Refirtilization: Zen, part one.

Let's start this with something simple: Zenny-boy.

Poor, poor bastard. For some perverse reason or another, he was given the longest name I've ever used. Rationally speaking, there should never be more than four names in any name. First Name, "Title", Middle Name, Last Name. As a general rule, a middle name is never displayed if a title is.

And yet Zen, the poor child, was given five names.

Other than name adjustments, very little changed in his core construction, or at least in his intended core construction.

Enjoy? Or what have you.

- - -

Zendru Silverfield Hagen was born in a quaint medium-sized city. It was not so large as to be a capital, yet it was a far cry from being a small town. Merchant business was exceptional there, and it was so prosperous that there was, in fact, very little impoverished families to be found. There was a homeless person here or there, a beggar now and again, and one or two families that made bad business moves and hit hard times, but they were surprisingly rare.

Zendru was the natural byproduct of Hadbud Hagen and Cylvia Silverfield. There was nothing particularly interesting about the family. Zen's mother died due to an infection caused by a post-conception complication five months after he was born, but Hadbud never held a grudge against the lad, and it was never brought up, so there was nothing that really caused problems for the small family of two.

Hadbud was a blacksmith, and an exceptional one at that. Born in a world where the abnormally strong, gifted, or otherwise powerful were almost equal in numbers to the average person, weapons had become quite the common commodity, and thus the demand for proper weaponsmiths were high. He charged irrationally large sums for his work, but was revered as being among the best in the region, and so not only got away with it, but had issues with keeping up with demand despite his bank-breaking prices.

Zen was, in his youth, a most unremarkable boy. In fact, he was so unremarkable that that in itself could be said to be remarkable. He lacked any sense of curiosity; he never once felt compelled to ask why he did not have a mother. Outside of studying how to read, write, and the various books his father forced him to go through - his father did what he could to try and make the boy educated - he had no profound interest in anything outside his town walls. Once he turned five, he developed just enough interest in what was going on around him to begin watching his father's smithing, and when he turned eight, he began helping his father as he could. Quiet and lacking mischievous tendencies, Hadbud was envied by many for such a well mannered child. The man thought it was extremely unhealthy, but since it was Zen's own choice, he let it be. It wasn't as if it was causing any problems.

His unspoken nature made it all that much more bewildering for Hadbud when, on the morning of Zen's eleventh birthday, he found that his son and a small collection of knives and two of his most recently completed swords were no where to be found. He had slid out so casually, calmly, and quietly, that no one in town was ever able to tell the startled farther where he had gone. So used to the boy being silent and harmless, even those who would have been awake at night to see him didn't pay him enough attention to remember that they had saw him in the first place.

Zen seemed to have obtained all of his youthful impulses in one sudden gush a week prior to his birthday, and he had suppressed it just long enough to obtain supplies for a grand adventure. What he was going to do, or where he was going to go wasn't important; the important part was that he went on a grand adventure. It came with no rationality, but he was going to follow it. Having spent nearly three years helping to forge swords, his upper body strength from the heavy use of a heavy hammer gave him enough body strength and a good, steady hand to be able to use a sword. Doing anything fancy was beyond him, but surely, he figured, he'd manage well enough.

For having never had any training for anything outside of the small city he had lived in, he was quick to learn. After two days of failed hunting, he realized that using his swords to hunt was silly, and after another day of failure, he learned the trick to sneaking up behind and killing small fury animals. He quickly figured out how to skin the small rabbit he had caught, and attempted to eat it. He was quiet oblivious as to how to make fire, and found that eating raw red meat was a genuine waste of effort. While he tinkered and experimented with how to make fire - he knew sparks were needed, but couldn't figure out anything beyond that - he began to try fishing.

Naturally still and attentive to his surroundings, it took him all of three hours to learn how to catch a fish with his bare hands. He was quite pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he went about catching six more. Having only eaten berries and nuts for three or four days, he had no qualms eating fish raw, and for a hungry eleven year old, they were delicious. Sadly, he could only eat four of the fish before feeling stuffed, so three of them died needlessly. Okay, not really; a passing fox ate them shortly after Zen moved on, but they still could have avoided death that day if Zen's eyes weren't bigger than his stomach.

It took him almost two weeks, but he eventually figured out the trick to creating fire, and soon enjoyed small prey and cooked fish - though he kind of liked them raw better, after having gotten used to it. Every once in a while, he'd stumble along a town where he spent a night at - he had obtained quite a plentiful allowance from his father after he started helping with the smithing work - but the direction he had headed from his home city lead farther and farther into a mountainous wild area, so the villages were scarce.

It was shortly after the beginning of the second lunar cycle since he left home that he was first attacked by bandits, and he fared well enough. He had gotten a large gash on his arm trying to dodge a blow at one point, but managed to take down the small group of four bandits using nothing more than basic dodge and hit tactics. Somewhat odd for a child who grew up well off, he didn't really think it was strange to kill people who attacked him, so never lost a bat of sleep over it. This was where he began to experimenting with cursing, however. Muttering to himself, trying out foul words the adults had used on the streets and on the roads he walked on. After all, the gash on his arm hurt like hell, and covering up the wound had cost him the arm of his favorite shirt.

While he did not become rattled by murder, he was still shaken by the event. Having been an all too good lad as a youth, he never had any fighting experience. He won with little more than raw instinct, the natural nimbleness of an eleven year old, toned strength from smithing - though being an eleven year old's body, that's somewhat limited - and exceptional weapons. He had not a lick of fighting experience to his name, and had never once made an enemy that had wanted to even hurt him badly. Thus, the thought that there had been people who had wanted to kill him - even if only for his belongings - disturbed him considerably. From then on, his traveling pace slowed, and his alertness magnified to near paranoia at the slightest sound. He had stopped using roads, and instead memorized to bends of the roads, then followed them deeper within the forests.

That paranoid attentiveness made it possible for him to notice a small red bird flailing on the ground as he was moving. On it's back was a small leather holder, where it held a tiny piece of paper. When he saw this, Zen was filled with enough curiosity to go and steal it. It was a dementedly comical fight, to see Zen wrestle against the bird, who managed to bend it's neck enough to peck at the boy's fingers the instant he noticed what the boy was up to. Zen actually ended up giving up after a while, after almost every one of his fingers were pecked bloody.

After resting - and cursing - next to the bird, who stopped moving when Zen gave it a rest, Zen helped the bird on a whim. It had been attacked by a predatory animal of some kind, as it was severely cut. It took almost half an hour to get the cardinal to realize that he wasn't trying to steal the paper inside it's holder again, and Zen almost gave up, but eventually, it allowed itself to be picked up by the lad and led to a small stream, where he washed out it's cuts. He couldn't tell if it's wings were broken, so just made it a bed of one of his three shirts, and decided to stop early.

Of course, it was actually a dastardly plan to see the paper, and after he was sure the bird was sleeping, he succeeded in taking the paper out without waking the exhausted feathered creature. It was actually a bigger paper than he had expected, and he did a double take when he looked at the leather pouch and the paper. He couldn't rationally justify it being able to fit in there. On the paper was either a language he had never even heard of, or a coded message. Either way, he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

He stared at it for a long time, and a mischievous thought came into his mind. He had read, and memorized precisely, everything his farther told him to, and so his favorite line was ingraved in his brain. After staring at both the paper and the bird, he realized it more than likely fit quite well with the situation.

He walked away from the bird as to not be heard. He took out one of the knives he had brought, and very carefully and slowly carved words into a corner of the paper that had nothing written on it. It took too long to make ink, and the paper was thick enough to be able to do it. It had roughly twice the thickness of modern day construction paper.

Aquila non capit muscas.

After he was done, he folded the paper exactly as it had been before, and snuck it back into the bird's leather pouch. Smuggly satisfied with himself, he proceeded to sleep.

When he woke up in the morning, the bird was nowhere to be seen, outside of a single red feather laying on the shirt it had been sleeping on. Not even dried blood from it's wounds were on it. It was puzzling, but the absent of it made him remember to clean and re-do the wound on his arm. On inspection, however, he found that it was also healed. Taking it as an omen, he kept the red feather for good luck, and went about his way.

A little over a week went by without incident. By the time something else occurred, he was almost half way up the mountain he had been traveling toward, for no other reason than the idea of seeing the top of it compelled him.

One evening, as the sun was starting to set, the boy was once again attacked by bandits. There were seven instead of four, and they were far more skilled than the men he had killed some time ago. The only thing which led to Zen's victory was that he was far less cautious with his footing on the mountain than they were, allowing him to move around with greater freedom using youthful reflexes as his guide. He was, however, not nearly as lucky as the first encounter. While he killed them all as he had before, the fight ended with several severe wounds. Once the adrenaline wore our, the pain hit him full force, and that mixed with exhaustion caused him to pass out.

He woke up to the morning sun, and found next to him the cardinal he had helped a week ago, along with a crow that was irrationally tall; it was easily four feet tall from talon to the tip of it's skull. Zen was too exhausted to feel anything more than faint surpise for it, which was a shamed. He would have probably tried to catch and tame it there and then if he had been healthy.

It did nothing interesting, though so after a few minutes he sat up and inspected himself. He had kind of been hoping he had miraculously been cured of his wounds like his arm had, but no such luck. They were cleaner than he had been expecting, and they had stopped bleeding, but were still very much there. He also noticed quickly there-after that there was no sign of the men he had killed in the evening. This was also quite curious.

The crow left after Zen got to his feet, and dived into a cave above that was within eye shot, but the cardinal stayed around long enough to hint that it would be nice of Zen to follow. Confused, but having no real reason to object, he went along, stumbling a bit from dizziness from time to time.

The cave was long and tricky. There were parts of the cave that were so narrow he literally had to climb through using the tips of his fingers to cling to small ledges on the walls, some areas were literally traversed by jumping from one stalagmite to the other, and at other points the walls were so rough and sharp with tiny rock needles it was impossible to use them to guide himself around. After all, the cave, once in to a certain extent, was perpetually filled with a severe lack of light

There was an end to this passage, of course, and it lead to a grand stadium sized cavern. At the other edge of the cavern stood a short man - roughly 5'5" in height - who looked at Zen with gleaming curiosity.

"Why did you come in here?" asked the man with a restrained excitement.
"It was here," was Zen's plain, blunt response.
"Do you want to go farther?"
"I want to go to the next place."
"Where is the next place?"
"Wherever the cave ends."

Steady, dull responses came out of Zen's mouth after every consequential question. The man seemed more enticed after every response, despite the lack of anything interesting coming from the boy. He carried a small backpack filled of knives, spare clothes, and a water canteen. He was cut, scraped, and bruised, but didn't seem to give a damn. And he had such a genuine lack of fear as to suggest that the boy simply wasn't sure what fear truly was - which was indeed the case, having only recently encountered threats, and he hadn't really processed them yet.

"Are you the lad who's been cutting up the mountain thugs?" inquired the man after giving up on the questions regarding the boy's reason for being there.
"Are you the mountain thug boss?" countered Zen with a bit of curiosity.
"I am not."
"Then why ask about mountain thugs?"
"I do not know," snickered the short male, even more amused.
"Then neither do I."

After another pause and a staring contest which neither seemed willing to lose, the man turned his back and poked his fingers at the cavern walls behind him, where they can to melt, and made strange hissing noises that resonated within the cavern, sounding like the screams of enraged of peculiar monsters. On instinct, Zen grabbed for the bottom of his two swords, both which were holstered at his right hip.

The man glanced back at the boy again, and they once again stared at each other, until the older individual muttered, "Don't become a fly, now." This was followed by a short cackle, before the man almost skipped down the newly visible tunnel.

Perplexed and driven by his impulse to move forward, Zen followed.

- - -

By no means the end to anything, but I'm lazy, and this is long enough for now. It barely scrapped at a starting point, but this is a good a place to stop as any. Not really designed to be fun, or even easy to read since it's more of a putting-it-in-words-so-it's-set-in-stone project. No reason to be pretty or poetic. Shouldn't be painful to read, though.

Or maybe it is. Meh.

Edit: Did a quick skim. I literally found too many grammar issues to be bothered with fixing right now. Get over it.