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No, not Lucas. That thought is cowardice. My mate does not create rot. He is not responsible for the shadows that move under my old bones. He did not put rage in me; he revealed where it had been sleeping. The bond sharpens everything. Want. Joy. Jealousy. Fear. If there is ugliness in the sharpened thing, the ugliness is mine.

I bend over him at last because leaving without touching him feels cruel, even if waking him would be worse. I press my mouth to the back of his shoulder, kissing those ember-marks lightly enough that he only shifts and sighs. His scent rises, warm and trusting. The bond reaches toward me in sleep, soft as a hand searching.

I almost stay.

My body argues better than my mind. Stay until morning. Let him wake under my hand. Let him laugh at the bed, at the way I hover like a guilty creature, at my hatred of his cold box. Let him call me Wildheart in that fond, quiet voice that makes all my ancient pieces lower themselves happily at his feet.

Tell him then. Tell him I was frightened by my own jealousy. Let him scowl and touch my face and say I am being an idiot in ways no forest goddess could manage better.

But the rage was mine before Lucas could soothe it.

I need Aestrata before I let my mate tell me I am still good.

So, I rise.

The bed barely moves when I leave it, though the softness clings to my feet like a weak bog. I stand in the dark of his room and look at him for longer than wisdom allows. The cabin is quiet. The cold box hums in the other room with its smug little throat. The squirrel in the eaves scratches once and then goes silent, perhaps sensing that tonight is not a night for crimes.

Lucas sleeps on.

I need words he can find when he wakes.

Writing is human and slow. I have learned some from watching him. He leaves notes to himself on paper near the door and then forgets to obey them. He makes marks for trail maps, for reports, for warnings other humans will understand. My hands were not shaped for pens, but this human form can hold one well enough.

On his small table beside the bed, I find a notebook and the pen he chewed while thinking two nights ago. It smells of his mouth. That almost stops me for a foolish moment. Then I sit on the edge of the chair, too large and too tense for it, and force my hand around the pen.

The first line is crooked. I stare at his name until the letters blur into meaning and ache.

I write slowly because if I let the bond carry the message, it may wake him, and I cannot trust myself to feel him panic and still go. The words are blunt. Poorly shaped. Mine, but less full than thought. He will understand. He understands me better than anyone has.

Lucas

I come back in few days. I do not leave you. Not angry. Never angry with you. I go to speak with deep earth. Something old woke in me tonight. Too much teeth. Too much Var mine. I must ask Mother if this is guarding or becoming wrong.

You are safe. Den is watched. I hear if true fear calls. Do not chase into deepwood. Deepwood does not know your feet yet.

Onyx

I pause, then add one more line because I can already hear his voice in my mind, hurt covered in anger, calling me dramatic and ancient and impossible.

I promise. I come back, Little Ember.

The letters are shaped wrong and the grammar is incorrect, I think, but I leave it. It is my voice more than perfect human marks would be.

I set the note where his searching hand will find it. Then I take the black stone from my pocket, the onyx he placed for me once on the porch when he thought apology could be offered to trees, and put it on the corner of the paper. He gave me that stone when he did not yet know he was naming me. It will hold the page. It will hold the promise, perhaps, better than ink.

At the door, I stop.

Leaving his den without goodbye feels like breaking a threshold, but waking him would make him reach for me. And if he reaches, I will stay.

I step outside before my resolve can wither into want.

The forest receives me coldly at first, or perhaps that is only my own fear. I shift before I reach the tree line, moving fast and running from the cabin, from Lucas’s sleeping scent, from the marks on his body and the note under his stone.

Human skin gives way. Bone rises. The skull settles over my face with a familiar weight that should comfort me. Antlers push into the night. Claws take the earth. The lantern hangs dark from its tine, silent and useless, because I need no light where I am going.

Deepwood lies beyond the paths Lucas knows.

Beyond the ridge, beyond the cedar hollow, and beyond the old creek turned south by landslide, there are places even I rarely walk. Not because they forbid me, but because they do not belong to ordinary patrol. The trees grow closer there, older, their trunks blackened with dampness and time. The ground remembers more blood. Roots twist over stones that have never seen human boots. Sound behaves differently. It does not echo. It sinks.