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Then Aestrata.

Not a physical woman in shape or anything my mind can turn into a clean picture. She is pressure under the soil, old and unsentimental, a presence so vast it makes my human bones feel temporary.

She doesn’t comfort him; she shows him. Possession as shelter. Possession as rot. Rage as protection. Rage as hunger. Choice sitting in the center of mine like a flame he’s meant to guard, not smother.

I see him rising, changed but weak, then I see the blue lantern.

Wrong.

Everything in me knows it before the memory tells me. Wrong scent. Wrong light. Wrong waiting.

I see the other one, and my stomach drops.

They have the same ancient shape—skull, antlers, pale eyes, lantern. But where Onyx feels like the earth holding its breath, this thing feels like a grave that’s laughing. Blood stains the bone of his face. His antlers are wrapped in strips and tipped red. His joy is disturbingly bright, spoiled, and terrible.

Varkhyn.

Brother.

Feral.

The words come with the images, and I feel Onyx’s old grief twisted with horror. His brother, sprung from the same making, turned wrong. A flesh eater not from hunger but pleasure. The reason stories of skull-faced monsters grew teeth in human mouths. The reason the lantern on the ridge never came closer.

Then I see myself from the thing’s stolen light. Me in the forest, two weeks after Onyx left, hollow, furious, and wrecked enough to beg a lantern to be him. The blue light hangs between trees, waiting.

I don’t follow, and the Varkhyn watches, hating that I won’t come deeper.

Cold spreads through me as I understand how close I was—close enough that if grief had stepped one foot harder than instinct, if anger had made me reckless, if I’d followed that light because I needed Onyx more than I trusted the wrongness in my gut, I might not be here.

The memory shifts to Onyx fighting his brother, then ending up trapped. Roots twisted around antlers and limbs. His brother crouched close, laughing through a skull mouth, saying I was his too. Saying I’d follow Onyx even if I wouldn’t follow the lantern. Saying the break would be sweeter because I was stubborn.

I come back fully to the cabin with a gasp.

My hands are locked in the blanket, and my heart is pounding so hard it hurts. For a few seconds, all I can do is breathe and stare at him while the last images fade behind my eyes.

“Oh my God,” I whisper.

His hand stays on my cheek, though his fingers tremble. I should have told before.

I sit back slowly, not pulling out of reach, but needing enough space to understand my own body. The room looks too normal. Rain at the window. Towels on the dresser. A bowl of crushed herbs on the nightstand. My bed, my floor, my damn cold box humming faintly down the hall like the world has any business continuing after what I just witnessed.

“That thing was in the forest with me,” I say. “That wasn’t you.”

Onyx closes his eyes. No, it wasn’t.

“I thought maybe it was. I thought you were standing there and refusing to come closer.”

The pain that moves through him is immediate and brutal. I know.

My throat tightens. “The forest hid your den from me.”

Yes, but not to punish or to keep you from me. Forest knew wrong lantern hunted near my path. It hid my den so you would not find the route he watched. It made you angry because anger turned you home. It protected.

That lands hard.

All those nights I thought the woods were mocking me, erasing him, keeping me out because he asked it to or because I had somehow failed some ancient test. All that grief. All that rage. The forest had been closing doors because something worse was waiting for me to find the wrong one.

I press one shaking hand to my face. “I was so close.”