1: Embrace

The jungle huddled around Leiyn as she tailed her quarry.

He walked ahead, unhurried and unbothered, demonstrating little care for what might linger in the dense forest. Not once had he turned to examine his surroundings since she followed him. Single-minded in his purpose, he left himself open to ambush—and pursuit.

Still, Leiyn took every precaution to remain unnoticed. She breathed through her mouth. Measured every step. Avoided dead branches and fallen fronds. Winter was mild in the Ofean wilds, but its influence had discarded shriveled leaves from the canopy, making a hundred hazards necessary to avoid. Like a jaguar stalking prey, she slunk around trees, shrubs, and ferns, careful not to let her clothes snag.

To be discovered might spell Batu’s death.

Guilt threaded through her at tailing her friend, but she saw little choice about it. That he had snuck off under the cover of darkness was telling of his intent. A mission that Leiyn knew could only lead to danger.

So she pursued him, unseen and unheard. She even veiled her lifeforce, though Batu did not possess lifesense as she understood it. But in the months spent at their refuge, he seemed to have attained some glimmer of it. Even when she approached with her softest footfalls, she rarely surprised him. He would turn with that solemn stare of his, eyes a reflection of the emptiness in her own heart.

Hollow, both of us. Like two rotted stumps.

She banished the thought. Thinking of their shared loss would not help him. Distraction could imperil them both. Though Batu would never intentionally bring harm upon her or their party, intentions could be corrupted.

Particularly when the plainsrider hunted for danger.

Leiyn followed Batu across an overgrown stream, its water trickling through a carpet of mossy stones, then up the opposite bank. They traveled next to the rivulet uphill. With her shoes muddy, it was difficult to keep her footsteps silent, but Leiyn managed as best she could. The growing gloom in the shrouded jungle made it trickier still. The creatures amid the dense branches provided inadvertent assistance, birds and insects filling the forest with their muffled, repetitive songs.

She yearned to open her lifesense. To be part of it all. The absence inside her yawned widest when her walls separated her from the web of surrounding life.

Yet she resisted. Alert him to her presence and he would turn back. Then he would return another time without her.

She could not lose him.

They continued to climb uphill, heading east toward the Ofean side of the Radiante Slopes. Leiyn had guessed their destination from the start, but her conviction grew with every step. So, too, did her foreboding.

Don’t do this, she willed to Batu. Don’t throw your life away.

He would not have heeded them even if she had spoken them to him. Be it a taint in his blood or the sorrow in his marrow, her friend was lost to any insight she had to offer.

The cave eluded her at first. Covered with moss and overhanging vines, it blended into the verdant hillside. But as Batu neared the mouth, Leiyn detected the beckoning darkness beyond the vegetation.

Darkness was not all that lay within.

Her heart crowded into her throat, choking her. The urge to cough became nearly irrepressible. Fear pulsed through her as Batu strode on with that same resigned determination, shoulders bowed and eyes lifted.

Should she cry out, stop this before it went further? What if she saved his life now only to doom him tomorrow?

Rarely had she suffered from indecision. It chafed all the more for its unfamiliarity.

Leiyn ghosted behind a fallen trunk. Between the fresh saplings growing from their fallen kin, she watched Batu, hardly daring to blink. Moving so slowly her muscles ached, she shrugged her longbow into hand, drew a broadhead arrow, and nocked it. Better if she did not have to use it, but it was a comfort to be prepared.

The pressure against her veiled lifesense presaged its coming.

Batu stopped a handful of paces from the entrance. He did not reach for his battle axe, tucked into a loop at his hip, but only continued to wait, unshifting as a rocky outcropping in a storm-riven sea.

The mouth of the cave was three strides tall and twice as many wide. The beast that emerged nearly filled it.

Leiyn tensed her bowstring as the creature fully came into view. A bear, by all appearances, yet so large she might have mistaken it for a titan. Was it five times Batu’s weight? Six? On all fours, the beast rose no higher than Batu’s chest, but standing upright, it looked to double that. Even the snow ape they had encountered on their way to Qasaar had not loomed so large.

A swipe of its paw could break bones. A bite could tear through limbs, enchanted armor be damned. This was no creature to be trifled with.

More perplexing than its size was its fur. Pale as snow, it seemed ordinary until a stray moonbeam fell on its coat. It struck like a spark on dry brush. Light spread across the bear. In moments, all of it glowed with a pale luminescence.

Even with her lifesense closed, there could be no doubt to its nature. This was a spirit beast like her silver fox, Chispa, and Ketti’s emerald hummingbird. One not entirely of Unera.

Back away! she urged Batu silently. Spread your arms and make yourself seem large!

Even as she thought it, she doubted the usual tactics for warding off bears would work. This creature wielded an innate magic, straddling the lines between worlds. It would be too much to hope it could be intimidated by a paltry show of force.

Batu did not attempt any such tact. Flouting his plainsrider training, he lifted his chin to stare the pearlescent bear in the eyes. Set in the large, pale face, those fuchsia eyes appeared like pits into fiery hells. She imagined all manner of foul feeling lay behind them. Malice. Ravenous hunger. Affront at this blatant invasion.

But Batu had not yet finished his foolishness. Leiyn watched, helpless, as her friend raised his hands to the white bear’s face. The hulking beast watched him, neither growling nor retreating. Its claws did not paw at the ground. Its ears remained upright rather than folded back.

But she could not trust her eyes. Leiyn raised her bow. Her mahia’s walls trembled, the need to lower them battling with prudence.

Batu paused and glanced over his shoulder. Leiyn almost called out a warning, for the bear chose that moment to move. Yet it did not strike as she feared, but drew back, its hackles rising.

Before the words could press past her teeth, the former plainsrider faced forward again. To her relief, he let his hands fall to his sides and stepped back. She began to hope this whole foolhardy endeavor was at an end when Batu folded onto the ground right in the middle of the clearing. Crossing his legs, he sat facing the spirit beast.

The white bear’s hackles dropped. For several long minutes, it regarded the intruder with an unreadable stare. Then it, too, sat back on its haunches.

The bear set to cleaning itself.

Leiyn let her bow fall and loosened her drawhand. As the creature licked its fur with methodical leisure—his fur, she saw as he openly displayed his sex—she realized neither Batu nor the bear intended to move soon. She funneled a sliver of esse throughout her body, easing the stiffness already setting in. But as a ranger of the Wilds Lodge, she had trained in just such vigils.

How long they remained in their standoff, Leiyn could not say. Night fully set in. The moon that had shone on the beast hid behind clouds, and the illumination of his fur faded. The bear progressed from cleaning his chest to twist around and attempt to reach his back.

The great animal started licking his paw to clean his face when Batu rose again.

The bear regarded his visitor with fresh interest. Leiyn swallowed, the sound loud in her ears.

Batu once more approached. Again, his hands lifted as he closed the final feet between them.

Leiyn caged her tongue once more behind her teeth. She watched her friend take that last damning step, then reach his hands out to touch the reclining bear.

His fingers brushed the white fur lining the bear’s muzzle. His palms pressed against the flesh. The beast did not strike him, but held Batu’s stare, unblinking.

Feshtado fool! she railed silently. What in Legion’s hells are you doing?

But she had known from the beginning what this was. An exploration. A delving into the buried parts of himself.

An acceptance of his heritage.

Batu had been told he carried a taint in his blood. Much like Leiyn had with her magic, he had regarded this sliver of Iritu within him with horror and revulsion.

But it was still a part of him. And as she had discovered with her mahia, denying a part of yourself only led to ruin.

A fresh sensation brushed against her mahia’s walls. Leiyn’s trust came to an abrupt end.

Carefully, she lowered her walls and extended her lifesense past them. It was a struggle to comprehend what she felt. Batu’s lifeforce leaked from his body in a way she had never felt from him, flowing into the bear. And the bear’s esse flowed into him.

Tainted.

Beastfolk, most called people like Batu. Ata had named them wildsouls. The name did not matter to Leiyn.

She only knew she could not lose him.

“Batu!”

Leiyn stood from her hiding place as she shouted. She kept her bow lowered, but the nocked arrow told of her readiness to harm.

The bear jerked back, startled. She aimed, fearing its aggression. It did not strike at Batu, but bared its teeth at her. Slowly, she lowered the bow again.

Batu retreated a dozen paces. When he was out of immediate danger, he turned to her. She flinched at his expression.

“Come on,” he snarled. “We need to speak.” With a final glance at the spirit beast, Batu stalked back down the path away from the den.

Fear of a different flavor filled Leiyn as she followed her friend down the slope.