He turns toward the house.
Still standing, but barely. More of them have reached it now, hauling themselves upward, fingers catching in broken wood, feet finding holds where there should be none, bodies stacking against the walls until they begin to scale it. Every windowis shattered, jagged, filled with movement as bodies force themselves through, breaking whatever remains of the structure with sheer weight. The front door has a hole punched straight through the wood, dark and ragged, and things are already forcing themselves through it.
He listens. Nothing. There is no sound from below, no voice, no cry. The silence hits him wrong and sinks in fast, something colder than the wind, something that does not belong to absence but to an end.
No.
He shuts it down immediately. She is alive. She has to be. She is resting, that is all. The silence means she is resting, and he clings to it hard enough that it almost feels real. He will get inside. He will go down those stairs and find her there, alive and breathing, her wounds already closing. Maybe the labor has not started yet. Maybe it has. Maybe the children are already here, safe and alive, and he holds onto that even knowing how unlikely it is, even knowing what he heard before the silence came, because he needs it.
He moves for the house.
The dead close around him immediately, drawn tighter by the motion, pressing in and forcing him back into the fight before he can cross the distance. He tears through them harder, less control and more force, and it does not break the line. He tries again and fails again. Something hits him from the side hard enough to drive him down and he catches himself on one hand, drives upward, tears through what is closest, forces space that disappears the second he creates it.
He drags in a breath that does not feel like enough.
The thought comes through the strain of it, sharper now. The Avanki were not meant to meet them here. They were meant to meet them at the third safehouse, a full day after, and if they have already reached it they are waiting there without knowing the coordinates were wrong, without knowing this house even exists. And if they have not reached it yet, if they are still traveling, then no one is coming. Not now. Not in time.
He forces himself forward again because none of it matters. He is on his own.
Something catches his shoulder. Teeth. He rips it away before it can hold and another latches onto his side, then another. He burns them off but it costs him more than it should, the fire slower to answer and weaker when it comes.
His movements grow heavier. Each strike takes more, each turn pulls harder through muscle that has begun to fail him. The fire comes less often and when it does it burns shorter, giving less each time he reaches for it.
He turns toward the house again and sees it beyond, another line farther out, another mass moving through the heavy snow, darker and thicker than the rest, pushing forward in a slow steady weight that will reach the house whether he stands or not.
His body wants to stop. To drop where he stands and let it end.
He cannot.
She is alive. The children could still be alive. That is enough. He moves again and something hits him from behind, hard, and he stumbles forward. Another catches his back. Another his arm. He tears them away but it costs him too much and when he tries to pull the fire again it comes weak and thin and not enough.
His body begins to give and he feels it, the shift coming slower, the recovery taking longer, his breath tearing through his chest, each pull harsher than the last.
He kills another one. Then another.
Then he drops.
The shift breaks, his body collapsing back into itself and forcing him into human form as he hits the ground, the cold coming back all at once beneath him. Snow. Blood. His and theirs both. He tries to push himself up and fails, then drags himself forward on one arm and then the other, toward the house, toward the broken door hanging open and silent.
Nothing else matters.
He keeps moving, even knowing he may not make it in time, even knowing what that silence might mean, because there is still a chance.
And that is enough.
The Plea
COLSAR
He cannot rise again. His body has already chosen for him. The shift is gone, the strength is gone, and he is human again, broken open in the snow, breath tearing through a chest that will not fill enough to matter. The cold presses into him from below, into his bones, into the blood that has already soaked through everything.
He does not fight it. He does not have anything left to fight it with. The house is in front of him, the door open and wrong, something moving inside it that he cannot look at again. He closes his eyes instead, just long enough to reach, and he goes deeper than he has before. Not outward, not toward the dead, the wind, or the heavy snow still driving across the open ground. Inward, past the pain, past the body that has already failed him, past everything he understands about what he is. There, something remains, faint and buried and waiting.
His hand curls into the snow.
"Fyrekin Council." The words scrape out of him, barely held together, pulled from what little breath he has left. "Whatever I am supposed to be."
His chest tightens, his vision dimming at the edges. He forces the rest through anyway. "Let me be that now."
