Chapter 15 #2
When he looks up, the seeds have begun to sprout again—violet, this time.
Blue entangled with red. Ash peppering their homes as it does every living thing in this forest. This time, when their magic recedes, the sprouts look unbothered.
They stand short and steady, planted in the earth, ready to grow again.
It isn’t much, but it’s a new start. A rebellion against the legion who tried so hard to ruin this place.
Basuin smiles. Until Ren forces herself to her feet and makes a sound like she’s trying to choke back another sob. The loss of her hand in his feels so cold. Frozen, like snow beneath his hands biting through his heavy gloves to smart his skin.
“I don’t need you,” she cuts, breathing heavy. “I wouldn’t even need your help if you hadn’t come here and stolen all my magic.”
Something inside him withers.
“I’ve always been alone.” Ren wipes her tears away on her arm. “You being here won’t change that. Ever.”
Right. Basuin didn’t help grow this forest—this magic never belonged to him. Proof that all he knows is how to kill.
But then, Ren wraps her arms around herself and cries, turning to hide her face. Basuin stretches his fingers out, unable to name if it’s grief or guilt.
The walk to Gyeosi is slow and metered, when Ren finally turns her back on the clearing. Time ticks away for an eternity and he lets it, unsure of what he can say. I’m sorry the legion is destroying your forest. I’m sorry my people are killing your people. I’m sorry I didn’t die the right way.
In the end, neither of them say anything at all.
He can’t even remember what the legion would tell the Grimmalian refugees when they came and conquered. It all blurs together, all of it the same. Comfort is a lie manufactured to make the winner feel better—and he’s always been on the winning side.
By choice, he reminds himself. By choice.
Something tightens in his chest, and it’s not the wolf-man’s claws in his lungs anymore. Even now, he’s making the same choice. Giving up godhood. Giving Ren’s magic back so she has a fighting chance against the army. He’s choosing to stay on the winning side.
Or, abandoning the losing side. What a haunting thought. What a cowardly decision.
“Why?” Ren’s voice, quiet and flat, makes him jump. It’s like she can read his mind.
He wets his lips. “I don’t know,” he answers, in truth because he doesn’t know what she’s asking.
“No.” Ren slows to a stop and it sends a chill trembling through him. “Why are they leaving the bastion?”
Basuin turns to look at her. “What?” She said it so solemnly. Alarm bells, war cries, screams of help ring in his brain.
Ren meets his gaze. “The army is moving. Before you arrived, they stayed close to the bastion. Now, the camps keep changing. They’re moving north. I don’t understand why.”
His stomach curls until he’s out of breath. It aches, the realization born of Ren’s words. Of Kensy’s visitation, of the threat he laid between himself and Basuin. Ren thinks it was Basuin’s arrival that changed things, but it wasn’t. It’s Kensy’s.
She doesn’t know—and he doesn’t know what Kensy’s looking for. Basuin opens his mouth, searching for the right words.
But then, a voice calls out, “Hello?” It comes from his left, deep in the woods, cutting through the darkness.
“Is anyone out there?” a woman calls, but Basuin hears no footsteps on the ground.
No movement, just the ghost of a voice. “I need help,” she calls meekly, a needle of fear piercing her throat.
It must be a soldier. From one of the camps moving, pushed up from Shaelstorm.
But they shouldn’t be this far out in the forest alone.
Ren is paces ahead of him now, looking back at him in wait.
But Bass stands still, at attention, locked in place by the siren call for help that only he seems to hear.
The voice warbles with panic. “Captain?”
He knows that voice. He knows her. Basuin breaks into a sprint through the forest, racing toward her.
“Aless!” he shouts. The foliage is a blur around him.
“’Less!” he yells again, until he bursts through a gap in the trees and sees her—back facing him, still armored, cloak missing.
Her blonde hair is strewn from the braid pinned to her neck, mussed and frizzy.
And when she turns around, she’s exactly the same as she always was.
Deep-green eyes and worried brow and smatterings of freckles along her nose.
Basuin skids to a stop in front of her, chest heaving.
“’Less,” he calls again, eyes searching her body for wounds.
But her head—her head is still intact. No cut mars her neck.
She looks exactly as she was before they climbed those mountains.
He breathes hard, especially when Aless’ face brightens with a streak of hope among the fear as soon as she sees him.
“Can you help me?” She rushes forward three steps in a familiar canter, hands pressed together at her chest. “I’m lost. I don’t know how I got here.
I need to get back,” she says, her eyes widening as if she’s realized something.
“I have to go back—they need me.” She raises a trembling hand to her mouth, panic coloring her eyes.
“It’s okay, ’Less,” he says, taking two steps forward to meet her. “It’s over now. We can go back together.” Basuin holds a hand out to her. They can go back to Shaelstorm, mourn over a pail of cold ale, get on a ship back to Ha’riste.
But Aless stares at his chest as if looking through him. “Do you know where we are?” she asks.
“Aless,” he repeats, something ripping through the hole where his heart used to sit.
“I’m looking for the Winter River,” she says. “That’s where they told me to go—but I’m lost. Please,” she begs. “Can you help me?”
Everything in him—every shred of hope and every star he could have wished on and every prayer he could have made—turns to rot in his organs.
“I can,” Ren says from behind him, and his body goes shock-still, limbs rigid and shoulders back as he stands at attention. He stares down at Aless, her face flooding with relief.
“Thank you,” Aless sighs out, and then her lips peel back to reveal that nervous smile she would always wear when she spoke with someone new.
When the spotlight fell on her with her next promotion.
And when he asked her to go to Valkesta with him.
All thin lips with the press of her tongue behind her teeth.
Ren moves to stand next to him, her head at his chest, extending her hand. Aless takes it, but the skin of her fingers turns to a ghostly white where her palm meets Ren’s.
“I don’t know how I got here,” Aless says, her voice growing watery and weak. “I really need to get back to them. I can’t let them be alone.” Tears begin to fall from her glassy green eyes, but she doesn’t wipe them away. She lets them careen off her chin.
“’Less,” he tries one more time, voice thin.
“I know it’s scary,” Ren tells her. “But we can walk there together.”
“Where?”
“The Winter River.”
“Will they be there?” Aless asks, and Basuin’s fingers clench into a fist. “Did my friends wait for me?”
Ren inhales for a long time, then nods.
Aless’ ghost-grip on her hand tightens. “Thank you,” she says, breathless.
“I’m so tired.” She sags as Ren starts to walk them forward.
Basuin takes another step, to follow after them.
He should chase her down and apologize. Tell Aless that he truly cared for her, that he’s sorry. But he can’t move.
Sudden light blooms bright against the dark background of the forest. Ren walks Aless toward it; it’s blinding.
He almost shuts his eyes and flinches away but he doesn’t.
And before Ren lets go of Aless’ hand, Aless turns back to look at him.
He swears that she looks at him this time.
But then, she fades into the nothing, a wisp of white that smokes from Ren’s palm. Gone.
At least she made it to the Winter River.
Now, it’s just him and Ren, ten feet apart from one another.
Her eyes feel heavy on him, but not quite as sharp as they usually would.
Yaelic’s told him of this before, how Ren walks her dead spirits to the River.
Basuin hasn’t seen it until now. His mother used to tell him stories—of gods like this.
Ones who shepherded their loyal devotees to the River so they wouldn’t cross worlds alone.
She always said that when she passed, she hoped someone would walk with her. Not because she didn’t know the way, but because it was a sign of love.
Would Ren have walked his mother to the River, like she walked with Aless?
Out of all spirits it could have been, of course it was Aless. She clung to him in life—clawed at him as they trekked up the Valkesi Mountains, begged him to let them go home. Of course it was Aless.
“Who was that?” Ren asks. He cracks under pressure and turns his head away.
“No one,” he lies. Another moment of silence runs through the forest, long enough that he chances a look at her.
Ren’s eyes have hardened into obsidian. “How did you know her?”
“I killed her,” Basuin snaps, as hard as the wolf-man snaps its teeth at his ribcage. “Is that what you want to hear?”
Aless didn’t have any last words. She never even made a sound. Not like Isaniel, who wrenched and spit at Basuin as he choked on the blood that sprouted from his stomach, damning Basuin for bringing them to Valkesta until the very end.
When her head was cut clean off, the only sound she made was when her skull hit the ground—the thud of it on the ice, rolling away.
Basuin did ask, though. He pleaded. Basuin begged on his hands and knees, prayed to every god he knew the name of, kissed his mother’s godstone until his lips were raw as he tried to infuse every last piece of his shattered soul into it as an offering to Sa-cha, for them to go to the Winter River.
If ’Less made it, then the others did too. Or, he hopes so.
And Basuin—Basuin won’t go there, so he’ll never see them ever again. He’ll never see ’Less, or Tomaas. Never see Isaniel ever again. But out of all of them—out of everyone Basuin has killed—he misses his mother the most.
He forgot, somehow. That he deserves whatever is waiting for him in the Blacksalt Sea.
The crunch of underbrush makes him look up, Ren beginning to walk away. Something tugs on the raw edges inside his chest, the cavern where the wolf-man chews him ragged and septic.
“I knew her,” he says, and Ren stops to look back at him. “She was my friend.” He doesn’t have anything else to say. Aless was his friend and he took her to Valkesta where he knew they would die, and she died.
Ren looks to where the light of the Winter River once shimmered. “She was very at peace,” she tells him. “Most spirits who I walk to the River, they aren’t like that. There was nothing lingering. No pain, no anger.”
Something in his chest trembles. “She was lost?”
Ren’s head tilts as she stares into the darkness. “No,” she says, and for once, there’s no barrier built into her voice. “She wasn’t ready to go yet, so she simply followed you here. I think she wanted to say goodbye to you.”
Basuin’s hands feel heavy with grief, but something sinks into him that smooths away the twist in his gut. The god mark on his palm burns, and when he turns over his hand to look at it, the soot-black lines have turned to a scar-like red.
Like him, Ren upturns her palm and looks at her own god mark, the same hand she used to walk Aless’ spirit to the Winter River. Her obsidian eyes trail upward, toward the sky above them, and her fingers curl back into her palm.
And though she doesn’t look back at Basuin, Ren’s hand finds his shoulder. A small, soft, barely there touch. Her fingers gloss down his bicep until she finds a wrinkle in his sleeve. Then, she gives it a tug, beckoning him to start moving again.
So, he follows. But for a moment, even as he moves, Ren’s touch lingers. A second too long, like she’s hesitant on letting go. But after that small, staying second, her touch fades, leaving only the echo of her fingers behind.
Basuin was wrong about Ren.
She isn’t a woman who plays in the forest, who plays pretend as a deity getting lost in the woods. Ren is a god.