Chapter 18
The Crying Trees are somehow sadder than he imagined.
Somehow grand, still. Like Gyeosi, it’s made up of a huge network of trees.
They branch out to their brethren as if holding hands, standing tall enough to block out the sky.
But they weep. Every tree’s head is bowed, back broken, leaves falling like tears all over Bass.
The crowns all connect in some spiderweb of a way, as if a mother has braided all her daughters’ hair together.
He can’t stop looking upward. Who are they crying for? It makes something deep in his chest ache like his teeth did when he first bit into a peach pit.
“They are grand,” Ko says, standing at his side. He raises a hand and gestures languidly toward the center of the Crying Trees. “From where we began.”
And where he ends—a reminder of why he’s here. Basuin shudders a breath. “They must be powerful. What magic do they hold?” Even here, where he is soon to die, Basuin tries to figure out Kensy’s next steps. If the artifact he’s searching for is here at the elder tree.
Ko hums. “Power only matters to humans. Here, we give life. The trees are full of it.” When Basuin looks at him, Ko gives him a lazy smile. “There’s no magic here for mortals. The elder tree only answers to gods.”
Power only matters to humans. How true, and yet how ironic it is all the same. Did he ever care for power when he was human? When he was a soldier?
Basuin stares up at the Crying Trees and loses all sense of time, barely noticing when Ko begins his slow walk back.
He wants to cry with them. He misses his mother, and there’s nothing here for humans like him—like he used to be.
No power, no magic. And nothing here for Kensy to find and break and steal.
Fear grows thick and fuzzy in his throat with each step further into the trees.
Guilt, and shame, and—if Basuin was still just a soldier, knee bent to Kensy, would he have come here with hand cannons too?
No Ren to stop them, no Ko to tell them there is no power here for mortals?
It grows hotter in his chest until Ren approaches his side and everything stills in the radius of her presence.
“I love this forest,” Ren says, out of nowhere.
A declaration, but softer, said with her full chest. He’s always known it.
And more than that, this forest loves her back.
She’s lucky in that way, to love something so fully and to have it love her in the same way.
More than loyalty. Less than self-sacrifice.
Her eyes shine with something right on that thin line of love and hatred when he meets her faraway gaze. Basuin didn’t know eyes could be that dark and that bright all at once until Ren.
“Are you coming?” Ren asks, shaking him from solitude and forcing him to look. She’s standing in that way he’s come to know as familiar—her shoulder facing him, turned halfway, eyes locked on him. She’s a waif of a god, thin from the side. As sharp as her mind seems to be.
He hates that she’s so damn pretty.
“To where?” he asks instead of answering.
Ren stares at him, as if thinking for a hard minute. Then, her gaze falls and her chin drops as she turns her back to him. “I’m taking you to the elder tree.”
He freezes. Right. That’s what they came here for. All this way for him to see the elder tree, to ask for his godhood to be severed. This isn’t a field trip; it’s a funeral march. There’s nothing left for him here.
If Basuin dies, where does Yaelic—motherless and scared and lonely—go?
He’ll have to get on his hands and knees and beg Ren to take Yaelic as her charge.
If Yaelic doesn’t run off into the forest and leave Hami without a brother again.
The thought makes his hands sweat, his fingers curling into fists only to stretch out once again to feel something.
He begged for death before, same as he’ll go to the elder tree. When Tehali sat by his cot in the healing huts, listening to Bass scream—in pain, in anger, in grief, in rot. She told him he would tear his stitches. He told her to fuck off.
Even now, he tastes blood in his mouth. This time, it’s from his teeth biting into his tongue as he stares at Ren.
She hasn’t moved forward in his hesitance.
Gods, he could take her by the shoulders and shake her.
Ask her if she feels superior. Ask her if she knows everything, named and bloodied and dead.
Ask her—gods’ sake—what will happen to her if the forest is burned to ash. If the legion leaves nothing but black fields in their wake, like the one she cried in for him to see; for him to bear.
“What will you do?” he asks instead. Her hair, cut blunt at her shoulders, wavers like the tears of the Crying Trees, shaken by a sweeping breeze.
And what will you do, Captain? he remembers Isaniel asking, sweat-slick and hot in his refusal to unlatch the tent window.
It was a bruising summer night. Basuin doesn’t even remember his own reply.
Isaniel’s words crawled over his naked skin on that night like mosquitos, like mean fingers searching to make new wounds in his flesh.
Here, in the present, Ren quietly asks, “What?”
Basuin takes a step forward. “Will you continue to sabotage them? The legion. Killing the crops, rotting their food, destroying their weapons—Is that still your plan?”
When they sewed his eye up, they didn’t tell him that tears would burn it. Salt in a wound. He hunched over his cot, Isaniel’s long-sleeved undershirt strangled between his fingers—two broken, the others scarred.
And what if they surrender to us?
Now, Ren faces him. She raises her chin in defiance, dark eyes holding emotion he doesn’t recognize. Her jaw tightens, and Basuin takes another step toward her.
“What will you do?” he repeats himself. “When I am no longer a god and I’m gone.”
Will you defy your orders?
Basuin swallows, but he doesn’t back down. He takes another step, and another, until she is just out of reach. She’s always out of reach, it seems. Right outside the stretch of his fingers.
Ren’s eyes narrow. “Things will stay the same, as they always have. We do not need you.”
He hears it, her unspoken words: I do not need you.
But that’s not true. It can’t be true. If Ren doesn’t need him—if the forest doesn’t need him—then he wouldn’t have been deified. It wasn’t about being a chosen one. It wasn’t about power or being god-full or being anything. Basuin is just that—Basuin.
He was deified for a purpose, not for himself.
They do need him. To protect Yaelic, who’s entrusted his life to Basuin. To protect Ko, who he hurt, and Haaman, who loves someone as fully as Basuin loved someone before. To protect Hami, who hates him, but loves his brother enough to brave the enemy.
But most of all, to protect Ren. Ren, who loves this forest but doesn’t know how to protect it.
Ren, who would do anything for her people.
Her dedication is strong, but her methods are soft.
She truly believes her power can drive off the army, but she’s wrong.
Dead fucking wrong. Bass knows this because he’s been a soldier. The legion was his home.
Starving them out, breaking weapons they can rebuild, sending them nightmares—soldiers have been through worse. He’s been through worse. And he still followed his orders.
Not all will surrender, he told Isaniel that night. He remembers it now. He told Isaniel, Never will they all surrender.
Above Ren’s head, the Crying Trees stretch tall.
She looks so small, a figure painted against the backdrop of the forest, planted like a new sapling to grow among this ancient place.
But this is her home—these are her people.
When she walks through this forest, the trees sway in her stead and the birds in the trees sing to her, and even the breeze offers its worship through her hair.
The Crying Trees bow their heads to her even now, somehow further, leaves entangled and tears weeping, reaching for Ren as if to pull her into their embrace. They’re all connected. The tangle of roots running along the ground aren’t singular anymore. They don’t belong to one tree, but to all.
This forest is all—and not all will surrender. Ren won’t. This is her entire world, her family, that risks destruction. Ren loves this forest, and it loves her back.
Basuin can’t go. He won’t go to the elder tree. He couldn’t protect Isaniel, nor the rest of the Valkesta unit, not even his godsdamned mother who he marched to war for. And yet, the gods still asked protection of him.
It’s a second chance.
The wolf-man laughs lazily, rolling onto its side. Humans and their chances. You all think so little of the world.
Then what is it, if not a second chance?
A command, the wolf-man tells him. A decree. We’ve given you a destiny—you should be thankful for it.
Bass grabs at the front of his shirt, right where the wolf-man resides. It hurts, aches in a way it hasn’t before. A destiny. This is what he was built for, where his choices brought him.
“I won’t go,” he says aloud.
The wolf-man snaps its teeth together, drool dripping from its jaws.
Ren recoils, her sharp eyes going wide at Bass’ declaration. He’d give anything to know what she’s thinking, what images he would find in her mind. What does she think of him? Behind that steel-forged gaze and those onyx eyes.
Isaniel wasn’t like that. He wore every emotion on each facet and plane of his face. Basuin read him well—always.
“You won’t go,” she repeats his words, slowly, savoring each letter and rolling each word over her tongue.
“No,” he says. And he means it this time. He’s said no more than he has said yes, which is ironic. A soldier’s only words are “Yes” and “Sir.” There is no room for “No.” And yet, Basuin has said it so many times.
The first time he killed someone. The first time he held someone dying. The day his dagger took the life of a child.
When Isaniel called him a liar. And when Aless asked if they could turn back.
No, no, no—no.