It's amazing, really, how easily bodies come to break. It's a motherfucking miracle, all the feeling, sound, and color what can be pulled of a corpse. The world around them both is red, red, red with tiny spots of indigo. It's crunching, cracking. It's sticky and wet, the blood hotter than any troll he's ever taken apart.

He observes the shine of that tiny little string, marvelling at how something can be caught in a trap so small, and still so deadly. Little things like, I pity you and I'll come back and It'll be okay. Sweet simple lies. He would bet there were some this one got told.

But suffocating as like this, the flail what calls all of drowning, there ain't hardly no time to think on such things. He knows this. Small mercies among the cruel.

He holds each end of the bow steady. He can pin when the struggle for breath finally makes cease. He can know when the mind is shutting down slow, still on the edge of deciding how deep in the fall will go. The body starts all going limp. He drops the bow before it's over, both pieces falling to either side.

His body slumps, shoulders hanging forward. At last he reaches and rips out the arrow caught in his chest. More indigo spills, his breath rasps all the more, but he ain't focused on neither. Unconsciousness ain't mean he's dead. It don't mean things is over. Give a moment and this homie could wake all readied. He knows these things.

The arrow is stabbed into the heart. He kneels over clint, red eyes watching and waiting, looking to see if them eyes open and fade. He touches a bloodied hand to feel the heart and see if it's stopped. Quiet. So, so, so quiet.

But it ain't never over until the head's come off.