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His scent threads through the dark like smoke under a door. Pine. River water. skin. grief. anger. The mark at his shoulder burns faintly against the bond, and that burn tells me I am not lost. My mate is near. He is alive, and did not follow the lantern.

That last truth is the one I hold hardest.

Lucas did not follow.

The dream pulls me down into the deepwood again, and this time I understand I am dreaming while I stand inside the memory. Lucid, Lucas would call it. A dream that knows itself; a strange human phrase for a thing my kind used to call walking the old root twice.

The air tastes of rain that has not yet fallen, iron from wounds that are not yet open, and the terrible pressure of Aestrata’s attention moving underground. I had come to her afraid of myself. That fear returns with the memory, but exhaustion dulls it.

I see my true body kneeling in the circle, skull pressed to the black stone, antlers bowed low, claws sunk into soil. I remember the rage I carried there.

Her standing at Lucas’s porch. Her eyes on my mark. Her old claim-scent wrapped around regret. I had wanted her gone from his world in a way that frightened me after because the wanting had not been clean. It had not smelled of balance. It had smelled of pleasure at the thought of erasing what had hurt him.

Aestrata had answered slowly.

Not with words. She never answers like humans want gods to answer. No bright mouth in the sky, no soft hand upon the head. She answers through weight. Through root pressure. Through the way every buried thing in the earth turns its face toward the one asking and forces truth through bone.

When her presence rose beneath me, I felt smaller than a seed, older than fear, and young as the first day I opened my eyes beneath trees that no human had named.

You fear hunger, she pressed into me.

I had no mouth-speech there. I had no need for it. I fear liking it.

The roots tightened around the circle, not holding me prisoner but holding me still. Soil cooled beneath my claws. My rage rose out of me like sickness drawn from a wound. Not removed or forgiven but shown. She turned it under her vast, unsentimental knowing, and I saw its shape without Lucas’s scent or Hannah’s tears or my own jealousy creating fog around the edges.

I had not wanted to eat her fear; I had wanted to end Lucas’s pain. The difference mattered, but the difference was not enough.

Aestrata showed me my brother then, not as he is now, but as he was when the wrongness first began. He had been beautiful once in the way storms are beautiful from far away.

Black, red-tipped antlers, pale eyes, a skull face sharper than mine, the same first earth-call moving through him and splitting sideways into laughter when humans screamed.

Guardians feel rage, Aestrata told me through stone and root. Varkhyn feed it.

I stayed in that circle while the moon changed and changed again above the branches. Days passed, perhaps more. Time’s behavior is distorted in the deepwood. I did not know Lucas suffered. That ignorance is a knife in me now, but in the memory, there had been only the Mother beneath me and the slow, painful work of letting her teach my instincts a cleaner shape.

Possession is not wrong by itself, she showed me. A wolf is possessive of den. A tree is possessive of light. A river is possessive of path until stone forces change. A mate bond carries mine because mine can mean shelter, recognition, duty, and chosen closeness.

But mine becomes rot when it stops hearing the answering yes. Mine becomes Varkhyn when the beloved turns into prey, and the world narrows to taking.

Lucas had taught me thresholds. Aestrata carved the lesson deeper.

When I finally rose from the stone, my body shook as if winter had lived inside it. I carried less rage but not less love. That surprised me. I thought to be healed of possessiveness might mean being emptied of the part that wanted Lucas with old teeth. Instead, the wanting was cleaner. Still fierce. Still rooted. But his choice sat in the center of it like a living flame I was made to guard, not smother.

Go back gentled, she told me. Hold the line. Teach him the difference between claim and cage.

I turned back, and every step toward Lucas felt easier than the last because I knew now what had happened in me, and I knew it would not harm him. I would tell him. I would kneel if I had to in his human way and place the whole ugly truth in his hands because he deserved nothing less than the clean shape of me.

My lantern hangs dark from my antler, and I am weak, though I did not admit it then. Aestrata’s healing had scraped me hollow. My claws dragged through moss once or twice where my steps should have been clean. I thought only of Lucas.

I imagined his anger first, because anger would be fair. I imagined his voice with that rough little country edge sharpened by hurt, calling me an idiot, an ancient asshole, and Wildheart only after he forgave me enough to make it sting.

Then I smelled myself where I had not walked.

My body stopped before my mind understood—Labrador tea. My scent, but wrong. Thinner. Mocking. Woven with old blood.

I turned too late.

He came out of the trees not in full beast form, but in the ugly in-between he always favored once Varkhyn took him. Shoulders too broad and misshapen. Skull half showing beneath too-taut skin. My brother was larger than I remembered, or perhaps memory had softened him to spare me.