Patrick II lay in his bed, his heart beating as if to keep up with a drummer-monk in a frenzy.
His father promised they would go hunting tomorrow.
Oh, it would be wonderful, he knew already. He was already eight years old, a bit late for a first hunt, but his old father the Duke did not let him until now.  His room overlooked the keep's east entrance, where the hunters came in every other week with fresh carcasses slung over their shoulders. They looked magnificent to him, grim and serious and bloodied, wearing leather, their scout-boys skipping along carrying the massive boar spears, the complex crossbows, the wicked javelins. Oh, how he longed to be among them!
 
He looked about his darkened room, a pleasant feeling of elation coursing through him. Tomorrow he will be a hunter, and he will try mighty well to be grim and serious, although he could never be sure if he could manage that. Hunting, in his mind, was no different than the games he played with the squires - trying to get at rabbits with slingshots, occasionally even scoring a hit and making them squeal. He was still only vaguely familiar with the concept of death.
 
His heart rate slowed down, and he felt pleasant sleepiness take hold. He closed his eyes, and was whisked away into a dream world - he knew then that he was flying, a soaring falcon overlooking a massive forest, and his sharp eye spotted below a ball of fur, prey running along between the evergreens, and he let out a mighty cry and dived, dived ever so fiercely, ready to capture the rabbit and take it away -
 
He woke with a start, staring into the darkened ceiling of his bedroom. He tried to get up and found himself struggling against leather straps that tied his hands to the bed.
"Now now," a voice said somewhere in the room, and he strained to look for it in the darkness, terror preventing him from crying out.
"Don't you worry, you won't remember a thing."
Patrick then felt a hand touch his calf, and then something cold pierced him there - he tried to yell in pain, but could only let out a feeble moan as he felt something strange run through his veins - spreading from the wound further into his body, a feeling of numbness taking over. Soon enough his eyelids felt very, very heavy again, and he let sleep take hold of him once more.
 
 
 
Patrick walked silently by his father and his squire, as the two conversed merrily. It was a crystal clear summer day, and the forest was positively buzzing with life. Insects crawled around the forest floor busily, flowers opened beautifully and stretched out towards the sun, and - as the squire pointed out to the king with a wink - a very certain boar was unwittingly about to become pork. The hounds stalked before them, sniffing about, and neither of the men seemed to pay any mind to Patrick, carrying the spare spear, who looked a few shades more pale than yesterday.
 
Suddenly, one of the hounds gave an excited bark, and darted off on a trail. The others quickly followed suit, and the men after them. Patrick tried to keep up with father and the squire, both excited as schoolyard boys, but he soon found himself separated from them, in a part of the forest he did not know. He heard a dog bark somewhere in the distance, but the sound echoed all around the forest and was hard to pinpoint. He scratched his head, and sat down on a tree stump, absent-mindedly dropping the spear. They will soon realize he was lost, he thought, and would surely look for him.
 
He looked around him, felt with his hands the ancient bark of the stump, and then looked up. The sun shone directly on him, and it was such a comfortable sort of heat he felt tempted to sleep. He contemplated this for a short while, before he heard a pig-like grunt to his left. He looked, and saw a great grey boar staring directly at him. The boy stared back, quite amazed, as the boar made another grunt, and took a step towards him. The boy noticed he had two big tusks jutting from his mouth, and to his unease noticed a bit of blood on one of them. He tried to get off the tree stump gently, but landed directly on a twig which broke under his feet. The boar made a cry of alarm and before the boy could attempt to back away, was already charging towards him.
 
Patrick felt paralyzed, with a familiar need to cry, and he forgot all about the boar spear - but as the boar closed in the last few meters a strange feeling took over him - and he then rolled to the side, evading the boar's charge, and before the boar could turn the boy was already upon him. Saliva ran through Patrick's teeth and he bit deep into the boar's back, as if his saliva dissolved the thick hide, and with murderous rage he was removing and spitting out chunks of flesh. The boar squealed in pain and tried to shake him off, but the boy's fingernails stuck out like a cat's, and he pierced the boar's sides with them, determined to stay in place. He bit into the beast's back again and again, with a predatory frenzy, until the boar cried out one last time, and started to swagger in its attempts to shake the boy off. Blood spurted freely from its numerous wounds, and finally it collapsed sideways, Patrick leaping off nimbly. Patrick then sat down right next to the great carcass, in the blood-spattered grass, and waited patiently.
 
 
 
A few hours later, the Duke and his squire started to feel they were lost themselves. They realized Patrick was missing quite late into the chase, and now they were trying to double back to find him - but he was nowhere to be found, and as the Duke grimly mentioned, neither were the damn dogs.
The squire clapped his hands together, trying to appear cheerful.
"There now, surely this will be a bit of an adventure for your boy, wouldn't it be?"
But even he couldn't keep the act, and his smile soon turned into a grimace as well.
"Is it just me, or do you hear a whining?" asked the Duke.
It was far to the right of them.
"It must be one of the dogs!"
The men started running again, their fatigue forgotten, for even one of the dogs could surely lead them to Patrick and to the end of this miserable adventure. After a few minutes they found themselves in a forest clearing where they stopped, panting heavily, and near its edge they saw one of the hounds - it was lying on its side, gored terribly by a boar tusk, and was whining its deathrattle.
 
"Oh," exclaimed the squire wearily, "I should put him out of his misery."
The Duke nodded in silence and the squire walked forth, unsheathing his hunting knife and kneeling next to the hound.
"There now old boy, it'll all be over -"
And before he could finish his sentence he heard a great cry of pain, and turned around in place to see a great boar charge and gore his Duke in the stomach. A small part of his mind told him something about that boar was wrong, so pale with so many wounds around its body, but before he could do anything a small figure leaped at him from behind, and was biting down on his neck, grabbing tight on his back, forcing him to fall to the ground - his vision and his thoughts turned to nothing, and he felt a numbness coursing through his body. A moment before he succumbed, he noted the smell of corpses in his nostrils, and the feeling of a rot setting in within him.