We find the burrow in late spring.
It takes three days of travel from the mountain, south and east, down through the foothills into the lowland scrub where the air is warmer and the vegetation thickens. Ruelle walks beside me, her pack on her back, the notebook inside it.
She’s been writing less, not because the science stopped but because the silence between entries has started to feel like enough.
I haven’t been back here in thirty years. The landscape has changed: the scrub is taller, the paths I remember as clear are overgrown.
I was a youngling, scared and alone, cast out of my mother’s burrow after her death by the larger males.
But the heat pits remember the terrain the way my body remembers things my mind has tried to forget, and we find the ridge and then the hollow and then the entrance.
The burrow is abandoned, the roof partially collapsed at one end, roots pushed through the walls, the entrance half-buried in dead scrub.
“This is it,” I say.
Ruelle looks at the entrance, then at me. “Take your time,” she says. She sits on a rock outside the entrance and opens her notebook and doesn’t write anything; she just holds it, the way she holds things when her hands need something to do while she waits.
I go in alone.
The burrow is smaller than I remember. Or I was smaller then, eleven years old, curled in the corner, watching an old male’s mate sleep while he told me something I carried for three decades. The sleeping area is at the back, the furs gone, rotted, the stone shelf where Thassren kept his things collapsed.
But the wall behind the sleeping area is intact. And scratched into the stone, in human handwriting, small and careful, letters I didn’t see when I was eleven because I was in the wrong corner and looking at the wrong things, is writing. The marks are shallow, made with something sharp, and they cover a section of the wall about two feet square. Behind where she slept. Nobody else lived here.
I lean close. The years have worn some of the marks smooth, and parts are lost where the stone has flaked.
But enough remains.
He thinks he is consuming me. He says it sometimes, in the dark, when he believes I’m asleep.The next lines are damaged, only fragments visible:...confession...crime he’s committing...
He doesn’t see what I see.
The foods I lost were foods I didn’t care about. The plants I can’t touch are plants that never mattered. My skin shimmers in the light and I hold my arm up in the morning...Stone flaked away here. Then, lower:...it is his color on me.
He gave me warmth in a world that was cold. He gave me a home when I had none. He gave me his venom and his body and his heart and he calls it eating and I call it...The next word is worn but I can read it....love...The sentence continues, partiallylost:...and he is wrong, and I will never be able to make him see it because his guilt is larger than my voice.
The last lines are the deepest cut, pressed hard into the stone, meant to survive.
I was happy. He could not hear it. But I was happy.
I stand in the burrow for a long time. The light through the collapsed roof falls on the words, her handwriting clear even after the years, the letters pressed deep into the stone, meant to outlast her.
Meant to outlast him.
I was happy. He could not hear it.
I walk back outside. The light is bright after the burrow. Ruelle is on the rock, notebook in her lap, watching me. She sees my face.
“Sirath?”
I sit beside her and take her hand. Her fingers are warm, her grip firm, her hand steady. Both hands steady.
“She was happy,” I say.
Ruelle doesn’t ask who. She knows.
“She wrote it on the wall. Behind where she slept. He never saw it.” My voice is doing something I can’t control, the words thick. “He called it eating. She called it love. She said his guilt was larger than her voice.”
Ruelle’s hand tightens on mine.
