, the campfire was a flickering, neglected orange eye. It was dying. No one was gathering wood. No one was watching the perimeter. They were all sat passively around the glow, their bodies huddled close to the 'Smooth-Thing.'

Thrall looked at his spear, then back at the fading light. A question tugged at his mind, heavy and sharp: What else could he have done?

He had shown them the meat. He had shown them the mud. He had shown them the maps. But you cannot feed someone who has forgotten how to swallow, and you cannot lead someone who has chosen to be an audience.

The first howl of a wolf echoed from the ridge—a real sound, a heavy sound. The tribe didn't react. They didn't reach for their weapons. They just shifted closer to the dying fire, looking for a 'moment' to save them from the dark.

Thrall turned his back for the final time. He adjusted the weight of the spear on his shoulder and walked into the silence of the trees.

The future was getting loud, but Thrall was finally back in the quiet.