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No.
His mouth opens. “Excuse me?”
I let the amusement move through the link before I answer. I’m learning
“Wow. Bold of you to sass me in your giant death-deer form.”
Death-deer form.
The phrase makes no sense and complete sense at once. I taste it in the link, the way he uses humor to put his hands around what would otherwise be too large.
Death-deer. Giant. Sass. I am not certain I hold the last precisely, but I understand enough to know he is teasing me.
Teasing, I say, testing cleaner speech.
His smile flashes brighter, pleased. “Look at that. You’re gettin’ better.”
I am, and not only because the true shape lets my mind spread wider. It is him. Little Ember’s speech is full of turns and hooks and meanings tucked under meanings, and the more time I spend in his company, the more the knots make sense. He is less straightforward than the forest and more honest than most humans. Those things live together in him without fighting. I like it. I like him.
He shakes his head, but he is smiling fully now. Not the faint, careful smile from before. The expression changes his whole face, pulling warmth through every ember-mark.
Happiness hits me so hard, I have to lower myself to one knee before him. Not in surrender, but because standing over him suddenly feels wrong when all I want is to be close enough to breathe him in without making him crane his neck.
His smile fades into something quieter as I kneel, and he takes a step closer, reaching out to touch the edge of the skull fused over my face. His fingers trace the weathered bone, careful over the ridges and old scars, then slide down to where slate skin meets the marking near my jaw.
A low rumble moves through me, and his pulse jumps. Good? I ask.
He lets out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Good, just… intense.”
I lower my head into his hand. Happiness is too small a word for what opens in me. I have known satisfaction from territory held safe, from winter survived, from threat driven out, from the old earth offering food after long hunger. I have known the low, private comfort of lying in a den while rain hammered the world outside and the forest breathed around me as if it and I were the same body.
I have never known this.
My mate touching my true face and looking at me with awe instead of horror. My mate choosing to stand near when every story of his town tells him to flee.
I am glad Aestrata made me endure.
Beautiful, he called me.
No one has ever used such a word for my true shape. Their stories made me hunger, warning, and punishment. Their songs, when they still had songs instead of screens and tinny little speakers, called me shadow and horn and grave-lantern.
Even those who respected my ground respected from a distance, the way one respects a cliff edge or river flood. Useful reverence. Fear with manners. This is something else.
My mate sees bark and slate and bone and the old death-mask fused to my face and gives me beauty.
16
Onyx
His questions start, threaded with pauses as he seems to learn to listen not only to the answers but to the spaces between them. It pleases me that he does not hoard his curiosity out of caution. He lets it live, climb over his remaining fear, and poke at me from every angle.
The forest chose well.
“So, the lantern,” he says after a while, glancing up at the tine where it hangs. “You really just… carry that around?”
Yes.
“Why?”
