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Then she raises her other hand, and I see something else.

Onyx alone in the hollow after I’m gone. Not screaming anymore, but worse—empty, with his great skull bowed. My body held against him until dawn and after dawn and after the forest itself starts mourning around him. His lantern dark. His antlers lowered. The bond collapsed into a wound that will never fully close.

“Stop,” I breathe, horrified, and the image fades.

“The second choice is life with him, but not as you were. You would return changed, bound to forest and guardian law. Human still, because your heart is human and I will not steal the shape of what he loves. Cervari also, because no ordinary human body can hold the life I would give back.”

I think about the mark at my shoulder. The herbs the forest showed me. The way I knew the false lantern was wrong even when grief begged me to believe otherwise. The way the woods used to feel like home before they felt like locked doors, and then like protection I was too hurt to understand.

“What would that mean?” I ask.

“Years,” she says. “Many, if you choose them well. Not immortality—I will not condemn either of you to endless wandering after love becomes grief again. You and he will guard together. Live together. Age slowly by human counting. You will remain until both your lives are fulfilled and both are willing to lay the work down.”

The words move through me at a glacial pace, but I understand what she means.

Not forever. Not Onyx becoming human by cutting out every ancient piece of himself that made me love him in the first place. Together as guardians. Live the same, in the ways that matter, and not the same at all.

“You said his first name earlier,” I say, because my brain grabs the strangest thread when the whole damn universe is unraveling in front of me. “His real one.”

Aestrata smiles again. “You heard what you could hold. His first-name is not sound alone. It is the root I called when I made him.”

“Can you say it?”

She studies me for a long moment. “I can. You cannot keep all of it yet.”

“Yet?”

“That depends on your choice.”

I swallow, though my throat isn’t dry. “Say it anyway.”

The name enters my mind but isn’t a word. It is a forest waking under frost. A black antler against the moon. A blue flame refusing to die in rain. My mind catches one small edge of it, enough to make my eyes burn.

Vaeronyx.

Onyx is inside it; or maybe Onyx was always the part of it I could reach.

“Vaeronyx,” I whisper, and the name roughens in my human mouth, incomplete and still true enough that the roots beneath me shiver.

Aestrata’s eyes soften. “He will weep when you say that.”

“Yeah,” I manage. “He does that a lot lately.”

“He has had reason.”

My laugh comes out cracked. “So have I.”

I look toward where the image of Onyx broke apart holding me. I think of heaven, whatever shape mine would take. My mother’s kitchen maybe, before grief touched it. A river that never floods dangerously. My father’s laugh if memory is generous. Peace. No pain. No terrifying antlers in the dark. No Varkhyn. No blood. No bond so deep it can gut me from the inside.

Then I think of Onyx calling my pillow immoral.

Onyx watching me like I taught daylight a new trick.

Onyx standing at the threshold because my choice mattered more than his wanting.

Onyx’s mouth forming my name for the first time.

Onyx begging me to keep my eyes open.