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“Oh, Wildheart,” I murmur, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine anymore. It sounds smaller.

The visions flicker, and I see his offerings. The first bundle. His shame when I run, gathering the gifts from my steps because he thinks he has hurt me beyond repair. Him burning them beneath a lightning-split pine and keeping the white stone. Him waiting without pushing into my dreams because he believes my fear matters more than his ache.

I felt so abandoned later. I felt so stupid, hollow, and unwanted when he left, but here he is at the beginning, choosing restraint again. Here he is loving me before I understood the shape of him, making himself smaller in my life because he thinks my fear deserves more respect than his loneliness.

I want to reach through the vision and grab him. I want to shake him and tell him I’m coming back, that I’ll put the stone on the step, that I’ll touch his skull someday and call it beautiful, that he won’t always have to stand at the edge of everything he wants.

Then I see myself placing the onyx stone on the step, and I see his joy—so much joy over a rock. So much joy that I make a broken sound and press both hands over my mouth, furious and tender and wrecked in a place beyond tears.

I didn’t know. God, I didn’t know. I thought I was giving him an awkward apology, a clumsy little human offering because I didn’t know how else to say I was sorry for running, sorry for fearing him, sorry for wanting to see him again even though every sane part of me said not to.

But to him, it was proof. It was an answer. It was me reaching across the dark with one black stone and saying, I’m still here. I’m still thinking of you. I haven’t shut the door.

“Did I really die?” I whisper.

The question barely leaves me before it starts tearing itself apart inside my throat. Because suddenly, I don’t only want the answer for myself; I want it for him. I want to know what I did to him by dying. I want to know how much of Onyx is still kneeling somewhere with my body in his arms.

The visions slow, and darkness gathers itself in front of me. Someone appears where the roots twist thickest under the speckled yet starless sky. She is not the impossible blur I half saw when Onyx held me in the hollow. Here, she chooses a shape I can look at without coming apart.

She stands tall and barefoot on the black soil, her deep ebony skin holding the shine of rainy nights and midnight stone. Her hair falls around her in thick, living ropes of black curls threaded with tiny pale leaves and seeds. Antlers rise from her head, not bone like Onyx’s, but dark branches tipped in new green. Her eyes are the color of earth after lightning splits it open—green-white and ancient—but they hold warmth too, the warmth of soil that takes the dead and still grows spring.

Aestrata.

My knees want to buckle, but I stay standing because she looks at me as if kneeling isn’t what she brought me here for.

“Lucas Dawson,” she says, and her voice is everything under the ground speaking at once, but somehow also a woman’s voice, low and rich and close. “Little Ember, he calls you.”

Hearing it from her should feel ridiculous, but it hurts instead. It punches right through me, because that name is Onyx’s mouth against my skin, Onyx’s mind in mine, Onyx looking at every freckle like I’m a fire he’s been trusted to warm his hands near.

“Is he okay?” I ask, because apparently, I can stand in front of the Earth Mother after maybe dying and still lead with the emotionally stable option. “Onyx. Is he alive?”

Sorrow crosses that vast face, causing a faint crinkle between her brows. “He lives.”

I breathe out, and I don’t realize until then that I was holding anything. Then her words catch up.

He lives.

Not he is okay.

Not he will survive this whole.

Not he is waiting for you, and everything can still be fixed.

The darkness moves beside her and becomes another vision of Onyx kneeling in the stone circle with my body in his arms. Lifeless, pale, and bloodied. The sight of it makes me stumble back, but there is nowhere to go. Onyx shakes in his true form, cracked skull and broken antlers and blood-matted fur, his lantern rattling against the tine with every tremor.

He’s this huge, terrifying, ancient thing every wrong story in Sweet Rivers ever tried to turn into a warning… and he is falling apart around my corpse. He begs with mouth and mind and body and offers everything. His years, his form, his guardianship, his place in the forest, and his life for mine.

He was lonely before me, but this is worse. This is loneliness with memory.

My throat closes when I see he’s shifted into his human form and is holding me closer, pain forcing him through a smaller shape so he can press my body against a chest that feels more human. His black hair falls over his blood-streaked face, and when his mouth opens, the sound that comes out isn’t the silent bond-voice I know. It is broken speech, raw and impossible.

“No. No. No! Give him back! Give him back! Take me. I offered! Mother, I offered!”

I jerk toward him without thinking. My hands reach for a vision, and they pass through nothing. The sound I make is humiliating, but I reach again because instinct doesn’t give a damn about rules. Onyx is right there, begging over me, and I can’t touch him. I can’t put my hands on his face and tell him I hear him, that I’m watching, that he has to stop offering pieces of himself like they’re meaningless just because grief has told him there is nothing else left.

“He can’t,” I say, and my voice sounds useless even to me. “Don’t let him do that. Don’t take him.”

Aestrata watches the vision with me. “He offered freely.”