The fire popped. Somewhere behind us, Randy’s voice carried on.
I had not interrupted her.
I would not.
I only watched, listening to the weight of her words, the shape of her passion, and the way she held the world in her hands and tried to make it better.
And I was pleased.
There was a fire in this woman. I’d felt it in the way she moved beneath me and took without hesitation, and in the way she let herself go without realizing she was capable of it.
Most mortals drifted through life unaware of what they could actually feel. But not her.
She felt everything. Even if she tried to pretend she didn’t.
That was what made her different.
And that was why tarrying further with her would be cruel.
The fire flared, casting long shadows across the clearing.
I turned.
Randy stood with arms raised, shaking a bundle of leaves over the flames, his voice climbing to match their crackling heat.
“The Green Man hears us!”
I sighed.
When I turned back to Samantha, she was still watching me—not the ritual, and not the show Randy was making of himself. I almost wished she were watching him instead. Or maybe that she’d managed to stay lost in her modern world altogether.
It would have been easier for her.
She would go back to her city, her work, her endless losing fight. She would build and love and grow—and one day, she would forget my name. Or maybe, someday, when the right kind of heat curled through her, she’d fondly recall some tall stranger who’d set it burning.
I would be long gone by then. The season would shift, as it always did, and I would follow.
Spring’s call stretched far beyond this place. I could already feel it pulling at me as it whispered of lands waking from winter’s grip—of rivers swelling far away, of the first blooms bursting across distant valleys, of wild hills everywhere untouched by roads or walls or men who thought themselves masters of the land.
A rustling movement pulled me back to the present. The man called Randy, ever undeterred, was digging through a satchel at his feet. He pulled out a worn, leather-bound book. Its pages were brittle with age, and its spine cracked as he forced it open.
“I found something in the university archives,” Randy declared as he puffed up with importance. “An original source. No watered-down translation. The real deal.”
He cleared his throat and held the book aloft, as if the weight of it alone would lend him authority.
“Oh, come on,” someone groaned. “Give it a rest, man. Bet you can’t even pronounce half those words.”
Laughter rippled through the gathering, but Randy was undeterred.
He planted his feet, squared his shoulders, and began to read.
The moment the first word left his mouth, I stiffened.
This was no modern language. It was older than the stones beneath our feet, and the forests that had risen and fallen across this land. It was the language I’d used with the doe. A tongue once spoken only by those who knew the weight of what they were calling.
But Randy did not know.
Clueless laughter rippled through the group. But it was no laughing matter.
