Alcor was concentrating hard. Sweat rolled down his face from the heat and humidity of the summer sun. Arrow knocked and bow drawn, he released the string. A sharp twang resonated from the vibrating oak and broke the mid-afternoon silence. The arrow whizzed through the air and snapped on a stone. He had missed. The deer darted off into the woods.
Alcor turned on his heel and swore. How could he miss? He had tracked that buck for two days. Looking down, Alcor saw that his brother was on the ground silently holding in sobs of laughter.
“What’s so funny?” he asked his twin contemptuously.
“Just the fact you can’t kill a deer in two days and now you have to track that scrawny thing down again,” Mizar responded.
“It wasn’t scrawny!” Alcor could feel the tips of his ears heating and his face turning red.
“It was so. It only had two little spikes.”
“They’re called antlers.”
“Whatever. The point is that you couldn’t hit a deer if it was enlarged to size of a barn and had a target painted on it,” Mizar quickly retorted hastily in order to disguise his vocabulary error.
“I don’t know why father sends you with me,” Alcor sniveled in reply, now resorting to childish behavior. “You only get in my way. Besides, if you think you’re so amazing why don’t you give it a try.” Alcor shoved the bow into Mizar’s arms.
“I don’t need this idiotic machine and you know it,” Mizar said as he threw the bow to the ground. “Find me that deer and I will get it.”
*****
Two hours later they came to a small clearing illuminated by the dim twilight.  In it stood the spike buck from earlier that day, grazing on thick weed grass and basking in a sliver of sunlight that had managed to slip through the canopy and descend to the forest floor.
Alcor gave Mizar a skeptical look and turned away. So what if his brother had chopped a few logs magically. At least Alcor could do it manually, which took much more skill than saying a couple of stupid words. His brother would never be able to kill a deer by magic, he thought. They both knew that killing was beyond his twin’s skill; in fact, Mizar didn’t even know the word for ‘die’ or ‘kill’ in the Imanuli language.   
As Alcor thought this to himself, Mizar began to draw on his energy. He closed his eyes and started to break down the barrier that contained his magic power. Warmth surged through his mind. The feeling was familiar and welcome to him. He savored the sensation of the power flowing through his body and taking him over. Suddenly, his eyes shot open.
“Ornu,” Mizar said as he directed all of his thoughts on the deer’s hind legs. Suddenly the buck squealed and fell to the ground, kicking.
“What did you just do!?” Alcor half yelled, half asked his brother.
“I broke both its back legs,” Mizar stated matter-of-factly.
“It’s probably in a lot of pain!” Alcor hollered. The deer was by that time screaming. It spasmed and rolled on the ground as if trying to stand. Every time it did manage to get onto its front legs, it crumpled pitifully under its own weight.
“Probably,” said Mizar just as matter-of-factly as before. The pain he had just caused another living creature did not seem to affect him at all, and Alcor found that more than a little strange. “Now go kill it,” Mizar commanded, and followed up with “you should be able to hit it now at least.”
Alcor removed an arrow from his quiver, strung it on his bow, and stomped over to the shrieking beast. He drew back the string and released. The animal shook for a few more seconds, but finally died.
The twins decided to set up camp in the clearing. Silence consumed most of the evening, broken only by the clanging of pots when Mizar decided to make dinner for himself. Alcor dined on cold cheese and bread. As they ate around their dwindling fire, he looked up at his brother in disgust. Mizar’s coldness that afternoon had appalled him.
“Is there something you’d like to say to me?” Mizar asked his brother without looking up. Alcor was startled by this. It was like Mizar had eyes in the back of his head.
“Yeah, there is,” he said after recovering. “What you did today, I think that was completely and totally barbaric. Not many people can deliberately put living things through pain the way you did. At least not the sane ones. You have serious problems.”
“You’re perceptions are incorrect, Alcor. I didn’t take pleasure in harming that deer, nor did I even want to.  Had you hit it the first two times, I wouldn’t have touched it, and we both know that. Don’t try to push the blame off on someone else when the only reason that you’re upset is because you’ve realized that maybe you’re not as great of an archer as you thought you were.” Mizar knew that the last part about Alcor’s inadequacy as a hunter was completely untrue and that he really was upset about the pain the deer had undergone, but he also knew that the statement would really get to Alcor. “So now you know. I’m going to bed.” With that, Mizar crawled into his tent.
Alcor, infuriated by his twin, sat in silence for a while trying to think of some sarcastic remark to throw in his brother’s face in the morning. This soon bored, for he came up with nothing particularly brilliant. After a few minutes, he began to stare at the coals pensively. Partly because he didn’t have the energy to get to his tent, and partly because he’d forgotten to even set it up, Alcor sprawled out in front of the fire and slept.
“Help me.” Alcor arose, woken by the faint but desperate whisper. He panned the surrounding wood but saw no movement except the faint rustle of the canopy in the slight nighttime breeze. Then, thinking that the voice had occurred only in his dream, he laid his head back down on his pack, which had been serving as his pillow. Before he had even had time to close his eyes, he heard the voice again. This time it was even fainter, but Alcor knew that it was real. He immediately sat up, crawled over to his brother’s tent, and woke him up.
      “Mizar, Mizar!” he whispered urgently. “There’s someone out here!”
      “Go back to sleep,” his twin groaned back.
      “Really, there is. And she sounds like she’s hurt,” Alcor said, gathering by now that the voice had, in fact, belonged to a woman.
      “It’s just the wind.”
      “No it isn’t! Now get up!” Alcor was becoming impatient.
      “This better be good, or I’ll turn you into a frog, and not the kind that can get kissed and turn back.”
      “Oh, shut up. I know you can’t do that.” Alcor walked away from the tent. As he heard Mizar pulling on his clothes, he caught the cry again. “Does that sound like the wind to you?” he sardonically asked his brother, who was, by now, half way out of the tent.
      “Okay, lay off and start looking. You go that way,” Mizar said, pointing to his right, “and I’ll go this way. If you find her bring her back to camp and yell for me. I’ll do the same.” With this, Alcor turned on his heel and set off at a sprint into the dark woods.
*****
Mizar shot away from camp at top speed, gracefully ducking under branches and leaping over brush. The farther he got from the glen, the louder the cry seemed to be, so he assumed that he was going in the right direction. About a quarter of a mile from where he began, he slowed down and started to search frantically with his now adjusted eyes. The distress call continued to reach him, and he noticed that it was coming at regular intervals. It seemed to be repeating about every half minute.
After searching for what seemed to be hours, but was really only minutes, the girl’s cry began to fade and, in a few minutes, ceased completely. Mizar cursed under his breath. He thought he would never find her. As he hurried toward the source of the cry, he heard a rustling of the bushes behind him. Alcor suddenly appeared at his brother’s side.
“What are you doing?” Mizar hissed, his bright green eyes flaring.
“Well she obviously wasn’t that way,” his brother replied as he pointed back over his shoudler, “so I just thought I’d catch up with you and help.”
“Fine. I think she’s over there. Let’s go.” They started jogging, neither one saying a word for fear of missing a sign of the girl’s presence.