Chapter 4 Falling Mountains
FALLING MOUNTAINS
Andrik-
I lace the locket over one of my antlers. The chain is cool against my skin, but the scent clinging to it—her scent—warms something I thought I was made without. I'm not sure why it's important—only that my body knows it is. “Veyrinth sael ves’torin,” I whisper. (Your scent quiets the storm.)
Something instinctual is screaming inside me that this fragile piece of metal matters more than anything I’ve ever held. I have no pockets or clothes. Only fur and the body the forest gave me. So I secure it high where no one can reach it but me.
The pendant sways as I shift my weight, and I find I like the sound the metal makes when it clinks softly against antler. It brings me a strange comfort I’ve never had before.
I don’t know why I was made like this, or why I was left deep in the marrow of these woods to rule over it. But standing here, watching her—
I’m starting to think it has everything to do with the tiny human shouting at me.
Movement catches my eye. She’s getting up.
No.
Panic slams through my chest.
She can’t leave. She can’t—
My body moves before my mind catches up. Muscles coiling, claws extending, everything inside begging for me to do something.
I could block her path—herd her toward my cabin, where I can keep her safe and close.
Kaemorin. The word pulses through me like a second heartbeat.
Keep her here. Keep her safe. Keep her mine.
The thoughts come too fast, swallowing reason whole. My claws dig into the ground. The beast inside me is screaming. I can barely control it.
Take her. Claim her. Don’t let her leave.
“No,” I snarl at myself, voice breaking. “Nai’thar veskae.” (Control yourself.) I force my claws to retract, and my body to still, even as every nerve burns with the need to move.
She’s not prey.
She’s not mine.
But gods help me—
She has to stay.
The locket swings when I move, cold silver clicking against bone—a heartbeat that isn't mine. A sore reminder that she screamed for a monster, and wept into his blood like her soul was being torn in half. And still, every part of me rebels at the thought of letting her walk away. I tell myself it’s about the questions, but that’s a lie. The truth is much simpler.
I won’t survive being alone anymore now that I know she exists.
For so long, I have wondered why I was made incomplete.
Forced to judge the wicked and protect the forest’s boundaries.
I never dreamed the gods would allow me to have a mate, but then she stumbled into my forest, grief-stricken and alive, and something I thought I was created without melts in my chest.
She takes another step, her scent getting fainter as each footfall pulls her farther from me. My claws sink deeper until cracks spiderweb the ice beneath them.
If I let her go, I’ll never get another chance.
“Varkh!” The word rips desperately from my throat.
She freezes, her spine going rigid. Her head whips around, eyes blazing, though she still can’t see me.
“Don’t tell me to stop, asshole!” Her voice rings sharp through the trees.
My world stops turning. She understood me. She understood Vraks?n. That’s not possible. Vraks?n isn’t a language mortals can speak—or even hear properly. To human ears, it sounds like wind blowing through branches, like the creak of ice, like… nothing.
But she did. And she answered.
My breath catches, and suddenly it all makes sense:
The bond intervened. When it sensed my desperation to make her stop, it reached across the space between us and made her understand.
Not because she speaks my language, but because she’s mine.
The magic that ties us together doesn’t care about linguistics or the rules that govern mortal tongues.
It only cares that we’re bound—soul to soul, life to life.
And when I called out to her, the bond answered. It gave her my words—and made them hers. Because that's what mates do. We don't just share a life; we share everything.
My legs threaten to give out. I have to reach for a tree just to keep from collapsing.
She has no idea what just happened between us. She is completely blind to the bond already weaving us together, stitch by stitch.
But I feel it.
Thal?n, I feel it.
She was always meant to understand me—no matter what language my soul speaks.
“Etra’ven, Sael?n,” I whisper. (You found me, soulbond.)
Lumi-
“Don't tell me to stop, asshole.” I spin toward the trees, my voice sharp enough to cut. Silence answers—not the empty kind, but the kind that watches.
“I don’t know what the hell you are, but I’m not in the mood for games.”
No one answers.
“Didn't you hear me?” My voice cracks between fury and grief. “I said he was mine. You stole him from me!”
I take a step forward. Then another. I don’t know what I’m walking toward, but at this point, I don’t care.
The old warnings whisper through my mind: Don‘t go into the woods after dark. Never go alone.
People disappear in this forest. Bodies turn up… wrong. Touched by something no human can survive. I saw what it did to Mark. His face was shredded, gouge marks trailing from his cheeks all the way down to his chest. His fingernails were splintered and torn away.
It wasn’t the wounds that made my heart skip though—it was the fact that they were self-inflicted.
What kind of thing can make a grown man tear himself apart?
“If you think killing him makes you my hero, you’re wrong,” I snarl into the dark. “I didn’t need to be saved. I needed revenge.”
A low, choked sound drifts through the trees.
A laugh?
My blood ignites. I shove my knife back into its holster and storm forward, scanning the entire area.
“Come out!” I shout. “If you’re going to laugh at me, do it to my face!”
My boots sink deeper into the drifts as I push past low-hanging branches, my breath fogging in the frigid air. My fists clench at my sides as my heart hammers in my chest.
I don't care what it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s got claws or stands twice my height. It took the one thing I've been surviving for—and now it hides?
“I didn’t crawl through two years of hell just to be mocked by something too cowardly to show itself!”
The wind shifts, sending snow whirling around me like a tornado. For a single heartbeat, the trees seem to move, closing in on me.
“I know you're out there!” My voice fractures in the cold. “If you want something from me—come take it!”
I’m met with the soft hiss of falling snow and disappointment. I don’t know what I expected. I think part of me wanted something big and brutal to step out from the dark and put me out of my misery. But nothing comes.
The longer the silence stretches, the clearer the truth becomes: I’m not angry at whatever’s out here. I’m angry at myself—
For not being enough when Anna needed me. For spending two years hunting a man I’ll never get to confront. For standing in a frozen forest, pleading for something to hurt me so the pain I feel would finally make sense.
I invented a monster so I wouldn’t have to face the one living inside my own skin. But there’s no monster. Just me, and the sad realization that I came here for blood—but I’m the one bleeding out.
Andrik POV:
Hero.
The word pierces right through me. Before I can stop it, a derisive sound rips from my throat.
If she only knew what I was, or the screams I carry from the souls I’ve shattered. I am no hero. I am the thing monsters fear in the dark.
But then her words fully register. She said she needed revenge, not mourning. Awareness slams into me like a sheet of broken ice. She didn't love him. She wanted him dead—a judge in her own right.
Relief floods through me so fierce it nearly bursts my heart. She wasn't mourning a monster. She was hunting one. And I took that from her.
Sae’var?n thrak’ven ar’ven, etra sael ves’kae. (I would take back the kill, if it meant your soul could breathe.)
But gods—she wanted him dead. She’s not his. She never was.
A laugh breaks free, and she whirls toward the sound. Her hand flies to the knife strapped to her thigh. She takes a step forward. Not away from danger—but toward it.
Toward me.
I have never seen something so wild, so alive.
She is a thunderstorm in a bloodstained parka, screaming into the mouth of something she cannot even begin to understand.
Every instinct I have is roaring at me to move. To step from the shadow and show her what waits in the dark.
To take what the bond whispers is mine.
But if I go to her now, she will only see me as something to fight—not as her mate, and I don’t want her surrender. I want to be chosen.
“Come take it,” she roars. Not knowing that every step she takes toward me, every furious word pulled from her throat, pulls at the fragile stitches of my restraint.
The earth groans beneath me, roots shifting to try and keep me still. The snow freezes mid-fall, suspended between us, as if the world has stopped to watch what happens next.
“That's what I thought,” she shrieks, her voice splintering with frost and fury. “All that skulking and hiding but nothing to say!”
“Kael’thurin veskai,” I groan quietly. (Gods help me.) She's baiting me, not out of arrogance, but out of pain. From grief so massive even the forest bows its head in recognition.
“Coward!” She spits.
The word burns like hot coal against my fur. Not because it offends me—because it’s true.
I am a coward. I’ve spent my life judging others, but I’m too afraid to face her.
I can hold back the weight of a falling mountain, but I can’t hold back the terror of her looking at me and seeing a monster instead of a mate.
I would tear out my own eyes if it meant I wouldn’t have to see the exact second her wonder turns to disgust.
“You watch me,” she snarls, stepping closer. “You tell me to stop, but you won't face me?”
Her boots crunch recklessly through snow. She’s fearless but so, so breakable.
“Come finish what you started!”
Another sound escapes my throat. She doesn’t understand. She thinks I’m the monster who killed her enemy. She doesn’t see that I’m the monster who wants to save her.
“You took him from me,” she says, softer now. Her voice cracks. Tears freeze where they fall on her cheeks. “So you might as well take the rest.”
She spreads her arms wide, surrendering herself.
“Take me too.”
The forest goes silent, waiting for me to decide—even my heartbeat stills.
She’s not asking for me to kill her. She’s asking me to end her. To take away the unbearable weight of surviving when she doesn’t want to anymore.
Thal?n knows I want nothing more than to gather her up and carry her somewhere safe where she can forget she ever wanted to die.
Her arms drop.
She waits two more breaths, staring into the dark where she knows I’m hiding.
Hoping I’ll answer.
Begging me to.
And when I don’t—something on her face breaks. The fight drains out of her shoulders, and she turns away.