Breath of the Hunted

I used to be a hunter; now I’m being hunted. Perhaps it is the way of all things: when the predator becomes the prey, the hand that grips the demon dagger will one day feel its bite. I thought myself righteous, moving through the shadows with silver bullets and borrowed prayers. But righteousness is only a veil, and beneath it I was nothing more than hunger in a human form. Every creature I struck down stared back with eyes I refused to meet. Now I run, and in the silence between footsteps, I finally understand: the fear I once delivered has come home.

And yet, there is a strange kind of mercy in this reversal. To feel the breath of the hunt on my neck is to carry the weight of every soul I silenced. Their faces rise in the dark – not with vengeance, but with the terrible patience of the wronged. They do not need to chase me – I carry them already. The hunt is not claws or teeth; it is memory, relentless and unyielding.

I move through abandoned streets, through empty houses as though they are corridors of a confession I never wanted to make. Every shadow twists into the shape of a question I cannot answer. Was it fear that made me aim true, or anger? Justice, or the thrill of power dressed in righteousness? The line between monster and hunter has thinned with every step, and now I see it for what it is: a ribbon fraying at the edges, impossible to hold together.

The night hums with voices I once silenced. I hear them in the rustling leaves, in the distant howl, in the echo of my own heartbeat. They are not angry; they are patient. They are inevitable. And I, who once walked through the darkness believing I was its master, know now that darkness has always walked through me.

Perhaps this is the lesson hunters never learn until it is too late: that power is borrowed, and every debt must be repaid. Perhaps I am learning it now, step by cautious step, as the hunt that was once mine slips through my fingers. I am a shadow of the shadows I once chased.

And so I run. Not for survival, not for escape, but to witness the truth I refused to see: that in the end, every hunter is hunted, every act returns upon itself, and fear — the fear I once wielded — is not a punishment, but a mirror.

I stop sometimes, just long enough to breathe, to feel the night press against my back, to understand that I am not alone. That the world has always been balanced this way. The hunter falls. The prey rises. The cycle continues – unbroken, unyielding, inevitable.

I used to be a hunter. Now I am being hunted. And perhaps, at last, that is enough.