Chapter 12
Ren leads him to a grassy field outside the village, far enough that he can’t hear the murmuring of the spirits any longer.
Close enough that the birds above the canopy sing down to them.
It’s bright here, the sea of trees parted wide enough for him and Ren to stand twenty feet away from one another.
The shadow of Ren’s hair darkens her face and obscures the color of her eyes, until she rolls her shoulders back and faces him with all the grace of a god.
“It comes from inside you,” she says, holding her right hand out toward him, palm faced up.
The curl of her fingers hides the white lines he knows decorate her skin the way the black scars do his.
Basuin copies her, with his left hand, eyes tracing the lines he’s studied before. He flexes his fingers.
He tries to picture it, the way Ren uses her magic so easily, effortlessly. He tries to remember the way that her blue magic coiled around her skin, dug into the earth of the Shaelstorm fields, burst from her fingertips like a firework shooting across the sky.
Imagining hers is easy—because remembering what his looked like washes him in shame. The way it felt, hot as molten metal, singeing his fingers as it exploded from him. The red of blood splashing against the walls of his hut, like fire, whipping and burning Ko.
Fitting magic for a soldier such as he.
“Do you feel it?” Ren asks him now.
No, but if he could, he thinks it would feel like a forest fire. Uncontrollable, and hot, and destructive. Basuin shakes his head, closing his open hand into a fist. The wolf-man huffs at him, and Bass doesn’t know if it’s laughing or frustrated with him this time.
Ren won’t stop staring at him. “Not from your hand,” she says. “From inside.”
His eyes flick up to meet hers. The light of day passes over her as the clouds sail across the sky, illuminating the planes of her face. Her irises sparkle like amber in the sun. It makes him snap.
“No one taught me,” he starts, defensive at the disappointment Ren’s not even expressed yet.
“I don’t know what magic is or what’s possessed me.
So how should I know what’s inside me?” He pulls his hand back to snatch the jade rock at his neck.
He wouldn’t have even known the gods were real if not for his mother.
And he wasn’t sure they were real after they let her die. After he let her die.
Ren says nothing in return, and he can’t read her gaze. She pities him. Sees him as nothing but a monster with no brain. No insides. No heart left.
Does she have a heart still? Did her god let her keep hers?
“I don’t know how to be a god,” he snarls in admission. It feels like someone stuck a burning poker through his stomach and left him for the crows to pick over. He hurt Ko with his carelessness, and Haaman should have killed him. He would’ve killed someone if they hurt someone he loved, too.
If he were to hurt Yaelic because he can’t control himself, Basuin doesn’t know what he would do.
“Neither do I,” Ren says, “but it’s all I’ve ever known.” She draws forward, closing in on him, the rustle of grass beneath every step as she shrinks their distance. “I learned, and you will too.”
It feels like a truce. Ren floats closer and the breeze brings the soft scent of white lilies mixed with something bitter. Basuin inhales, hard, and his shoulders slump with his exhale. In this moment, Ren is kinder to him than she should be—more patient than anyone’s been before. He yields.
“What’s inside of me?” he asks, voice smaller than he means it to be.
Ren offers her hand to him, motioning toward him. “Here.”
But he hesitates. She pities him.
The wolf-man scratches at his ribs like a sad pup wanting its master’s attention.
It makes something itch inside of him, so Basuin places his hand in hers.
She clasps it, so large and scarred in her much smaller, much more delicate one, and overturns his palm so it faces upward.
Basuin’s palm is lined deep, not just with blackened marks, but with battle scars along his fingers and winding down his wrist and up his arm.
Striking compared to her pale, unmarked skin.
The only scars he’s ever seen of hers are the familiar lines spread across her palm.
This is the closest they’ve ever been before, amicably, and the wolf-man’s tail thumps in his chest.
“Right here,” she whispers, tracing a line over the soot-stained mark engraved in his palm. “This is a god mark, like mine.”
Ren sinks to her knees among the grassy field, and Basuin follows her down. Where Ren folds her legs beneath her, Basuin clumsily crosses his legs underneath his hulking frame. Each breath he takes is shallow as Ren holds his hand within hers.
“The vein here—it leads back to your heart.” Her thumb soothes over his god mark like a mother soothes over a child’s wound, and Basuin swallows at the softness of her touch. “A thread to your soul.”
I don’t have a heart anymore, he wants to say. The wolf-man ate it. Do you still have yours? Or did the forest become it?
A glow overtakes his hand, erupting from hers and drowning his.
His god mark swims in the blue magic that bursts from her fingertips, and then it’s shooting up his arm, following the same vein hidden beneath his skin.
But the color shimmers, changes as it crawls up his limb.
From Ren’s bright aquamarine, it shifts into an array of colors until it runs bright red. The color of blood.
The threads seize him, trickling down to the place where the wolf-man resides, and the magic makes it howl from between his lungs.
Heat sinks into him, but it feels like it belongs to Ren at first. Like she’s pouring lava straight into his god mark, injecting it straight into the vein she’s made come to life on his skin.
It surges up and through his arm until it fills the hole in his chest, and then like lightning, it races home back down to the soot mark scrawled and burned into his hand.
“Do you feel it now?” Ren asks, and she peers up at him from below thick, straight lashes dark in contrast to the moon-milk skin of her face.
“Yes,” he says, because it feels like the pull and choke of an invisible leash when her magic fizzled out like the fireworks. He feels like the fire that erupted from him when Ko surprised him. “What is it?”
Ren’s fingers press his own open, unfurling like a flower.
Her fingertips aren’t marred by callouses.
They feel like silk against his work-hardened skin.
She draws her fingers along his palm as if grasping for something he can only describe as light, pinching a fabric made of magic together and pulling it from his god mark.
Dripping from her fingertips is the blue color that belongs to her, but as she extracts it like a puppeteer tugs the strings of its marionette, the light shimmers to the red color that sank into his veins.
It pulses and wraps, like vines alive, around his bicep.
“Magic,” she says, drawing her hand away from his—but the light stays. It rounds out in his palm, warm and wispy and somehow fragile.
Magic. His.
“Think of a light,” she instructs. “Imagine it in your hand. Think of it as something inside of you and pull it out.”
Bass takes a deep breath in. There it is.
Deep in his chest, an ache. It burns, but it doesn’t hurt.
Like a fever growing inside of him. And the wavering light of magic in his hand starts to solidify, becoming an orb of light that pulses right from his palm.
It’s ruby red, spitting golden shimmer-embers. And it belongs to him.
It’s so beautiful, so precious. It’s a living thing, a collection of energy, like he bottled up lightning and laughter and the static on his skin when his mother’s lavender light poured from her mouth late at night when she communed with gods in the godrealm.
It’s foreign, and yet so familiar. A kind touch, something he’s known before, but hasn’t felt in so long.
“I did it,” he says. He flexes his palm and the ball of magic jumps. This magic, it belongs to him. He created something out of the darkness that festers inside of him.
From behind the glow of the ruby, artificial, magical light that bursts forth from his palm, Ren smiles.
It eases her in a way that takes his eyes away from the brightly lit orb to focus on her.
The curl of her mouth is so astonishing, so unfamiliar, but so perfect where it sits on her countenance.
It softens her. Not so much a god now, but a woman.
“You did it,” she says, and the way her lips mold words catches him a moment too long. “Well done, Wolf God.”
There is so much inside of him. Too much—filling him up in the strangest of ways.
The weight of that name hangs heavy on his heart-bone.
There’s something akin to pride, burning like a flush infecting his chest, that washes over him.
The wolf-man is yipping, a soft pup keening to play with its master, rolling over onto its side and sneezing.
It makes him feel full, and that smile of hers—small and quiet but there—threatens something.
He just doesn’t know what yet. His magic is what he’ll blame for the warmth in his face.
But then, he curls his fingers over the red light he’s created, snuffing it out.
No heat races over his palm, only a sparkle of something once real.
Seeing her like this, more at ease here with him than ever before, makes words tumble from his mouth. “How did you learn magic?”
She hums, eyes flicking far off into the distance for but a moment before returning back to the space between them. “The spirits taught me,” she says. “Ko was one of my first teachers—and one of my first friends.” Admiration fills her voice. It’s the first time he’s heard it.
“He seems kind,” Basuin says. Guilt shivers down his spine.
“He is,” she agrees. “Very forgiving.”