Chapter 14 #2
Ren doesn’t linger in it the way he does. She never does, and every time, he’s awed by it. How she can turn from such a fierce beast into a gentle creature.
“Imagine it,” she repeats herself. Once again, he closes his eyes. This time, he pictures the red thread of his magic zigzagging through the camp and invading every single weapon the soldiers carry. Taking them apart, breaking them, tossing away every screw and string.
He hears it—as if his mind is part of his magic—every bolt and spring it attacks. The click and snap of it assaults his head. Bass opens his eyes before Ren instructs him to.
“I did it,” he tells her, and he can’t help the grin that crawls over his face.
More magic, yet again. Before, the only power he had was in his body as he struck down men and carved into their corpses.
The only power he had was in death. It’s a stark reminder that what he’s doing won’t stop the army at all.
Whatever Kensy’s plans are, sabotaging a single camp will only slow them. Kensy always gets what he wants.
“You did,” Ren says, and then she draws her hand away from his. Blunt nails dig into his palm in a fist. She gazes off toward the camp, that smile long gone. “I’ll teach you one more thing,” she says. “It’ll be more difficult.”
Eyes stuck to the curve of her cheek, Bass nods.
Ren waves her god-marked hand over the camp, but no magic raises from her palm. “Thread yourself through their minds,” she says. “The way you imagined yourself before, imagine yourself inside their heads.”
Bass’ brows furrow together, and he doesn’t close his eyes. Being inside someone else’s mind—it makes him uneasy. He wouldn’t want someone else in his mind. He hates the wolf-man for it.
Still staring out at the camp, Ren doesn’t even look at him. “You’ll take their minds apart like you took the weapons apart. Creating nightmares isn’t as easy—”
“No.” He spits the word like it’s a sickness. “I won’t.”
There isn’t a world where Basuin will weave a nightmare into someone’s mind. Not even his enemy.
Ren turns, her face unreadable. He looks at the floor instead. It’s crawling all over him—her eyes, or the idea of barreling through someone else’s mind. This was supposed to be easy; helping Ren by using the magic he’s leached from her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
No. He won’t do this. Not to anyone. He’d take their miserable lives before he inflicts something like that. The power to kill is something he’s come to terms with. The power to break someone’s mind is something completely different.
“What?” Ren’s voice is unsteady. Confusion and bite are laced in her words.
Bass brings his hands closer, turning his palms upward. The red glow of magic still lives under his skin, throbbing like blood vessels ready to burst and break. His god mark laughs at him the way the wolf-man does inside of him.
“I won’t curse someone with nightmares,” he says. “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. It would be better just to kill them.”
For the past eight months—two of them taken to heal—he’s woken in the middle of the night, punished by the blood that soaked his clothes. Forced to watch the macabre play of his career unfold on a stage illuminated by his sins. A theatrical rendition of his worst decisions.
He used to jump from sleep, still in Valkesta.
Surrounded by snow and ice and all his misgivings.
His body would be heavy with the weight of dead men, unable to do anything but thrash and yell and wait for Tehali to barge into his room and free him from the illusion—the memories.
Bloody her nose, by accident, and keep his hands slick and stained with it.
The same way he hurt Ko, in Gyeosi, too.
“I don’t kill,” Ren finally says, her voice controlled. “I will not kill.”
“Then what will you do?” he asks, and the wolf-man snatches a rib from Basuin and splinters it. “Because this won’t stop them. Do you truly believe you can starve out a whole militant bastion and send them home?”
Ren’s eyes flash with something half malicious as she cuts her gaze to him. “Are you asking me to fight your legion?”
“No,” he says first, because he doesn’t think. “But you have to protect the forest. Isn’t that your duty?”
And what of you? the wolf-man mocks him. What will you do, Basuin of Ankor, to save the forest?
He’s giving up godhood. Giving his magic back to Ren. That’s all he can do.
“I can’t fight an army,” Ren says, and while it should sound like an admission, a weakness, she makes it sound like something already decided and at peace. “I won’t fight a war I cannot win.”
Ren pushes off the tree as if she might walk away, but she only paces two steps before stopping. He doesn’t understand it—that she won’t fight a war. There’s never been a time that Bass hasn’t been in war.
Always a war you can win, the wolf-man reminds him with a painful nip.
That’s true. Xalkhir has never had a bad hand in the war.
They’ve always held high ground. Aggressive, always the one to start the fight and always the one to finish it, too.
Even when Bass stood at the bottom of the Valkesi Mountains and stared up at their frozen peaks, even when he knew that it would be a lost mission, they were stronger.
But only because they made sacrifices.
What of the innocent? Basuin once asked Kensy as they stood across from one another, war plans on the table between them. These bombs—we can’t control the blasts, Commander.
And Kensy looked up at him, eyes iced over. What of them, Captain? This is war. We make the sacrifices that we make. Otherwise, we’ll lose. Then what will we have left?
Bass chose to climb those mountains. He chose to sacrifice himself and his men to the icy hellscape of bloody Valkesta.
“So that’s it?” Bass feels the simmer of anger in his bones. “You won’t fight them and the forest will die?”
“I am doing my best,” she snaps at him. “Before you came, I had more power. Their crops withered and their weapons jammed and their men woke from nightmares that made them fear the woods. But you’ve taken that from me.”
“Weak nightmares won’t stop any man,” he growls. He would know that best. “You’re not protecting anything with your god magic, your games.”
He expects her to respond with heat. But her shoulders only draw up, defensive, her eyes blank. Ren doesn’t look at him.
“Then tell me, what would you do? What is your plan to fight them, Basuin of Ankor?”
Gods, stop saying his name like that. Say it like anything but that.
But he doesn’t have an answer. Ren is right. The legion is massive compared to them, with weaponry and fire. They can’t answer that. Basuin was supposed to find a way to protect them, but all he can do is give Ren back her magic. What she does with it, that’s not on him.
But Ren will die. Yaelic, and Qia, and Hami, too. Once again, there are lives in his hands. Once again, he has nowhere to run but head on—toward the elder tree. He bites back the sting of selfishness he feels sitting on his shoulders.
Get it off of him. The magic, take it back.
Drag it out of him with teeth and with claws, and take the wolf-man, too.
He doesn’t want this. He’s never wanted any of this.
If anyone would have listened, they would know that all Basuin ever wanted was to die up in those mountains, in Valkesta, honorably and unrecovered, with no war story left to bring home.
He doesn’t want to care about people dying anymore. He shouldn’t be here to care. This is Ren’s forest, and these are Ren’s spirits, and this is Ren’s responsibility—and fuck the guilt that he tastes in the back of his mouth because it’s her responsibility, not his.
Won’t someone just let him die? For good, for once?
And when he looks at Ren, those dark eyes of hers and that flat nose and those high cheekbones, he doesn’t see a woman right now. He sees a god with god magic trying to save her forest, her people, by weaving his biggest wound into her enemies’ minds—and still failing, alone.