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This is weird, I send, because I can only endure awe for so long before I start throwing rocks at it.

Onyx’s affection curls around me. Good weird?

He makes that huff-laugh again, and it warms me down to the new fur on my legs. Yeah, really good weird.

We stay that way while the moon washes the clearing silver. Then restlessness rises in my new legs. They want slope, moss, and speed. They want to learn the forest from the ground up and the wind from the front. I turn my skull toward the trees, and joy sparks so suddenly it startles me.

I want to run.

Onyx feels it. His head lifts from mine, and though his skull cannot smile, I feel the expression through the bond. Ancient amusement. Bright pride. Something playful enough that my newly shaped body wakes even more. Do you want me to chase you, Little Ember?

The question lights up every old dream inside me. I lower myself awkwardly, claws digging into damp earth, my new body gathering beneath the moon. You better keep up, Wildheart.

Then I launch myself into the trees.

The first stride is clumsy as hell. Let’s be honest: beautiful magical transformation or not, I have brand-new legs and the confidence of a man who has fallen on perfectly ordinary trails before coffee. My front claws hit moss, my hind legs push too hard, and I nearly send myself straight into a fern bank like a heroic idiot.

Onyx’s amusement follows me immediately, which is rude considering this is my first night with backward-bending monster legs and antlers.

Don’t you dare laugh.

I would never.

You are literally laughing inside my head.

Yes.

I find the second stride is better, the third is almost graceful, and by the fourth, the forest catches me. It shows me where my feet belong half a heartbeat before I place them. Root there. Stone there. Fallen branch to leap, not avoid. Slope to take low, claws digging deep.

My body learns faster than thought, and the awkwardness breaks open into speed. Moonlight flashes across my skull, ferns whip past my legs. The air tears past me, full of pine, moss, water, and life.

Onyx runs behind me, beside me, everywhere around me. We both know he could catch me, but he doesn’t. That makes the joy sharper.

I run laughing through a body that cannot laugh the way my human one can, and the sound comes out rough and wild and perfect. I am happy. Not because the past is gone, or every wound is magically healed clean. I’m happy because I am alive, and I am wanted, and the part of myself I feared has turned out to be another way the forest loves me.

Onyx surges up beside me, black antlers cutting the moonlight. He turns his skull toward mine, and I feel his delight, his relief, his love.

Little Ember, he sends, voice thick with feeling. You are happy.

He lets me run farther, and I glance back through moon-silver darkness. I am. I am so ridiculously happy, Wildheart.

The truth of it almost hurts. Right now, under this full moon, in this body I feared, with Onyx behind me and the forest opening ahead, I am happy.

Then Onyx lunges.

I shriek through the bond, which comes out in my body as a rough, startled bark—deeply undignified and apparently hilarious to both of us. He catches up in two powerful strides, not slamming into me, just brushing his shoulder against mine hard enough to turn me off path. I correct by instinct, snapping around a cedar, and suddenly we are running side by side.

For one impossible stretch of moonlit forest, we run together as the same kind of miracle in different colors: his black antlers and shadowed fur, my copper-tinted skull and orange ember-fur, his ancient tree-ring markings, my darkened freckles and new root-light.

He is old forest. I am the spark that chose to live inside it. He is the last guardian Aestrata had left. I am the strange new answer she made because love refused to follow a false light and death was not allowed the final word.

Onyx surges ahead, then wheels around a fallen pine and waits in the path, skull lowered, playful challenge rolling through the bond. I skid to a stop clumsily, claws carving up damp earth, and glare at him through my orange-tinted skull.

Show-off.

Older legs, he sends, smug as sin.

I lower my head because apparently antlers make certain arguments very tempting. Don’t make me use these.