The jungle of Abonia was a maze without edges, where layered shadows and cold, dripping vines strangled sunlight and sanity alike.

  Rohan tore through it without direction. He did not feel like he was running — he was more like a puppet driven by something primitive, something that had taken the place of thought. His feet had long since been reduced to raw, bleeding flesh, the gaps between his toes packed with black mud and shredded leaves. Each step produced a grinding, nauseating sound — skin and stone in hopeless friction. But he felt no pain. He felt no exhaustion.

  Whatever had made him a hunter — that precise, patient awareness — was gone completely.

  He had fled the fire at the Abonia riverbank. But there was no fleeing the broken thing that played on a loop inside his head. That sensation — slick and cold, carrying the last fading warmth of his brother's body — coated his hands like a lacquer of poison that no amount of scrubbing would ever reach.

  He was an animal now. Lost. Crashing forward on instinct alone.

  And instinct had led him somewhere deeply wrong.

  The trees here were enormous, their thick trunks wound about with colourful arrangements of feathers and sun-dried bone ornaments. This was the sacred ground of the Manuk tribe — their ancestral shrine. In the totemic geography of Abonia, the Manuk were their nearest neighbours, and this place was the only passage to the world beyond.

  Under any other circumstances, any hunter who crossed into this consecrated ground would have stopped, bowed his head, and retreated in reverence. But Rohan's eyes held nothing now except a flat and lifeless grey. He did not even notice that the sacred totem pillars around him had been knocked askew, that the offering altars were scattered with broken feather-robes, that the earth beneath his feet had taken on a strange, deep violet discolouration.

  This place had been raided too. But Rohan could not see it — or rather, his senses had sealed themselves shut against the outside world, overwhelmed past any capacity to receive it. He only wanted to run. Run until perception ended. Run until the world ceased to exist.

  Then, as he lurched and stumbled through a stand of enormous Tree Ferns, something cut straight through that protective numbness — a wild, predatory presence so immediate and so dangerous it bypassed every shattered defence he had left.

  "HRRAAAOOOGH——!!!"

  A roar that shook the canopy itself detonated less than ten paces away.

  Rohan stopped dead. He turned his head slowly, his vision drifting slightly out of focus with exhaustion.

  Beneath the shadow of a massive buttress root, a shape like a black rock-mountain was rising.

  A mother moon bear. Full-grown, and enormous — many times the size of the cub he had taken that morning. The thick fur along her back was matted with dried mud. Her eyes were threaded through with red, and what burned in them was something beyond animal anger. It was a kind of madness. The madness of grief turned all the way to vengeance.

  She did not charge immediately. Her nostrils worked in violent, rapid pulses.

  She had caught the scent.

  It cut through the smell of the forest, through the cold sweat and filth covering Rohan's body. The milky, faintly rancid oil of her cub's fur. The blood-smell of her young one's final moments. Rohan had buried the crescent-marked hide deep beneath the vine cord at his waist — but to this bereaved creature, the figure standing before her was the only thing in this forest that mattered. The only enemy in the world.

  The mother bear let out a sound — short and thick and low, something that began as a cry of grief and curdled instantly into a fury that seemed to tear the air apart.

  Rohan stood where he was and watched that black mountain come for him with the force of total destruction.

  He did not move. He did not even raise the hand that held the knife.

  In that moment, a kind of peace settled over him — sickly and absolute. So be it. To die beneath the claws of Aruan's own emissary. To be taken in this moment of consequence and cause. Perhaps this was the most honest way to pay what he owed. Perhaps this was how he would catch up to his brother in the clouds above the sacred mountain.

  He closed his eyes. He opened his arms. He waited for those claws to open his chest.

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  But the rage buried in his blood — the oldest, rawest human need to survive — refused to let him die so humbly.

  HMMMMM——

  The high-pitched resonance detonated inside his skull again.

  "…Accept me…"

  Not a voice. A whisper pressed directly into the nerve endings. The devil living at the bottom of Rohan — the part of him that wanted to live, that wanted to make someone pay — speaking through the blade's vibration, issuing its final invitation.

  Rohan did not answer. He held himself in a silence like death, and let that cold, rust-tinged energy pour through the wound at his waist and flood into his heart.

  But the churning spread through his veins like wildfire regardless. His body betrayed his will again. The black fire-beings lurking in his blood and flesh woke — dark mirrors of his grief and despair. They erupted in shrill laughter and tore into what remained of his reason, feeding on it, converting it into something pure and simple and murderous.

  Rohan's eyes snapped open.

  His pupils were gone. In their place: two points of deep, burning dark red.

  He let out a sound no human throat should have produced. His body moved at a speed that exceeded anything biological, and in the instant before the mother bear's claws came down, he had already slid sideways into her blind spot in a way that made no sense.

  The black handleless blade — he could not have said when it had happened — was already driven deep into his palm, fused with the bone beneath.

  RRRIP.

  The mother bear's thick back hide split open in a gash so deep it showed what lay beneath. The dark red arc of force left a scorched trace in the air where it had passed.

  This was not hunting. This was not self-defence.

  He had become a machine of grief-driven destruction. He did not use a hunter's technique. He used force that was not his — not human — slamming into the bear's body again and again. He got on her back, drove his fingers into her flesh, and every movement of his arm took chunks of meat and broken bone with it. He could feel her pain. He could hear her crying. He could feel her desperately trying to pull away — and that feeling did not slow him. It fed him. It gave him a satisfaction so sick and complete it felt like drowning.

  Killing was the only thing that stopped the pain. Blood was the only thing that could put him to sleep.

  He wanted to tear this bear apart. He wanted to tear this forest apart. He wanted to tear apart the world that had taken his brother from him.

  The black mountain fell.

  Her limbs had been severed at the tendons by Rohan's blade. But even that was not enough to make him stop. He straddled her heaving, dying body and drove his fists down into her already-fractured skull — mechanical, relentless, over and over. Each blow landed with a dull crack of breaking bone and the hot spray of blood across his face.

  His expression was pure, unrecognisable fury — and threading through the sounds of destruction, coming up from deep in his throat, was something broken and intermittent.

  He was crying.

  He was killing this bear, and he was killing the useless, arrogant boy who had desecrated his brother's body with his own hands.

  The mother bear had stopped moving. The last light went out of those black eyes. She died without ever understanding why this small, weak hunter had turned into something worse than any nightmare she had ever instinctively feared.

  But Rohan could not stop.

  He was still tearing at the ruined mass of flesh — clawing, biting, lost inside the bloody ritual of it. His fingernails had peeled back. His knuckles had worn through to bone. And still he could not surface. He needed more blood. More destruction. Only this, moment to moment, kept his brother's rolling head from filling his entire mind.

  He was close to the edge. Close to the point where the force inside him would finish consuming what was left of his soul, where he would offer everything — the last of himself — to the blade—

  And then a presence moved across his bloodied spine like the dew on the sacred mountain at first light. Something gentle. Something that had no business existing in this place.

  "Enough… child…"

  The voice was so soft. Soft as a feather settling onto still water — and yet heavy enough to hold down every storm in Abonia.

  Rohan's fists — already raised to come down again — locked in midair.

  The screaming resonance in his ears went silent. The fire-beings raging through his veins made a single low sound of something like terror, and retreated instantly to the darkest corners of his soul.

  The burning red faded from his eyes. Slowly, with violent trembling, his natural colour returned.

  Rohan lowered his gaze.

  He saw himself.

  This creature covered from head to foot in shredded flesh and viscera, something that had crawled up from the bottom of hell. He saw the mother bear beneath him, killed not cleanly but piece by piece. He saw the remains of the god's emissary spreading through the mud around him.

  He opened his mouth. No sound came out.

  A chill unlike anything he had ever felt moved through every part of him. He felt filthier than the Odsu warriors who had come to raid and burn. He felt more evil than the fire that had taken his home.

  He turned, shaking, toward the direction the voice had come from.

  At the base of an ancient tree — half its bark scorched away — in a clearing that his rampage had reduced nearly to bare earth, a small figure was sitting.

  A spirit-child of the Manuk tribe. An Aru. He looked to be no older than ten. His pale face was dusted with sacred white talc. A terrible wound had been torn open in his leg — deep, ragged, bleeding — and his breathing was so faint it was barely there, fragile as a moth in late autumn. But his eyes held no fear at all.

  He simply sat, and looked at Rohan with a compassion that had moved entirely beyond the question of whether he himself would live or die.

  "Enough." The Aru spoke again. A weak smile came to his lips — exhausted, but full of something like mercy. "You are a person. Not a blade."

  Rohan's vision went soft again. Not blood this time.

  Tears.

  He collapsed beside the ruined body of the bear, and in the broken sacred ground of the Manuk, this boy who had lost his soul let out the most helpless sound he had ever made in his life.