“And then—” her twilight eyes capture him once again,
“—the god without a home finds a new one. The living eat the ancient. The dead come back to life.”
To punctuate her words, the wolf-man’s canines seize Basuin’s lungs and squeeze the air out of him. Painful and sharp. A sword run through him, fire licking at his skin. Ren never stops watching him, even as he wheezes and clutches his chest.
The wolf-man built its new home there, where Basuin’s heart used to lie. Maybe the wolf-man ate it, the way humans eat at their gods. Bone by bone by bone, slivers of sharp, cutting tools.
Like Ren’s eyes. The edge of a blade.
“Ask me,” she says, too lightly to be a demand but not hard enough to be a command. “Ask me how gods are born.”
He sucks in a haggard breath and swallows his own blood. “How are gods born?”
From the Winter River, he thinks, there arose a god, and that god was Sa-cha. Please Sa-cha, please let Isaniel make it to the Winter River, and he was good.
“They possess the dead like humans possess houses,” she tells him. “Like a child possesses its mother’s stomach.”
Something howls inside his head. The wolf-man blinks into his mind and takes up residence. Again, and again, and again.
But he knew this, that godhood is another leash tied around his neck, a knot he can’t cut through. That he is owned once again, his fate another command in a long chain of orders he can’t say no to.
And yet, to hear it out loud—to lose himself in Ren’s eyes, as dark as the Blacksalt Sea itself—feels more damning than anything.
“Did they tell you? What happens if you fail the duty you’ve been given?” Her gaze is sharp. Shame, yet again, wraps around his throat.
“The gods,” he says, voice wound tight. “I can’t hear them. They don’t talk to me.” Just like her, he refuses to say. But her voice, the image of her fist to her chest as she begged for an answer, is burned into his memory.
Her brows draw together, eyes flicking down to his neck and back. “But you wear the stone,” she says. “It’s a—”
“It was my mother’s,” he cuts her off, an ache in his ruined chest. “It doesn’t belong to me.” Unlike Kensy, Basuin knows that not everything in this world belongs to him.
Ren walks two steps closer to him. A breath between them, umber eyes of hers locked on him. “If you fail to protect the forest,” she says and draws nearer to him, “it won’t mean death. The Wolf God will release your body and you’ll disappear.”
“To the Blacksalt Sea?” he demands, breaths quickening as his lungs grow heavy in his chest.
“No,” Ren says. “You’ll go nowhere.”
Basuin pants, a tightness in his ribcage. Like the wolf-man inside of him is taking up too much space. Claustrophobic.
“What do you mean?” It hurts to speak.
In all his life, through all his mother’s stories, Basuin’s never heard of a nowhere. Humans go to the Winter River, or if they’re like him, they go to the Blacksalt Sea.
And dead gods—gods who can no longer walk the mortal plane—they go to the godrealm.
But he is no human, and he is no god. So then, what is he? All he knows, for certain, is that he’s dead.
The Blacksalt Sea is where he belongs. He has to go there. After everything, he’s given up his chance to see his mother, his comrades, Isaniel—he gave it all up. Basuin deserves punishment. He deserves that penance.
Because if he doesn’t repent, then what was it all for? Saying goodbye, leaving for war, watching everyone die around him. It’s cruel, to make him struggle for atonement when it’s all he’s ever wanted.
Ren straightens her back, somehow more rigid than before. “It’s as I’ve said. Your body will be left to rot as anything else. Your soul will die. You will go nowhere.”
His hands shake. He can’t breathe. The world spins away from him, his body attached to metal strings, and then he’s looking down upon himself from above. Watching how mechanically he moves, how his lips crack open to speak.
“And what of you?” he asks. “You’re the god of the forest.”
“I’ll die too,” she says. “My life is irrevocably linked to the forest. If one dies, so will the other.”
