Chapter 34
The darkness of his mind has never been this dark before.
It’s pitch and stuck, limbs moving so mechanical and slow that it’s painful.
Burning. Every part of him feels heavy, packed ice and snow atop him, weighing him down on the battlefield.
The winds of Valkesta howl. They howl so loudly that the echo could shatter metal and bone alike.
He covers his mouth with his hand. Rust on his tongue. Bile in his throat.
Ren is dead. Ren is dead.
Basuin takes her face in both his hands, gentle. Still gentle. Maybe he can wake her.
“Please,” he whispers, again and again. “Please, Ren,” he begs. With shaky fingers, he fumbles with his mother’s godstone, squeezing it in his hand so hard it aches. “I’ve never—”
He’s never asked for anything like this before. He’s never begged for something so bad.
Basuin begged when his mother died—to go home and bury her.
He begged Tehali to kill him when they returned to Ha’riste with fewer bodies than they left with.
He tried not to beg when Kensy said they were going on this godsforsaken crusade to claim this uninhabited island.
Uninhabited because Ithika and her host protected it—until Kensy slew her, again.
But he hasn’t begged like this.
“Please!” he shouts again, looking up to the sky, looking around the field, looking at the broken statue. “Please,” he cries, watching the way the stream soaks Sa-cha’s shrine in red the shade of Ren’s blood. “Take me. Take mine, my life.”
Barely twenty feet away, Kensy’s body hangs from Ren’s antler. His blood runs thick and dark, his hand still twitching. Basuin should’ve killed him first. He should’ve done what he does best. He’s a murderer. He failed at the one thing he’s good at.
The roar of the waterfall grows into screams in his ears. He can’t move. Ren has chained him here—he’ll stay until he’s washed away with her in tow.
“It was supposed to be me.” He chokes on his own tongue. “It was supposed to be my life.”
Fuck Valkesta. Fuck it all. He shouldn’t have died there. He’s glad he didn’t die there, in those mountains, under that ice. Because he’s here. And this is where he should’ve died. This is where he was meant to.
“Say something,” he begs. Not to Ren. Basuin hits his chest with his fist. “Say something!” he screams at the wolf-man.
Fuck’s sake. Basuin cries. Fat, hot tears. He claws at his face, nails in his eyes, wanting to tear his flesh raw.
“You’ve never been silent before,” he snarls. “You’ve always had something to say. So fucking say something.” He bows his head, dropping his forehead against Ren’s, frantically working to wipe away the tears that fall upon her perfect, cooling skin.
It should’ve been him. Why’d she take the shot? His sobs are the only sound in this place—this sacred place, defiled with blood and dead gods.
Come to the River, someone says. He nearly screams again out of pure rage.
“I’m here!” He turns his face upward. “I came all the way here and there’s nothing.” The River is nothing but a dream. Ren lies in its water and she lies there dead. Eyes closed. Limbs heavy.
The ghost of hands fall to his back and over his shoulders. Come to the River, my son.
Basuin whirls, but no one is behind him. “Ma?” He knocks his fist over his heart again. No wolf-man is home.
But something sparkles in the water, a glint of light. Not a reflection. Something real. It skips down the stream, bounding off the broken idol and toward the waterfall. When it slips inside, the water parts as if making way for a body.
Come to the River, his mother says again.
Basuin gathers Ren in his arms—she’s so heavy, blood smeared across her skin and water dripping from her clothes—and drags himself toward the falls.
He tucks Ren’s face into his shoulder as he wades through the curtain of water, shielding her from the spray.
Everything here is dark, except for the glow of the light jumping through the cave.
It draws him forward, further into the falls, until his eyes adjust to the blackness of the cave.
Here, a true river runs through the earth. The stream of it is cool on the crags, peaceful and unending. When he takes a step forward, the movement creates a blue glow from the water. Another step and the surface ripples in the same hue as the barrier that hid this place from them.
This is what he was looking for. The Winter River.
Place her in the water, his mother says again. With no hesitation, Basuin does as she instructs, moving further into the River and letting Ren’s body sink into the water. He cradles her head with one hand, his arm still wrapped around her waist.
“I love you,” he finally says, too late. It’s too late. “I want peace—I want to find peace with you, whatever that means. I’ll learn to let go. I’ll learn to forgive myself. We can find peace, together.” A trembling thumb runs over her bottom lip. “Please, Ren.”
His heart is tearing into two. Someone’s claws are sunk into him and ripping him apart.
Breaking him. He’ll never see her smile again.
Never see her twilight eyes, gorgeous eyes, anxious eyes.
He’ll never hear her laugh. Never again will he borrow anything from Ren—not the floral smell of her or the feeling of her hand in his.
Not her lips against his or how they move when she talks.
It’s unbearable. He’s lost his home again. It’s dead and his hands have left imprints in blood behind.
“I’ll do anything,” he bargains. “Just please, Ma. Let me wake up. Let this be a nightmare. I’ll do anything, I swear.”
The gods won’t speak to him anymore. Good. Because if they could, he would be offering everything he has. His eyes, his mouth, his hands, his bones. Anything to bring her back. Anything.
There’s something buzzing in the water. Something fizzing against his skin.
When he opens his eyes, Ren’s body is aglow with blue magic.
Not hers, but from the River. He pulls away, heart beating rapidly, afraid to disturb her.
Then, the image before his eyes shifts and changes as a spirit emerges from Ren’s body—a deer.
No; half deer, half woman.
She stands before him, naked, tattoos running blue along her pale skin in long swathes and winding around her limbs.
A deer’s head replaces hers, eyes glowing cyan, with long antlers the same color as Ren’s stretching out like a flower in bloom.
White hair falls in long rivulets around her shoulders, covering her breasts and ending below her waist.
The deer-girl tilts her head to the side, assessing him. When she blinks, her hand falls just above his chest, then pulls back as if he’s burned her. She makes no sound at all. Basuin stills himself, takes shallow breaths, but his heart races.
“You…” Her voice sounds like Ren’s did before, linked with other voices until a buzzing harmony is reached.
It echoes in the cave, bouncing off the water.
“You are lucky somebody loves you,” the deer-girl says, as if confused.
As if she doesn’t believe it to be true.
It sounds so familiar, but deadly all the same.
“I am,” he says, voice smaller than it ever has been.
“And…” She tilts her head to the other side now, hair falling over her antlers, a jingling of bells coming from nowhere. “And you loved her, did you not?”
“I did,” he answers. “I do.”
The deer-girl stares at him, like she can see inside of him. “Then so be it.”
Her hands reach for him, arms encircling his shoulders to pull him into a tight embrace.
As their bodies clash, her tattoos shed from her skin and jump to his, wrapping around him like vines, squeezing and constricting him until they’ve cut into his flesh and his bone to entangle in his organs.
She reaches for his sternum, his heart-bone, plunging herself inside of him.
As the deer-girl slithers into his skin, his head burns and screams, agonized by the prayers and cries and songs of thousands of others ringing out in the hellscape of his mind. Blinding white. Her fingers dig up the roots of his eyes and rip them out, then replace them with her palms.
An anger, unlike anything he’s felt before, consumes him.
Sweeps him away in a blaze burning so bright and hot he feels like he’s suffocating beneath it.
Desert dry, no air that isn’t burning with the heat of Elka’s sun to gulp down.
The Forest God fits herself into every single corner of his body as if she looks to become him—not just to possess him.
It’s heavy. This anger, so sudden and unbidden, is oppressive.
It’s so hot it burns him from the inside out and then creeps back inside him again.
There’s no way to shake it. No water to drink down and cool him.
Valkesta is a gift compared to this molten, sticky, suffocating fury.
Basuin falls to his knees on the bank of the River, choking and coughing and pounding his fist on the ground.
Was this the anger that possessed Ren? The anger she felt at every moment since godhood, the anger that consumed her, but didn’t control her the way it would control him?
And despite it, Ren chose peace. Over war, over killing, over everything, Ren chose peace. He was the naive one all along. Not her.
She’s dead. Sa-cha help him, Ren is dead.
He can’t bring her back. He’s lost again.
The Forest God’s anger wraps him up, blankets him from the grief, turns his heartache into a hunger for war.
It’s changing him, he can feel it. Basuin’s body, broken with anguish, is pieced back together by the Forest God, sinewed and stitched up with fury.
His back hunches and cracks. Fur grows on his skin. His mouth turns to maw and his teeth into fangs and his nails into claws and Basuin, rage like a brand igniting his skin, throws his head back and howls across the forest.
“Yaelic!” he growls at the top of his lungs. “Qia!”
He calls them to duty. They are his charges. Ren no longer lives, and she is no longer the Forest God, and now the Forest God has possessed him.
The bubble around the River breaks, shatters into nothing but a shimmer of magic, and beyond it—beyond the daylight that’s frozen in time, the night still black on the other side—waits Haaman with Yaelic and Qia in tow.
Behind them, all the faces and the spirits of the forest who are left. They’ve answered his call, or perhaps this is all the distance they could cross in time. Maybe they were stopped here by the barrier. He doesn’t care.
There’s no time for words, and even if there were, he’s being eaten by the burning ire that’s healed all the breaks in his bones, suffused through him.
“Qia,” he barks. “Ren is in the river. Tend to her. Call on Hou-tou.” Then, he turns to Yaelic, too boyish and too little and too young to be in a war. “Stay with her and protect her.”
“I want to come with you,” Yaelic starts, but a snarl from Basuin shuts him up.
“You will stay,” he bites. “Haaman!”
The sparrow looks at him warily. Like they don’t know if they should bow or puff out their chest.
“Watch over them.” Basuin waves a hand over at the spirits lining the trees. “Get them somewhere safe.”
“Where are you going?” Haaman asks, but Bass has already turned his back.
Kensy still hangs from the tree Ren grew from her magic, her antler stabbed in his gut. The blood is shiny, still trickling down and feeding its roots. Thick vines, grown from the tree, have begun to coil around him. It’ll feed on his matter, feast on his decay.
Bass braces his foot on the tree trunk and, magic running through him, rips Ren’s antler from the tree. The roots wrapped around Kensy tighten, but those calculating blue eyes have gone dark. Basuin wasn’t sure he’d ever see the day Kensy died.
If only Basuin had killed him. He wishes it. If only he could’ve saved Ren from killing; if only he could’ve saved her.
But, more than that, Basuin was meant to kill Kensy. For as much as Kensy made Basuin, Basuin made Kensy, too.
Kensy trained him like a dog, and every time Basuin rolled over and did as he was told, it grew the cruelty that Kensy was capable of. An obedient dog makes for an arrogant master.
But that arrogance brought him here. How far Commander Kensy has fallen, to die in the forest he lay claim over. Struck out to colonize. Basuin licks his lips—there’s blood on his mouth.
“I’m going to the bastion,” he says. “Back to Shaelstorm.”
He’s going to where everything began. Where he first set foot on this island.
With one last howl, stood up on his two legs, Basuin’s heart thunders and his body bends and breaks and grows until he falls onto his hands and knees—on all fours on the forest floor.
He can see above the canopy. He can see the whole forest stretched out before him.
Basuin growls, all wolf and no man, and then he lunges and breaks for the trees.
He leaps through the forest, large and unending.
But he is larger, and he sees everything.
The southern coast where Shaelstorm is built.
How will you end it? the deer-girl asks.
The same way it started. With fire, and with blood.