The months that followed changed Reige in ways he could not fully understand.
Now that he had language, the silence that had once filled his mind was gone. Questions rose constantly. Every time Arnis mentioned something new, Reige immediately wanted to know more about it.
"What is a city?"
"Why do people live together?"
"What is war?"
"What is a king?"
Sometimes Arnis answered patiently. Other times he simply smiled and said that Reige would understand one day.
The old man mostly taught him simple things what he called common sense. How people lived. Why they wore clothes. Why they built houses. Why they protected land.
But many of the explanations felt distant to Reige.
He had no memories of such things. No experiences that connected him to these ideas. When Arnis spoke about families, villages, or markets, they sounded like stories about another world.
Still, Reige listened carefully.
Even if he could not relate to the knowledge, he absorbed every word with the same intense focus he had once used to study animals or hunt for food.
Days turned into weeks.
Weeks slowly became months.
They remained near the lake, living mostly inside the cave on the small island. Arnis would often leave for short periods and return later with food or strange objects, but he never explained where he went.
Reige never asked.
His curiosity had shifted elsewhere.
One evening, the sky darkened unusually early. Thick clouds gathered over the forest, swallowing the last light of the setting sun. A powerful wind rolled across the lake, sending waves crashing violently against the shore.
Soon the storm arrived.
Thunder echoed across the valley as rain began pouring down in heavy sheets.
Arnis watched the storm quietly for a while before turning to Reige.
"Come," he said.
They moved deeper into the cave than they had ever gone before.
The tunnel twisted inward through damp stone passages until the faint light from the entrance disappeared completely. The air grew colder as they walked further down.
Finally, the tunnel opened into a large chamber.
The walls of the chamber were covered in enormous paintings.
Reige stopped walking.
Each painting stretched across an entire section of the cave wall, so large that they nearly surrounded the chamber completely.
Three paintings.
But something about them was strange.
Two of them were clear and detailed, their colors still visible even in the dim darkness of the cave.
The third painting, however, was different.
Its surface was faded, almost erased by time. Only faint shapes remained, barely visible against the stone.
Reige stared at them silently.
He walked closer to the two clearer paintings first.
They were filled with scenes he recognized.
Mountains.
Forests.
Animals.
Humans.
Some figures wore clothing similar to what Arnis wore. Others held strange objects weapons, tools, banners.
Many of the things in the paintings matched the words Arnis had taught him over the past months.
Because of that, Reige did not think too deeply about them.
To him they were simply images of the things Arnis had described.
But then Arnis raised his hand.
Without any flint or torch, a small flame appeared above his palm.
Fire.
The light expanded slowly, illuminating the entire chamber with a warm glow.
Reige froze.
This was the first time he had seen something that did not fit within the explanations Arnis had given him. Fire appearing from a hand had never been part of the simple logic or knowledge he had learned.
Questions rushed into his mind immediately.
How?
Why?
What was this?
But the words never left his mouth.
Because at that exact moment, something else caught his attention.
Behind Arnis, the firelight revealed the first painting completely.
Reige's eyes locked onto it.
The scene covering the wall was vast and chaotic.
A battlefield.
Countless figures clashed across a sea of red land. Massive creatures towered over the soldiers elephants, horses, and dragons. The sky itself seemed to burn above them as enormous shadows fought among the clouds.
Reige's body slowly stiffened.
Somewhere deep in his memory, something stirred.
A place filled with blood.
A land where nothing moved.
Where he had once walked alone.
The painting looked eerily familiar.
And for the first time since leaving that place, fragments of something long buried began to rise within his mind.