Chapter 19
Smoke and gunpowder and everything he hates—it’s choking him.
Gyeosi really is burning. Fire streams out of the hand cannons carried by legion soldiers, the same ones Kensy wielded.
The pop-click-boom of rifles fills the air, screams and war cries the accompaniment.
Orange and green should not mix. The flames swallow the forest until the canopy drips with hot black pitch.
Black Wolf, Black Wolf. He wants to vomit all his guts up and wash the floor with them.
Ren’s blood soaks his hands, illuminated brilliantly in the face of the fire.
He doesn’t remember how he got here. An aching howl, a scream vibrating through his bones until his vision lost color and the forest became a blur.
His joints breaking and reforming as he sprinted toward Gyeosi—riding on the winds of forest magic.
Beside him stands Yaelic, a steeled look on his face that speaks to the stubbornness of children. Bass kneels before him, hands swallowing Yaelic’s shoulders as he gives the boy a shake.
“Listen to me.” Bass holds Yaelic’s green-eyed gaze. “You stay away from the fighting. Grab anyone you can, get them out of here, but stay away from the soldiers. You hear me?”
Yaelic nods, and Bass gives him another hard shake.
“Don’t go near them. Grab who you can and go to the creek.” Yaelic nods again, but it’s not enough. “Do not go near those soldiers, Yaelic.”
“I won’t,” Yaelic promises, eyes big and wide and terrified. That stubbornness is gone. “I promise, Captain, I won’t. I’ll grab the spirits and I’ll go to the creek.”
Bass gives him a hard nod. “That’s right. Now go,” he says, and he releases Yaelic from his grasp to stand. Yaelic hesitates, staring up at Bass, but then he turns and he runs toward the north side of the village.
Gods, protect him.
The wolf-man doesn’t have to rip its teeth into Basuin for him to know he’s too late. He swore to protect this forest too late.
He’s never been too late before. Bass was never one to turn down a fight.
Haaman darts into his vision, something half human and half spirit, landing on their feet. Feathers cover the backs of their arms where their scars line their skin, silver and sharp and glinting with the light of the fire that burns Gyeosi. They look back at him as if waiting.
Bass unsheathes his sword, giving it a swing to remember its weight in his hand.
His fingers adjust, his grip is strong. Wordlessly, he charges first, toward the growing flames, and Haaman follows.
Their steps are so light they look like they’re still flying.
Bass feels like he’s flying, too. This is a homecoming; this is where he belongs.
He strikes first dishonorably—a soldier whose back is turned—sword run through the gut. And next, another who turns at the scream of death and rushes Bass, with a sharp swing to the neck. Bass kicks the body away as the head rolls.
Haaman, not too far away, fights with their whole body. It’s all fast lunges and quick dodges and swift, cutting movements that leave soldiers falling at Haaman’s feet, dead. Those silver feathers are hard spines, now covered in a viscous red.
Other spirits fight alongside them, and he shouldn’t be surprised but he is. They fight for their home, too. Basuin has seen so much rebellion before, but never on this side. Not until now.
The flames only grow as Basuin shoulders his way through the legion, his sword leaving bodies in his wake.
It’s hot here—sweat drips from his hairline.
The smoke makes everything hard to see. Coughing, wheezing as he ducks a backhanded dagger.
Hacking and spitting right after he disarms a man with a pistol.
It feels like too much. But a surge of something burning red and dark wraps him up in its clutches until it physically aches.
God magic, filling him to the brim, fueling him.
Basuin shatters through the ranks of Xalkhan soldiers, breaking each one that comes within reach.
He cannot see. Blinded by smoke and rage and the image of the wolf-man as it moves within him.
It doesn’t matter—his body moves through the battlefield as if he’s walked it a million times, because he has. Because he’s trained to be a warrior.
Basuin is strong again, as strong as he once was when soldiers, allies and enemies alike, cowered beneath his shadow.
This is just like Valkesta, fucking Valkesta all over again. As strong as he is, and as he was, it never changes the outcome. He acted selfishly. His want for death, to ask the elder tree to sever his tie to godhood, resulted in this.
Gyeosi burns because his anger dragged the Forest God away. He was deified to protect them. He failed again.
Selfish bastard. He marched his own squad up the Valkesi Mountains to save one soldier—one they had lost due to his own fault. When the Grimmalians took Tomaas, Bass claimed there was no choice. No soldier left behind. He wasn’t willing to lose someone else.
Basuin knew it was a trap and he still led his squad to death. Gods damn him.
He braces his foot against a legion soldier’s shoulder blades for leverage as he yanks his blade from the soldier’s spine. Blood blooms across the man’s back, seeping out from underneath his armor. Ren’s body looked just like his.
It invades his mind, the warmth of her blood on his hands.
How pale her olive skin looked under the light of day.
Red is not a color he thinks of when he conjures the image of Ren in his head.
He thinks of blue, and forest greens, and white.
Not the red that trickled down her nose and marred her chin.
Ko promised they would help her; take her to Hou-tou, who could heal even the worst of wounds. Basuin doesn’t even know what happened to her, what injured her.
Whatever they did to her, they’ll pay for it.
A howl builds in his chest. A compulsion to throw his head back and cry for blood. The veins in his neck pulse, a heart beating. A heart he doesn’t own anymore. The wolf-man is loud enough for the both of them.
When he razed Ulenski to the ground, there was nothing left but soot and ash—no survivors. His bronze skin was painted in black, eyes wild and boots covered in offal. Far beyond, on an overlook jutting out from the Valkesi Mountains, a black wolf howled to its moon-mother.
Before he slaughtered them, the soldiers called it an omen. And when they died, they called him the Black Wolf.
You gave them a chance, Kensy lied to him. But if you had given them two, you might have lost. Remember that, Black Wolf, Kensy said with his unkind smile.
This time, he watches the men who were cut from the same cloth as he razes this village to the ground instead. His arms are covered in soot and ash and blood. But this time, there are survivors—only none belong to the legion.
Kensy was kind enough to warn Basuin—and Basuin wasn’t smart enough to trust him. He knew, just like he knew about Valkesta. But he never learns.
Burning Gyeosi just like he burned Yaelic’s den. Kensy will set this whole forest aflame to find what he’s searching for, whatever that may be. If the gods refuse to answer him, then the gods themselves must burn.
Somewhere behind them, to the north, a wolf howls. He turns, a cold shot of fear striking through him. Yaelic.
Without warning, Haaman muscles him out of the way and shields themself with their bloodied wings, blocking an attack meant for Basuin. He whirls around Haaman and dispatches the soldier with a clean, upward arc of his longsword.
“They won’t fucking die,” Haaman says through gritted teeth. “There’s too many, and the fires—”
“We’ll fight until they fall,” he says, adjusting his grip on his sword’s hilt. It’s sticky with blood and sweat. “Go to the creek, with Yaelic.”
He doesn’t mean it as a slight, but Haaman thrusts their arms out and the spiny feathers covering their skin seem to flex and harden again.
“Not a chance,” they say, and then they run back into the fray.
He follows, content to do the same—and then the howl of agony becomes the scream of a child.
“Hami!”
Basuin sprints toward Yaelic. That scream is a command, as powerful a guide as the magic linking him to Ren. He clears the battlefield, what used to be a village, charging through the army.
And there sits Yaelic, in the middle of the fighting, on his knees in front of an unmoving body. No.
But then there’s a soldier, sword raised above his head, glinting like a guillotine about to drop upon Yaelic’s neck.
No.
Inside him, the wolf-man breaks its own spine to contort into the shape of Basuin’s ribs.
Its bones drive into his bones, its blood becomes his own.
And its fury, not so unlike the boiling in Basuin’s gut, races up his throat until the veins in his neck thicken and pulse. His whole body burns with god magic.
The scar of his god mark burns. The wolf-man growls and rises onto both hind legs, sharp claws embedded into all Basuin’s organs as it snaps its teeth, hungry for violence.
He feels it in his left palm, a pulsating heat that grows until his fingers are tight around the soldier’s neck, god mark searing into the man’s flesh as a brand.
Bass takes the soldier’s head and bashes it into his knee, and the force, backed by magic, ends the man’s life and he crumples in Bass’ hold.
Bass tosses him away. He reaches for Yaelic.
At his touch, Yaelic screams. Jade eyes wide, tears streaming down his face, jaw unhinged. Boyish hands covered in familiar blood.
Fire rages around them, soldiers and spirits clashing. The air shifts and Basuin turns out of instinct alone to skewer a man on his sword. And another. And then another, before he can fire a bullet from his gun.
He walks circles around Yaelic and the limp, white body draped over the boy’s legs, killing soldiers before they can kill first. Acting as a barrier between the battlefield and this bubble of grief Yaelic rests in. The boy is still screaming. Howling, staring empty-eyed at his brother.