His teeth sink into the first body he finds. He tears that man in two. Then, he skewers two more soldiers on his canines, crunching down on their bones and drooling them back out from his maw in a mix of blood and entrails. The air tastes of something sweet and smoky. There isn’t enough fire. Not enough of it.
Magic collects on the surface of his body, unable to contain itself within him. His black fur glows red, ominous and dangerous, and when he rears back and opens his jaws again, flames burst from his mouth. The Wolf God breathes in embers, spits fire onto the bastion, and everything goes up. This place burns. Shaelstorm is swallowed up by the very thing they’ve destroyed his forest with.
This isn’t cruelty. It’s punishment. The same thing that brought him here.
He can’t tell what they shout and scream and cry at him while they shoot their guns. More and more root-armor pads his body with every bullet they attempt to lodge into his skin. He sweeps them up in his paws and plays with them, teases his prey right before he slams his snout into them and breaks their little bodies. Kills them.
“Please!” someone shouts above the rest. His head snaps to them, sunk low to the ground and ready to pounce. A man drops to his knees, bows his head to the ground, crying. “Have mercy, please! Gods, have mercy, we are weak. We are wrong. We are only human!” he prays, sobbing with his face pressed into the dirt.
Other men toss their weapons in futility and do the same, dropping to the ground and bowing, begging for mercy.
“You would ask for mercy after what you’ve done?” he growls at them, teeth dripping with blood. “Insolent men. You beg for forgiveness even in the wreckage of what you’ve destroyed!”
The Wolf God howls, neck stretched up to the missing moon.
“Gods, have mercy,” another begs. “Gods, be good.”
He slams into another building, destroying one of the large barracks, shredding through wood and setting it aflame with a snuff from his snout. And then he lunges for another. The mess hall, he remembers. He thrashes it and breathes fire into the building’s bones until it catches like a match head.
He turns for the next barracks, but a woman stands before him. Small compared to him. She’s shed her armor already and bows her head at him, hands upturned and palms stretched out to him in surrender and prayer.
“From the Winter River, there arose a god,” she recites, eyes closed. “And that god was Sa-cha, and he was good.”
Basuin recoils, jerking his head away.
“Our good Sa-cha cried until the River ran, and his tears birthed more gods, and they birthed man.”
Man is weak and man is small, his mother would recite from memory, her hands moving across his own as they sat up late at night in her bed. But Sa-cha’s River has love for all.
A man, and another man, shuffle toward the woman. Each places their palms out to him in worship, soot-streaked faces and fingers covered in blood. They look weary, not scared. They have already lost.
“Be us weak and be us small, we turn to Sa-cha, for he is ever and he is all. Our gods give the gift of light and night, birth and death, mistake and mercy,” they pray to him. To the Wolf God.
“And if we are good,” a voice pants, breathless, over everyone else’s. Tehali is waiting behind him, blood streaked across her face. “The Winter River opens its gates and grants forgiveness to those who are worthy,” she finishes, closing the prayer. Her hand is dripping blood.
Cold, freezing guilt replaces the burning heat of anger. Shaelstorm is ruined. Dead bodies litter the ground. The bastion is half destroyed, lit aflame, and continuing to burn to pitch. These soldiers aren’t the ones standing in their own wreckage. It’s him.
Kensy really did make him. Desperate enough to become violent out of fear. Out of love. Out of losing something.
Ren—if Ren saw this, she’d be ashamed. He can hear her voice perfectly in his head, a blessing and a curse. Her voice is an echo on the roar of the flames around him.
The way her lips form his name and the way she told him that she didn’t want to go to war with an army she couldn’t fight. Her voice is clear, and stubborn, and still gentle somehow. The way she told him that she loved him. That he was the first.
She’d be disgusted if she saw him like this. Horrified at the beast he’s become. A monster, just like Kensy. Basuin kills everyone he loves. It’s a curse to love Basuin, but worse a curse to be loved by him.
Ren wanted peace. She didn’t want things to end in blood.
But he’s glad he did it anyway, because it’s ended. No matter how horrified she’d be.
An animalistic cry tears out of his jaws and Basuin leaps across the bastion and toward the watchtower. His claws scrabble for purchase, turning into fingers once again as his tree-bark armor chips away and his body wanes into something not quite human again. Still godly, still rife with scars and blood and red magic, but human as he climbs over the guardrail to fall onto the platform. His body aches.
Part of him believes it was a mistake. Part of him thinks it’s righteous. A means to an end. He told the deer-girl he would end it in fire and blood and he did, but Ren wanted peace. Ren is dead and she wanted peace and he should’ve honored that. But he couldn’t. The anger inside him, half human, half god, or maybe all him still—it consumed him.
Ren is dead. He can’t bring her back. They deserved to die for that.
No, they didn’t. It was Kensy who brought this war, Kensy who shipped them over the sea and to this island, Kensy who commanded they destroy the forest. It was Kensy who killed Ren.
They were just soldiers, like Basuin.
