Here is the truth the sagas forget:

The boy had no net, no bow, no brothers at his back. He had one spear.

In his dreams, the world was painted in ochre and deep twilight blue. The wind smelled of wet flint and blood. He was not a king, not a scholar, not a builder of walls. He was a runner, a tracker, a thing of hunger and terror. In his right hand, he gripped the —a shaft of fire-hardened ash tipped with a shard of obsidian, sharp as a serpent’s promise. In his throat, he felt the fang —not his own, but the ghost of the wolf’s, the saber’s, the serpent’s that had tasted his ancestors and failed to swallow.