Two hungers are in me, and they drive me forward. I was born to starve. I lost my parents to starve. I was brought to Vetris to starve, I fell in love with Lucien to starve, I killed those fourteen men to starve, and my hungers drove me to my friends, and my choices, and they drive me now to the river, and the iceberg, and the end of all things.

True names are true.

I am the Starving Wolf.

And I will eat the world.

26

26

THE WOUNDED

It’s the nights that are the hardest.

But I always knew that.

In Nightsinger’s woods, the deep cold and the deep darkness ate away at you. They gnawed like the valkerax gnaw, like the Bone Tree gnaws at Varia even now. I’d stay awake, listening to Crav and Peligli breathing in their unneeded Heartless slumbers, their cheeks and eyes puffy with childhood. A childhood suspended in midair, like a dewdrop off a tree branch.

Remembering how I used to watch them sleep, I understand. I understand the witches of Old Vetris and their desire to freeze their beloveds in time. To never have them age or grow sick. To have them by their sides, always. But isn’t that cruel? The witch would die eventually, taking all the Heartless with them. Wouldn’t it be so cruel, to ask people to tie their fate to yours like that?

Looking around the ship at night, at Yorl serenely in the crow’s nest with his tail hanging and Lucien and Malachite at the prow talking, I realize it’s not unusual. Isn’t that what friendship is? When you become friends, you ask one another to stay. To tie their fate to yours, until that same fate rips you apart.

So when, I wonder, did Heartlessness become a tool for war and not love? Was it ever love? Did inflicting the hunger on a loved one make them love you more? No. Less, surely. Living with the hunger is not a fair exchange, ever. Not even for immortality. And those who became Heartless in the more peaceful days of Old Vetris still would’ve lost their memories of being human. They would’ve forgotten the very people who made them immortal, their family and friends. They would’ve had to start over.

Love doesn’t take things away. It gives. I know that now.

I’m glad I got to know that in my lifetime.

I watch Lucien’s broad back, he and Malachite laughing together about something. I watch him transform into a crow, black hair growing long and swirling around him and turning white, his clothes bleaching white and his body shrinking small and feathery. He does a quick circle around Malachite’s head before turning back to human, boots thumping on the wood of the deck. Malachite looks pissed, but Lucien just laughs, smile bright under the brighter moons.