Taigan held onto her until it seemed like she was relaxing. He had not been sure what to expect when he caught up with her. Would she even feel like the same person to him? When he first was wrestling with her, he wasn’t sure, but when he heard her voice, still so much the same, he felt recognition that made him feel calm. Maybe it was because changing was part of his people’s nature for generations that he had no trouble feeling like she was still who he knew… even if it was a little opposite. She was evidently a wolf that had been made to be human, and he was a human who could become a hawk.

Still, the waste of it was not lost on him. He was there when his father found out Gaiden’s identity and how that could influence things if she had been a real child of Gaiden and Lindir. No word from the Gods came to contradict the idea. More, the liana had certainly been looking out for her.

But they never said she was the One. They definitely never said it, he thought as he squeezed her close. So was it for this Moryshin stuff that made them take so much care for her? Still, it seemed like a horrible secret to keep. And what purpose did giving her a liana have?

And then taking it away?

He pressed his face to her face and just held her until she had relaxed. She was bigger than him and a little heavy. “Better?”

“No.”

“But better enough we can talk about a plan?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“Good, because you are shaggy and warm and there’s been this rock here against my back…” he tried to tease her a little, to lighten the heavy mood as best as he could.

She grumbled and sat up. He sat up and smiled at her. She glowered at him a little.

“So, uh, before you… took your run, there was something important that your… family wanted to tell you. Do you want me to tell you?” He wished he had a more delicate way of handling this.

***

Rosalea looked at Taigan. He was a Uryan; he did not show much on his face. So, when he spoke uncertainly, and gently, about her family, she really looked at his face. The soft expression gave her a fluttering sensation she did not quite know what to do with. She looked away. “You tell me, I… I know what I still look like, but it is not what I feel like. It cannot be good, whatever it is when you say it like that.”

He nodded, and he slowly stood up. He put his hand to her neck, guiding her to walk with him so that they could get away from Miron before they were noticed. She followed him. “So,” he started and then paused. “So, it might be good,” he said at last, guiding her with his hand on her shoulders, back the way she had come to the border. “The lost Moryshin? That’s you.”

She suspected a little, she had put just enough of it together to know that if she was Nekana’s lost child, then she was also… apparently a queen of forest gods. Carnelian’s mother… she felt even more of a grudge toward both dragons. I do not know how to do or be anything; I do not know what I even am, she thought with uncertainty.

Taj came down to land on Taigan’s shoulder, leaning against him, looking ill. She remembered Raisa and Sasha. She took a deep breath in, So, if I can be a young and strong center point of the mystics and forest… but it was too hard to think; it was hard to apply the title to herself. And yet, if I can heal these problems and reclaim the forest from the dragon and all her minions, then that is what I should do.

She looked back at Taigan as they walked. He was trying to be reassuring, to help her, and she closed her eyes for just a step or two before focusing out into the burned forest on the other side of the river from them.

She stopped as she saw movement down in the trees. Taigan paused and looked also.

It was white in sharp relief with a dark black cloud around it that reminded Rosalea immediately of the magic she had been using. She walked that way with Taigan, and the white part became clear… Those are its bones.

It was the walking bones of a horse-like creature with a horn on its head. Rosalea backpedaled.

“The demons… die, right? They die?” Taigan said urgently.

Rosalea’s heart was pounding so hard she thought she might pass out. “I… think so, but I do not really know.”

Taigan tilted his head, “No,” he said, and Rosalea guessed it must be Taj talking to him. Then silence. Rosalea watched the creature approach a tree, touching it with a horn. It was a tall, magnificent old thing. It withered up, darkness chewing through branches as it lost its grip on the soil and fell with a crash across the river. The death-wreathed skeleton made its way onto it.

Rosalea looked to Miron, still not that far from them, and she felt she knew exactly where it was going.

“Taj… says that is the current Moryshin.”

Rosalea looked up, “Then Taj needs to tell me what to do about it.”

There was a pause. The dark magic dripped off the monster into the water, flowing down it, hanging up against the banks, and killing anything it touched.

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“He says you have to try to take what is yours, but he is not sure what will happen if you approach a Moryshin that has become a monster.”

Rosalea took a deep breath in. “Go and get my… family. You know where they are?”

He nodded, “Are you really sure?” the creature left their vision as it was under them somewhere beneath the cliff.

Rosalea looked up at him, at the concern on his face. There is no world where the companionship we have come to enjoy together over the past few weeks can live on, she thought. But, it touched her, that he was truly worried for her, that he had rushed after her and stopped her from acting rashly. There had been so few faces in her life that looked at her this way. She breathed in and then out just once, to brace herself. “This… is my actual birthright. If I can claim it, then… I can change almost everything, right?”

His brow furrowed, but he nodded. “That is what the wolves told me.”

“Then… go tell them, and I will see what I can do here.”

Taigan looked to Taj, and then he sighed. “Be careful,” and he started at a jog away from her back the way they had come. She watched as Taj leaped from his shoulder and began to fly. Taigan changed and followed him.

Rosalea moved to the cliff edge. She looked down and then almost fell on herself backing up as she came nearly face to face with the monster just casually walking up the cliffside. Are you coming to me?

But as she backed up, it ignored her and turned its face toward Miron.

There was a dark moment in Rosalea’s heart when she considered letting it. But as the grass withered and died beneath the thing’s feet, she decided she could not just let it destroy people bound there by a dragon.

“Hey!” she called as the thing had its back to her. “Do you not know me?”

“What use do I have for children? They have abandoned me,” the voice that came at her reminded her of Gods, a little bit. It burned her brain. It had a lot of power behind it… worse, a lot of malice behind it that she had sensed in one of the Gods she had interacted with.

“I am not your child,” Rosalea said to it, challenging it.

It turned back. The leering skull had pools of red in the eyes and nostrils that smelled coppery to her. What was this thing before? She backed up as it breathed black mist toward her. It burned her nose, and it was heavy in her lungs. No one has had a chance to tell me what to do about this. She pushed back against the magical sensation as if was mind magic again, and the sensation cleared.

The skeleton charged her. She squawked and tried to dodge out of the way, but the thing turned out to be fast when it wanted to be.

The horn was going to graze her side as it tried to lance her with it. She grabbed the white spiral thing in her teeth.

Magic engulfed her. She felt herself pulled away from her body. I guess this is it. I am dead. How… anti-climatic.

She tried to keep biting down, she could still feel the horn in her teeth, but her body felt far away. She was in a sea of blackness.

“Hello there,” said a voice she faintly recognized.

She turned back and saw the chained God from the night Ulric died. She felt her hackles come up, “Hello there?” she repeated back angrily.

He raised a manacled hand and scratched at his face. “Well, uh, yes. I came to give you a blessing again. The last one of God’s language seems to have helped you.”

Rosalea frowned. “Am I not dead?”

“If you focus, you can still feel yourself. But, first, let me give you my gift.”

Rosalea tensed as he raised his hand.

The dark landscape fell out from beneath her. She was standing on the hill behind the refinery, but there was still a lot of greenery on the hill beneath it as if they were not just dumping the slag from it. There was a dead red dragon. It was not Carnelian, so Rosalea knew it must be Rubis.

She saw herself, not far from it. She was a lot littler than when she saw herself even in Lindir’s memories. It might be months before Amalia ever found the woman. She was laying on the ground.

There was a cut string of magic, from her to… the god who was hovering behind her. No, not one, two of them. One on her heart and one on her head. She had cut them from Rhainnon. They had been cut from her. But one string still remained, thick like a rope to her, and a white unicorn that had laid down and began sobbing bitterly.

“She was supposed to be my relief. You promised me I could be done! You promised me!”

Rosalea closed her eyes. That pain, that longing for death, that feeling of being trapped in a life you cannot handle, she could empathize with it. It was impossible to go forward, but you had to go forward somehow.

“But why? Why not save him? Why not appoint someone else?”

But when Rosalea saw Amalia have to take her away, the cord stretched between her and this creature. It was there, it had always been there. She had taken it with her when she had to be taken away.

“Why take me?”

But there was no answer for that either. She just felt her body snarling and biting down on the horn of the creature trying to kill her.

She fell out of the dream world, but she could see the rope between them. The God was gone. I will kill the traitors, she heard the thing’s voice as if it was her own thoughts. I could do nothing. I had to take it all. No more. I will kill it all instead.

She was a mirror to this monster. The magic burning her skin was falling off of her and killing everything it touched. She had killed the wolf with it, she had wanted to kill a dragon with it. This thing had killed a dragon already with it.

It had done nothing because it felt trapped. They were mirrors … for how long? Since she got here? Or her whole life? The vision seemed to be over from the Chained God, and she could not tell.

She bit down, biting through the monster’s horn until it broke.

She tried to reach forward, to grip mentally the coil of magic between her and this monster, to claim it for herself. I was supposed to let you die, I am here now.

But the creature pushed back on her, and she slid back, horn still in her mouth as it screamed, and the bony hooves slashed at the air in front of her. You do not even know! He screamed from inside her.

Then show me, she thought back. This time, when he lowered his head and charged her, she stood her ground, moving only slightly as their chests slammed together, her head to just one side of the bony head. It pushed her back, back, and she slid across the oozing black magic engulfing them both, into trees. Show me, she demanded again.