Debt begets debt that is never repaid. Basuin hooks his pinky around hers.
Ren was human, just as he was. But Basuin died old, with a life lived, even if he was nothing but a soldier. Ren was a child; a little girl, who died and became a shrine. How lonely she must have been. How gracious the gods were—how cruel they are.
Ren plays with his mother’s godstone, all worried jade and desperate prayers. “I was jealous of you,” she admits. “I’ve never spoken to the gods before. Not in my whole life.”
The light streaming through the forest canopy creates a halo circling Ren’s hair. There’s a shimmer of red amidst her umber strands, a color he hadn’t noticed before. A single bright tear rolls down the plane of her cheek, catching on her moon-curved jaw.
“Despite it all—despite how I treated you—you were kind.” Her voice is so small. “Kind to Yaelic, and Qia, and Ko and Haaman. Kind to every spirit. Kind to me.”
His mouth is too dry to speak, his tongue heavy.
“You always admit when you’re wrong. I can’t do that.” She hangs her head, tears falling from the soft slope of her nose. “I had no one to guide me. No parents and no gods,” she whispers. “There was only Ko, who taught me how to wield my magic. But he’s gone now, and I don’t know—I don’t know what to do with this vacant space beside me.”
Ren stares down at her trembling, empty hands. “What if I did it wrong, Bass? What if I’ve been wrong all this time?”
Basuin reaches, harbors Ren’s cheek in the shelter of his large palm, and turns her gently to look at him. Please, look at him. See that he sees her, that he won’t look away from her.
He’s never seen Ren as Am-sa, nor as his god. She isn’t the forest to him, a thing to protect.
She’s always just been Ren. Who hated him. Whose tongue cut into his bones, whose eyes daggered into his own. A threat. A curse. A treasure. Something mean. Something benevolent.
Someone who bleeds. But bleeds for the ones they love.
Basuin doesn’t give a shit if Ren doesn’t love him—he doesn’t give a shit. He would do anything for her, even if she did nothing else for him. He’ll bleed for her. Cut him open, tear him apart. Fuck it, let the wolf-man hollow out his chest again. Take his heart, and his organs, and his bones, and all he is.
Anything that’s left, he’ll lay at Ren’s feet. Even if she doesn’t love him.
Because Ren is afraid of water. And she was human once. And even she questions if she’s made mistakes. Ren sits here, now, and tells him that she fears water and that she was once human like him and that she might’ve been wrong.
Her tears are hot against his palm as she presses into his touch, and Basuin doesn’t care if Ren may never love him. As long as she trusts him, he’ll happily bleed out among these trees for her.
“And what if you were?” he asks, gently, as gentle as he can be after a lifetime of brutality.
Ren clenches her eyes shut and turns into his hand, trying to hide. But Basuin frames her face with both hands now, baring all of her to him. His calloused thumb wipes at the tears she cries.
“What if you were wrong?” he asks again.
“Then I’ve failed,” Ren sobs. “Then everyone who has died has died because of me.” When she looks up at him, her dark eyes glitter behind pools of tears in distress. “My first friend—my only friend—is gone, and I am all who’s left to blame. If I’d let you kill Kensy, Ko wouldn’t have died. You know that, don’t you?”
A laugh, mean and guilty, is wrenched from her mouth. Her fingers are so tight in the cotton of his shirt it might tear.
“What sort of peace is that?” Her voice is broken. “This isn’t the peace I promised. This peace brought death. I chose this.”
Another aching sob blossoms in her chest and it takes everything in him not to kiss her forehead, kiss that wrinkle of anguish in her brow and soothe it all away.
“I chose wrong,” she cries.
“You’re human,” he murmurs.
“I’m a god.”
“You were human, first.” Basuin gathers her in his arms and Ren crumbles. Fuck this distance he keeps trying to put between them, to hide how he covets her touch. He doesn’t care anymore. Because Ren collapses, and Basuin pulls her against his chest and cages her safely in his embrace.
The whole forest—the whole world—is cradled right here between his two legs and two arms.
“You did your best,” he murmurs into her hair. “You didn’t bring the army here. Even if you killed, you couldn’t have stopped them. You did what you knew how to do, and you did it well.”
She was a child when she died, stuck frozen in time. They made her a god and didn’t tell her what to do.
