He has never starved. But he has loved.

And that’s why, at the end of the world, there are wolves and not mortals.

That’s why I reach the Root first. That’s why Varia lunges for me, my hands gripping the slippery pearlescent blood as I try desperately to push the two halves of the First Root together again. To hold it there, to heal it there. She’s only destruction. She doesn’t know—she can’t know of healing. Of what I’m doing.

But the bones of her choker spear out of her and into me all the same.

Four, five—I can’t count how many points of pain, of entry. Maybe a thousand. It feels like a thousand, the agony ripping through muscle and organ and every undead part of me. My skin tries to curl away from itself, vomit and hot-cold blood like nausea, a tide that moves with my inhales and exhales. Each breath, pain.

Every year of the thousand this Tree has had to endure—pain.

“NO!” Lucien bellows, and the flash of black light dizzies me. He does something—I don’t know what—but Varia staggers back woodenly, like a doll, and lunges for me again.

This time, her half-dead visage freezes. Completely unmoving, her withered eye sockets focused only on me. Her bones still spear my body, but I manage to turn my head over my shoulder to look at Lucien. His entire body is eaten by the void, up to his neck, to his jaw, creeping over his lips as he trembles, shakes, holding his sister in place with all his magic.

“Lucien!” I scream, blood spattering out of my throat. “Let go!”

He doesn’t.

“It’ll kill you!” My voice shatters. “LUCIEN!”

His eyes flicker from his sister to me, just that one movement so impossibly hard for him. “You…let go…”

“I have to put it together!” I shake my head. “You have to trust me!”

Varia’s eyes are dead. But his are alive and burning. Burning alive with his love for me, his worry, our memories together. The two halves of the First Root start to keen in my hands, close, their wounds touching and reaching out for one another all at once. Something booms beneath us, around us, above us. It sends out shock waves, little tremor warnings, and I know.