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Lucas is no ordinary human; he is mine. He is marked by forest, by bond, by choice, by teeth, by every stubborn refusal that kept him from following the false lantern even when grief had hollowed him nearly to the bone.
And I am not above begging.
I cross the first root-marker without slowing, though the air thickens so violently it presses against my chest. I snarl through it. Not in challenge—never at her. A plea with teeth because I have forgotten gentler languages. The trees twist closer, trunks black with old rain and time. The scent of deepwood rises around us, cold moss, buried stone, dark soil, old blood that is not rot but memory.
Lucas makes a small sound in my arms, barely more than breath, and the sound cuts me open more surely than my brother’s claws. “St…ay,” I force out.
The word tears my throat. I have spoken so little with this human shape, and less in true form, but I drag the sound out anyway because the bond is fraying and mind-speech keeps slipping off him.
He needs something to hear with human ears. He needs his name. My voice is ruined, still raw from the first time I forced it around him after escaping the deepwood, but I speak because silence has hurt him enough.
“Stay, Lu…cas,” I croak, each syllable breaking over teeth and bone. “Stay.”
His lashes do not lift.
The bond dims.
No.
The word shakes the trees. It leaves me through mouth and mind and claw striking earth. “No.”
I reach the old stream that guards the second boundary and plunge through it. The water is black and cold enough to bite even through my true body, splashing over Lucas’s boots, his torn jeans, the blood at his side where the Varkhyn’s claw opened him while promising slow pain.
The sight of that wound nearly makes me fall. I have packed it with moss and pressure and what little forest craft I could steal in the frantic moments after cutting him down, but the blood keeps coming. Not fast now, but worse. Slow and steady, as if his body has grown too tired to fight the loss—or there is not much more to lose.
I remember him hanging in the mine. I remember his eyes when I broke through the rock shelf, dazed and half gone, yet still finding me. I remember him trying to smile because even dying, Lucas wanted to comfort me first.
The hollow opens.
The stone circle waits at its center, blacker than night, ringed by roots rising and sinking like the backs of sleeping beasts. The quartz veins glimmer faintly beneath the moon, and rain does not fall here though it falls everywhere else. The air is not empty. It is held.
Aestrata is already listening.
I stumble into the circle and fall to my knees with Lucas in my arms.
My antlers strike the earth, and my claws dig into soil. I shelter him against me with both arms, bending my skull over his face to shield him from nothing and everything.
His skin has gone too pale beneath the ember-marks. His hair is wet and copper-dark against my forearm. There is blood at the corner of his mouth, blood on his shirt, blood beneath his nails where he fought the ropes, fought terror, fought long enough for me to find him.
“Mot…her,” I say aloud, and the word is broken, ancient, terrible in my throat.
The circle does not move.
“Mother,” I say again, louder, because I do not care if my voice splits itself apart. “Aestrata. Hear… me.”
The roots tighten around the circle, and Lucas’s breath catches, then stutters.
I press my hand to his chest. “No. No, Little Em…ber, no.”
The bond shows me the thread fraying thinner. I lower my head until the skull over my face rests near his brow. My voice collapses into something rough and wet, but I keep speaking because the speaking is all I have left.
“Take me. G-give him my years. Give him my root. Give him… my b-breath. I have walked… long enough. I have… guarded enough. I have seen… rivers move and… t-towns grow, and men make roads… over deer paths. Take all of it.”
The ground remains silent, and the panic in my chest rises so violently that I nearly crush him against me. I loosen my arms at once, shaking, terrified of my own strength even now, even with the cleaned rage Aestrata gave me and the Varkhyn dead by my hands.
“Please,” I say, and this word is smaller.
Human.
