The skinning was efficient and without ceremony.
The dark shadow leopard's colossal frame submitted to the process with the specific, patient quality of something that has no further opinions about what happens to it — the blade moving through the hide with the particular, practiced ease of advanced sword mastery applied to a task that did not require advanced sword mastery but was improved by it anyway, the edge finding the correct lines with the intuitive, effortless quality of a hand that has stopped thinking about cutting and simply cuts.
The fire came next — small, deliberate, the specific size of something that has been calibrated for function rather than comfort, built to cook rather than to announce. The meat went over it with the dense, rich smell of a second-sequence creature's star-energy-saturated flesh beginning the process of becoming something the body could absorb rather than simply contain.
He ate.
