Chapter 33 #3
Fire roars behind him, a reminder that Ren is still here. A reminder that his race toward the River, toward Kensy, means his life is tied to Ren’s. If Kensy kills him here, Ren dies too. He swore he wouldn’t let that happen.
“What will you lose?” Basuin asks him. “If you don’t become a god and you go back to Ha’riste, what will they take from you?” A lick of sympathy coats the back of his mouth. They were friends, once. Weren’t they?
Everything is quiet. In this pocket of peace, protected from the outside world, the forest is so silent. He can almost hear himself breathe, it’s so quiet out here. Breathe in, breathe out, chest panting to keep his lungs filled.
Then, Kensy pulls out a cocked pistol and shoots him.
There is no pain—he flinches but there is no pain—and then a body falls into him, and when he opens his eyes, it’s Ren, and Ren is collapsing in his arms, and he smells blood, and Ren is bleeding, and her shirt is bloodied, and his knees hit the ground and Ren is so heavy in his arms and—
“Well, that’s one.” Kensy cocks his pistol again. “Now, two.”
In an instant, the field explodes in a shattering of blue magic too bright to comprehend and Ren lunges out of Basuin’s arms on all fours, a wild animal.
Her limbs stretch into long legs and her spine crooks and then breaks, hunching and shifting.
Her body grows into something imposing, larger than any animal he’s seen before, glowing with the blue of her magic as antlers sprout from her temples.
In her place stands a deer, fur white and glowing cyan, tall enough that her antlers scrape the trees. Inside of its trunk, Ren’s human body sits on her knees, palms pressed to the belly of the deer. Basuin reaches a hand out for her.
Before Kensy can shoot again, Ren charges him, impaling him on the end of an antler. Blood drips down the bone from Kensy’s disemboweled stomach.
The monstrous, beautiful deer that is Ren’s spirit turns and looks at him, viscera decorating her crown like jewels.
Back arched, hooves dug into the earth, head dipping low with the weight of Kensy’s body.
Her eyes are blank, white, wide, glowing.
Her human body is outlined in the blue that belongs to her, sitting on her haunches, staring at him.
Inside, she presses herself up from its belly and stands, a vision, a bright flash of light filling the clearing. When it fades, Ren’s hair whips against her cheeks, human again, but still coronated with blue-boned antlers. Kensy hangs from her laurels.
Then, she slams her hands upon the ground.
Ren sprouts a tree made of blue magic out of nothing at all.
This time, without his help. Basuin watches every cycle—seedling to sprout to root to tree as it grows and thickens and branches unfurl and leaves plume from it.
Ren rams her antler into the tree, slamming Kensy into the trunk and pinning him there.
And as her body slowly shrinks, magic waning away, her human hand reaches and snaps the antler from her hair. Blood stains her god mark.
“The gods did not choose wrong,” she speaks, her voice echoing with tones that don’t sound like her at all, overlapping voices carried from her mouth. “They abandoned you.”
And then, light bleeding from her body, Ren sinks. Basuin dives to catch her, skidding into the creek as he holds her in his arms. Red blooms from the shot in her chest, leaking blood from an exit wound in her back that he presses a hand against to staunch the flow.
The fear is so suffocating that when he opens his mouth, no words come out at all.
“Not so unfamiliar, is it?” Ren says, but it’s breathy and strained.
“Stop,” he whispers. “No.”
Ren reaches up, hand on his cheek. It’s sticky with blood—Kensy’s, or hers? He’s going to vomit. He’s going to lose it. Bass’ hand covers hers in desperation. The water beneath Ren turns red as it streams through the field.
“I’ve loved many things,” Ren says, “but why do you feel like the first?” She smiles, but it’s weak and trembling. “I love you, Basuin. Of Ankor, of the Wolf God—all of it. I love you, Basuin.”
The tears break with shuddering breaths and swimming vision. He hurries to wipe his eyes because he can’t do this right now. He has to save her. He has to heal her. He has to look at her face and commit it to his frail, lying, terrified memory so he won’t forget her.
“Don’t say that.” Basuin presses his hand to her chest and pumps red magic into her wound.
Stitch it up, mend it, damn it. Damn him.
“Don’t say it like that. We’ll rebuild.” His magic feels like it’s pouring into nothing, going nowhere.
It’s just being leached away. “Say it then, once we’ve rebuilt our home. ”
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” she says.
She sounds tired, like she’s beginning to drift away in the quietness of it all.
Basuin chokes on a sob and pours everything he can into his hands to heal her, but his magic keeps filtering through her.
Ren reaches up and clutches his hand instead, grip feeble. “I hope I did it right.”
He makes a noise, half laughter and half shock. “Everything you do is right. Everything—please, Ren.” He can’t bring himself to do anything more but beg. “Please.”
Basuin covers her with his body, cradling her tight. He cries into her neck. The magic he possesses won’t stitch it back together, won’t close the wound she’s losing life from. He’s losing her. Stitch the wound, stitch it up. Mend her, heal her, save her, anything.
But Ren stills in his embrace, and when Basuin pulls away to look, her eyes have closed. Her chest doesn’t rise again.
And just like that, he’s lost everything. Kensy won.