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.
