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Sleep, Little Ember, he sends, voice soft as moss and old as stone. I guard.

For once, I don’t argue.

I fall asleep on the heart of the forest, with my mate’s voice guiding me down. My last clear thought is that I am absurdly, impossibly lucky.

28

Onyx

Lucas falls asleep with his cheek pressed to the slate of my chest and one hand buried in the fur near my ribs, as if even sleep wants proof of me.

I stay still beneath him long after his breathing deepens. In true form, stillness is easy. The forest taught me long before language did. I have waited hours beneath snow for prey to pass, days near a sick tree until the rot showed whether it would spread, seasons at borders where wrong scents drifted and vanished before I could find their sources.

My body knows how to become stone when needed. But this stillness is different, because my mate lies sprawled across me like I am ground he trusts not to shift beneath him. Every instinct I have wants to curl around him tighter until nothing in the world can reach him.

The den is warm around us, filled with cedar, moss, old earth, and the newly settled scent of our bond. His mark is hidden from my sight where he rests against me, but I feel it anyway, a steady pulse in the space between us. It no longer burns with fever—it hums. Whole. Rooted. A new thing learning its own shape.

Lucas sleeps more deeply here than he did in his cabin, body finally accepting what his mind fought all day. He came back. He needed me and hated needing me, and still, he came. There is courage in that which he will not name for himself, so I keep it for him.

For a little while, happiness holds me. Then the old truth stirs under it.

I told him of Aestrata. I told him she made my kind from root, bone, hunger, night-sight, and storm-memory. I told him she named us guardians and set us in the places that needed teeth. I gave him truth enough to fill his eyes with awe and quiet his clever mouth until sleep carried him down.

But I did not tell him the other truth. I did not tell him about the one sprung from my same making.

The human word is twin brother. It sits oddly in my mind, shaped wrong around what we were, but it is the closest word Lucas will understand. Not brother by womb or childhood. Not shared parents, shared food, shared house, shared small human years. Cervari are not made that way.

We do not begin soft, helpless, crying beneath blankets. We rise from purpose. We are called out of earth and shadow, given hunger and restraint, given sight for dark places and teeth for things that harm the land. We are made alone because guardianship requires solitude.

But he and I were made from the same deep call; two answers to one wound in the earth. An aberration.

While I was the patient one, he was not.

The memory of him moves through me like a scent I cannot clean from stone.

Black antlers tipped red and heavier than mine, even young. Eyes too bright, too quick to follow the tremor of small things. A laugh that came through the bond between us as hunger sharpened into pleasure. He learned fear faster than I learned patience, and he liked the taste of it.

At first, I thought it was youth of making, a wildness that would settle once territory shaped him. All Cervari carry violence; it is not evil by itself. Teeth are not evil, laws are not evil, even death is not evil when it feeds what must live.

But there is death that feeds nothing. There is taking that leaves the earth quieter. There is hunger that does not begin in the belly but in delight.

The old word for what happened has no clean human shape, as human words are blunt in the wrong places. Feral comes nearest and still misses much. Madness sounds too mindless, frenzy too brief.

My people used Varkhyn. It carried the sense of a hunger turned wrong by its own reflection, of instinct overrunning law until pleasure and blood became one thing.

It was what happened when a guardian forgot the line between culling and cruelty, between necessary death and delighted ruin. They eat humans not because the body requires meat, or because men came with guns or fire or poison and would not leave.

They eat because human fear pleases them, and the sound of human pleading becomes a bloody symphony.

The Varkhyn were the reason humans whispered about flesh-eating skull beasts in the oldest fireside dark. They were the origin beneath a hundred different legends, later flattened, mixed, and made into entertainment.

My brother became Varkhyn.

He disappeared long ago, and I let disappearance become a grave in my mind because the truth was too dangerous to hold without madness. I haven’t smelled his scent since our last fight, when he crawled away with a broken antler, and I haven’t sensed him since.

I lower my muzzle until it rests lightly over Lucas’s hair. He makes a small sleeping sound and shifts against me, fingers tightening in my fur. He has no idea that the stories he jokes about may wear a face tied to mine by first making.

He has no idea that when he asked whether another like me could be taking humans, I gave him the softer edge of an answer because I did not want terror to poison the first days of his trust.