Ask her—gods’ sake—what will happen to her if the forest is burned to ash. If the legion leaves nothing but black fields in their wake, like the one she cried in for him to see; for him to bear.
“What will you do?” he asks instead. Her hair, cut blunt at her shoulders, wavers like the tears of the Crying Trees, shaken by a sweeping breeze.
And what will you do, Captain? he remembers Isaniel asking, sweat-slick and hot in his refusal to unlatch the tent window. It was a bruising summer night. Basuin doesn’t even remember his own reply. Isaniel’s words crawled over his naked skin on that night like mosquitos, like mean fingers searching to make new wounds in his flesh.
Here, in the present, Ren quietly asks, “What?”
Basuin takes a step forward. “Will you continue to sabotage them? The legion. Killing the crops, rotting their food, destroying their weapons—Is that still your plan?”
When they sewed his eye up, they didn’t tell him that tears would burn it. Salt in a wound. He hunched over his cot, Isaniel’s long-sleeved undershirt strangled between his fingers—two broken, the others scarred.
And what if they surrender to us?
Now, Ren faces him. She raises her chin in defiance, dark eyes holding emotion he doesn’t recognize. Her jaw tightens, and Basuin takes another step toward her.
“What will you do?” he repeats himself. “When I am no longer a god and I’m gone.”
Will you defy your orders?
Basuin swallows, but he doesn’t back down. He takes another step, and another, until she is just out of reach. She’s always out of reach, it seems. Right outside the stretch of his fingers.
Ren’s eyes narrow. “Things will stay the same, as they always have. We do not need you.”
He hears it, her unspoken words: I do not need you.
But that’s not true. It can’t be true. If Ren doesn’t need him—if the forest doesn’t need him—then he wouldn’t have been deified. It wasn’t about being a chosen one. It wasn’t about power or being god-full or being anything. Basuin is just that—Basuin.
He was deified for a purpose, not for himself.
They do need him. To protect Yaelic, who’s entrusted his life to Basuin. To protect Ko, who he hurt, and Haaman, who loves someone as fully as Basuin loved someone before. To protect Hami, who hates him, but loves his brother enough to brave the enemy.
But most of all, to protect Ren. Ren, who loves this forest but doesn’t know how to protect it. Ren, who would do anything for her people. Her dedication is strong, but her methods are soft. She truly believes her power can drive off the army, but she’s wrong. Dead fucking wrong. Bass knows this because he’s been a soldier. The legion was his home.
Starving them out, breaking weapons they can rebuild, sending them nightmares—soldiers have been through worse. He’s been through worse. And he still followed his orders.
Not all will surrender, he told Isaniel that night. He remembers it now. He told Isaniel, Never will they all surrender.
Above Ren’s head, the Crying Trees stretch tall. She looks so small, a figure painted against the backdrop of the forest, planted like a new sapling to grow among this ancient place. But this is her home—these are her people. When she walks through this forest, the trees sway in her stead and the birds in the trees sing to her, and even the breeze offers its worship through her hair.
The Crying Trees bow their heads to her even now, somehow further, leaves entangled and tears weeping, reaching for Ren as if to pull her into their embrace. They’re all connected. The tangle of roots running along the ground aren’t singular anymore. They don’t belong to one tree, but to all.
This forest is all—and not all will surrender. Ren won’t. This is her entire world, her family, that risks destruction. Ren loves this forest, and it loves her back.
Basuin can’t go. He won’t go to the elder tree. He couldn’t protect Isaniel, nor the rest of the Valkesta unit, not even his godsdamned mother who he marched to war for. And yet, the gods still asked protection of him.
It’s a second chance.
The wolf-man laughs lazily, rolling onto its side. Humans and their chances. You all think so little of the world.
Then what is it, if not a second chance?
A command, the wolf-man tells him. A decree. We’ve given you a destiny—you should be thankful for it.
Bass grabs at the front of his shirt, right where the wolf-man resides. It hurts, aches in a way it hasn’t before. A destiny. This is what he was built for, where his choices brought him.
“I won’t go,” he says aloud.
The wolf-man snaps its teeth together, drool dripping from its jaws.
