Lydia wanted a knight. Not this trader. She wanted the iron-clad one the whole kingdom praised, the beast-slayer ready to lay down his sword. She wanted his footsteps in her cavern forever. Instead she had Alph. She pressed her back to the cold stone and listened to him crash through her home. He was the trader she had lured three days ago. His blood had smelled wrong the moment he stepped inside, sour and rotten, so she left him. But he never left her. "Hello?" Alph shouted again. His staff banged rock. "The voice! I heard the voice! Where's the way out?" Lydia made her call. She shaped it low and sweet through the echo, aiming it toward the pass mouth, hoping to catch a fresh traveler. But Alph's clatter swallowed it. Her sound broke apart against his noise. No one outside would ever hear her over him. She stepped from the dark. "You're going the wrong way," she said. Her voice was silk. "The exit is past the deep pit. Follow the left wall." Alph squinted at her, then grinned like a child. "You're real! You'll help me?" "Of course." She smiled her mischievous smile. The left wall led straight to the drop. He walked right past it. He tripped over a loose rock, cursed, and turned back the way he came. Lydia's jaw tightened. She tried again. She rolled a smooth stone toward the pit's lip and made it sing, a lure any traveler would chase. Alph chased a dripping sound instead and sat down to drink from a puddle. "Fool," she whispered. He heard nothing. He belched and stood. For two more days it went like this. She laid every trap she knew. Alph missed each one by pure stupidity. His banging never stopped. Her call never carried. Every hour, another traveler passed the mouth of Rou-Do Cavern Pass and heard only a muffled mess. She lost them all. Then luck turned. Alph wandered near the pit again, chasing an echo she hadn't even made. His boot found the edge. He yelped and dropped, catching the lip with both hands. His staff clattered into the black below. "Help me!" He kicked at the stone. "I can't hold! Please!" Lydia knelt above him. His rotten blood filled her nose. She looked at his fingers, white and slipping. She could pull him up. She could keep trying to fix him, keep failing, keep losing every knight who passed while he screamed. Or she could have her cavern back. "You never should have stayed," she said softly. "What? I can't—" His grip tore loose. He fell without knowing her face was the last thing he saw. The pit took him. Silence returned to the stone. Lydia stood and breathed the clean, cold air. She smoothed her hair and tested her voice against the walls. It rang far and pure now, out past the mouth, into the pass. Somewhere a knight was leaving his sword behind. She began to sing for him.

Three days had passed since the pit swallowed the trader. Lydia sang for the knight every hour. Her call rolled clean out the mouth of Rou-Do Cavern Pass and into the day. But no boots crossed her stone. No traveler turned to follow. The pass stayed empty, and her stomach began to ache. She needed a body to feed on, and none came. By the fourth day, hunger bent her double. Her voice thinned. Each call cost her strength she no longer had. She pressed her hand to the cold wall and steadied herself. If she starved, she could not sing. If she could not sing, the knight would pass her by forever. She had to eat something now. She searched the deep parts of her cavern. Water dripped in the dark. She followed the sound to a pond she had walked past a hundred times. Its surface lay black and still. Then a shape moved under it. A fish rolled its pale belly toward the faint light, sleek and dark, its fins ghost-white. Lydia knelt at the edge. She did not know how to fish. She had only ever fed on what she lured. She cupped her hands and waited. The fish drifted close. She struck. Cold water soaked her sleeves, and the fish thrashed free. She struck again and missed again. Her arms shook from the hunger. On the fourth try, her fingers closed on its slick body. She dragged it out and pinned it to the rock. It flopped, then went still. She ate it raw, tearing the tender meat, ashamed and desperate at once. It was the first food she had touched that no one else had brought her. Strength crept back into her legs. Her head cleared. She caught a second fish, slower now that she knew the trick, and ate that one too. Her hands stopped shaking. But when she looked into the pond, she counted only a few pale shapes left. The rest hid in the dark, and the water was small. She understood the truth of it. The pond would feed her for a day, maybe two. It would never feed her for long. A siren was made to eat what she lured, not to scrape fish from a puddle in the dark. This was a patch, not a plan. Lydia stood and wiped her mouth. Her strength had returned, and with it her purpose. She walked back toward the mouth of the pass and faced the open day. She had bought herself time, but only a little. She had to catch her knight before the pond ran dry and left her too weak to call. She drew a full breath and sang, sweeter and stronger than before, out into the empty road.

Over the next few days, Lydia's song began to catch. A pair of merchants wandered in, then a lone shepherd, then a woman who had lost the road. Lydia fed on each one and grew strong. Her voice returned to full weight. The pond in the depths could rest now. But strength alone would not bring her the knight. She needed her cavern to work harder for her. She stood at the mouth of the pass and studied the stone. The echo here was good, but not perfect. When she sang, her call broke on jagged rock and scattered before it reached the road. A cleaner throat of stone would carry farther. It would make her voice sound sweeter, closer, harder to ignore. The knight would hear it from miles off and think a woman waited just inside. Lydia set to work. She dragged loose rubble from the passage and stacked it against the walls. She pried away the sharp edges that split her sound. Dust coated her arms. Her fine dress grayed at the hem, but she did not stop. She hummed as she worked, testing the shape of the air. Each stone she moved changed the sound. She listened, adjusted, moved another. By dusk the passage rang like a bell. Lydia stood in the center and sang a single low note. It rolled down the smooth stone, deepened, and came back to her doubled. She grinned. The cavern held her voice like a cupped hand and threw it far. Then she smelled it. Where she had cleared the rubble, an old smell rose from the deep pit. The trader's body still lay at the bottom, and days of rot had thickened the air. Her cleaning had opened the passage straight to it. The stench drifted toward the mouth on the same clean current that carried her song. Lydia's grin fell. She had built the perfect throat, and now it breathed rot onto the road. No traveler would follow a beautiful voice into a cave that smelled of death. A knight most of all would turn and draw his sword, not walk inside. She knelt at the edge of the pit and looked down into the dark. The pond lay somewhere below. The smell came from the trader she had let fall. She could not sing him away. She could not leave him there and lure anyone. Lydia wiped the dust from her hands and stood. Her cavern was ready at last. Its voice would reach the knight now. But before she could call him, she had to go down into the pit and deal with what she had left rotting at the bottom.

The passage was ready. Lydia's voice would carry for miles now. But the smell of the dead trader poured up the same clean stone and spoiled everything. She stood at the pit's edge and made her choice. She would go down, drag the body up, and rid her cavern of the stench. She studied the wall. The rock dropped straight into black. No ledge, no stair. One slip and she would join the trader she had let fall. Lydia knelt and tested a jutting stone with her weight. It held. She lowered herself over the edge. Her bare feet found cracks. Her fingers gripped cold rock. Dust rained past her into the dark. She climbed down slow, testing each hold before she trusted it. Halfway down, a stone crumbled under her foot. Her body swung loose. She caught a seam with both hands and hung there, breath tearing at her throat. The smell thickened as she went lower. She breathed through her mouth and kept moving. At last her feet touched a wet stone shelf. The pond glimmered near the trader's body. He lay twisted where he had struck, his skin gone gray and slick. Lydia gagged and turned her face away. She could not haul him up the wall she had climbed. He was too heavy, and the holds were too small. But the pond fed somewhere. Water always found a way out. She waded in and felt along the rock at the far side. Her fingers slid into a gap below the surface, a channel where the water drained. Lydia dragged the body to the water. She worked it into the current at the drain. The channel was tight. She pushed with both hands, her feet braced on stone. The trader's shoulder caught, then slid. The water took him. He vanished into the gap and was gone, carried off through the rock to wherever the pond emptied. She stood in the cold water, shaking. The stench already thinned. The pond would wash the rest. She climbed back up the wall slower than she came, her arms burning, and pulled herself over the lip onto solid ground. Lydia lay on the stone and breathed clean air. Then she rose and walked to the mouth of the pass. She sang one low note down the smooth throat of rock. It rolled out toward the road and carried nothing but her voice now. No rot. No warning. She smiled. Her cavern was clean and ready. The knight would hear her at last. She drew a full breath and began to sing for him.

Lydia sat by the pond with her belly full of fish. Her song still hung faint in the stone. She had sung the knight's call for hours, and now she rested. She leaned back against cool rock and let her eyes close. His name had traveled with the merchants she fed on. Gregorio. They spoke it like a prayer. She remembered the first time she saw him. A year past, he had camped near the road below her pass. A small fire burned. A shield leaned against his tent, dented from old fights. She had crept close in the dark to study him. Sharp face. Dark hair pushed by the wind. He sat alone and did not fear the woods around him. Then he raised an ocarina to his lips. It was carved from pale bone, worn smooth by years of use. The holes gaped like empty eyes. He played a low, aching tune into the fire. Lydia had lured a hundred men with her own voice. No sound had ever pulled her the way that one did. She stood in the trees and could not move. A beast came for the light. It dropped from the sky on wide red wings, a large dragon. membrane stretched thin, talons out. Lydia knew fear then. She wanted to run. But Gregorio set the ocarina down without hurry. He rose, drew his blade, and met the thing head on. Steel bit through the wing. He cut it down and stood over the body, breathing hard, blood on his armor. Then he sat again and finished his song. That was when she wanted him. Not as food. Not as sustenance, the way the trader and the shepherd had been. She wanted the man who could play like that and kill like that in the same breath. She wanted to stand beside that fire and be part of what he was. For a year she had waited. She had cleared her cavern of rot and stink and every dead thing so her call would reach him clean. Lydia opened her eyes. The memory left her hungry in a new way .

Lydia rose from the pond with the memory of the ocarina still ringing in her. Her song alone had not brought Gregorio. He was no lost merchant. He had faced dragons without flinching. A voice on the wind would not be enough. She needed him to see her and want to stay. So she sat with her back to the stone and set her mind on a new task. She would make herself something he could not turn from. She pulled a wooden case from a dry ledge. Inside sat small wells of dye, each ground from plants and stone she had gathered over the years. Deep red. Dark green. A rich purple like a bruise. She had collected them and never had a reason to use them. Now she did. She wet her finger and worked the purple across her lids, over the burgundy she always wore, until her eyes looked deeper. She smeared red high on her cheeks. She darkened her lashes with the near-black powder. The pond gave her a dim mirror. She leaned over it and studied her face. Better. But not enough. She wiped it clean and started again. She mixed the yellow with a pinch of the orange to warm her skin. She lined her mouth in the deep red until it looked full. Hours passed. Her fingers stained. She did not care. Between each try she sang. She was building a song to match the face. Not the wide call that pulled strangers off the road. Something smaller. A close song, meant for one man who had already come near. She wanted it to sound like the tune he played by his fire. Low. Aching. A song that said, stay. She hummed it, changed a note, hummed again. By the time she stopped, the case was near empty and the pond water swam with color. She leaned over it one last time. The woman looking back was not the same one who caught fish in the dark. Her eyes were dark and sure. Her mouth was red. Every freckle stood clear against warm skin. She smiled, and the smile looked exactly as sharp as she meant it to. Then the sound reached her. Boots on stone. Slow and heavy, the tread of a man in armor. It came from the road, closer than any traveler had come in days. Her close song had drifted out through the passage without her meaning it to. Someone had followed it. Lydia went still. Her heart beat hard against her ribs. She had built the face and the song for one man. She did not yet know if he was the one at her door. She wet her lips, smoothed her hair, and rose to meet whoever climbed toward her.

Lydia held the last note soft in her throat. The armored man climbed toward her pond, and she kept singing. Her eyes stayed low. She let the song say stay. She waited for wind-swept hair and the ocarina at his belt. She waited for the man who slew the dragon. The figure stepped into the dim light. Long silver hair fell past his shoulders. His armor was dented and scarred from old fights. His face gave nothing away. This was not Gregorio. This was some other knight, drawn off the road by a song she never meant for him. The wrong man broke her. Her voice cracked. The note fell dead in the passage. For a heartbeat she only stared, and her careful mask slipped. The knight saw it. Whatever spell had pulled him, it snapped the moment her song stopped. His hand went to his sword. "Siren," he said. His voice was flat and cold. He drew the blade in one clean motion and came at her. Lydia had no more song. She had no time to hide what she was. So she stopped hiding. Her skin split into feathers. Brown and red plumage spread down her arms as they widened into wings. Her legs cracked backward into scaled bird legs, and black talons scraped the stone. Her face sharpened to a beak. The elegant woman was gone. In her place stood a harpy, twice the size of the girl who had leaned over the pond. Her auburn crest bristled high. Mezador's cold face finally moved. His eyes went wide. He swung anyway, quick and hard. Lydia was faster now. She caught the blade between two talons and wrenched it aside. The sword rang off the wall. She screamed, and the sound was nothing like her song. It was raw and it hurt. The knight staggered, hands to his ears. She struck. Her talons closed on his shoulders and lifted him off his feet. His armor was heavy, but her wings beat hard against the cavern air. She carried him out over the black mouth of the pit, the same pit that had swallowed the trader. "Wait," Mezador said. His unreadable face was gone. Now she saw fear. Lydia felt her hunger for the first time in days. Fishing the pond had kept her weak. This was different. This was real prey, drawn to her door by mistake. Her song for Gregorio had brought her a meal instead. It was not the ending she wanted. But she would not waste it. She opened her talons. Mezador fell into the dark. His cry faded, then stopped. Below, water swallowed the sound. Lydia settled at the pit's edge and folded her wings. Her hunger eased at the thought of food. Gregorio was still out there, still unmet. But tonight she would eat, and tomorrow she would sing again, and this time she would keep her voice for the man she truly wanted.

The pit had fed her. For two days Lydia sat at the cavern mouth and sang, and no one came. The road stayed empty. She began to understand the problem. Gregorio would not wander past her stone by luck. If she wanted him, she had to find where he was. That meant leaving the cavern. That meant the city. She had not walked among people in years. Her human shape held well enough, but her scent gave her away to anyone with sharp senses. So she rubbed pond mud and crushed river weed along her arms and neck until she smelled like wet stone and green water. She dyed her hair a duller brown. She left the burgundy off her eyes and traded elegance for a plain traveler's cloak. In the pool's still surface she looked ordinary. That was the point. She walked the road at dawn. By midday the city rose ahead of her, ringed by water, its spires black against the sky. A stone bridge carried her over the moat and through the gate. Inside, the noise struck her like a wave. Wheels, hammers, shouting sellers, boots on stone. She kept her head down and let the crowd carry her toward the great cathedral square. She listened. A siren always listens. Among the market talk she caught his name. Two guards leaned against a wall, and one said the dragon-slayer had come to petition the crown for his release from service. Then she saw him. Gregorio crossed the square alone. His dark hair fell wind-swept over sharp features, and his armor caught the light. She knew the shape of him from a year of watching. Her chest tightened. She wanted to speak, to sing, to make him turn. She held still. A clerk in fine robes stopped him. "The crown values your service too much to release it," the clerk said. "The answer is no." Gregorio's face did not change. "Then I leave without it." "You cannot simply leave." "I can," Gregorio said. "I'm done." He walked past the clerk and did not look back. Lydia's heart beat hard. She had feared he was fixed to this city, guarded, out of reach. Now she saw the truth. He wanted out. He wanted quiet land where no one knew him. She could give him that. Her cavern was quiet. Her pond was clear. She only had to make him believe the road home passed her stone. She followed at a distance and watched which gate he took. He went west, on foot, toward the open country and the long road that ran past Rou-Do Cavern Pass. He was leaving the city, and his path would carry him near her. She turned back before he could feel her eyes. The mud on her skin was drying and cracking. She had what she came for. She knew his face, his want, and his road. Tomorrow she would wait at her passage and sing the song she had saved only for him.

Lydia reached her cavern by dusk. The mud on her skin cracked and fell away as she walked. Inside, she washed in the pond, brushed the dull dye from her hair, and let the auburn shine again. She painted the burgundy back over her eyes. She was herself once more, and now she knew his face and his road. Gregorio Stannison would pass her stone within a day. She had one song left, saved for him alone. She stood at the mouth of her stone passage, where the walls carried sound for miles. She breathed in. Then she sang. The melody rose and curled down the road like a ribbon of light and note. It was not a lure to trap prey. It was the tune she had built to match his ocarina, the one she heard him play before he killed the dragon. She poured her want into it. She sang for the man, not the meal. The road answered. Boots on stone. Slow at first, then steady, drawn nearer with each verse. Metal caught the last light. A tall shape came through the passage, silver-gray armor over sharp features, dark hair swept back. Gregorio. His eyes were soft and far away, held by the song. He walked to her like a man in a dream. Lydia's heart pounded. She had waited a year for this. She stepped close and lifted her chin. His breath touched her cheek. She reached for his face, ready to seal him to her with a kiss, to make the spell whole. Her lips were a breath from his when his hand shot up and locked around her throat. The dream broke in his eyes. They went hard and clear. He drove her back against the stone wall and pinned her there, forearm crushing her windpipe. His other hand drew the sword. The blade rang free and pressed flat under her jaw. "I've killed things with prettier songs," he said. Lydia clawed at his wrist. Her human shape strained. "You wanted quiet," she rasped. "I can give you quiet." "I know a siren's stone when I hear one." His voice stayed flat. He pressed the edge closer. "Every knight does. I came to end it." She went cold. He had not fallen for the song at all. He had followed it to find her and cut her down. He had known from the first note. Her strength was fading under his arm. In moments she would have to choose: die as a woman, or break into her true form and lose forever the chance to win him gently. The kiss had failed. The lure had failed. He held her life against the rock, and he meant to take it. Lydia stopped clawing. She looked up into his flat eyes and made her choice.

Lydia chose the beast. She let her true form tear loose. Feathers burst along her arms. Talons split her boots. Her scream filled the passage as Gregorio's blade bit into her shoulder. The wound burned, but the sound she made was worse. It broke out of her, high and raw, a note no throat should hold. The knight staggered. He pressed both hands to his ears and dropped to his knees. His sword rang on the stone. "Enough," he grunted, but he could not stand. His head hung low. Even the man who killed dragons could not fight the pain of that scream. Lydia's shoulder ran red. She should have finished him. He knelt within reach, sword down, helpless. But something under her ribs woke and reached with her. Hunger. The old, blind urge that told her to feed. His blood was in the air now. Her talons twitched toward his neck. She pulled back. She had waited a year for this man. She wanted him alive and beside her, not cooling in the pit like the others. So she fought two enemies at once: the knight below her and the beast inside her. She locked her jaw and turned her body away from him. Feeding on Gregorio would end everything she had built. She ran. Her wing dragged along the wall as she fled the passage. Behind her, Gregorio's voice found its edge again. He shouted for others. She had not known he came with men. Now boots crashed on the road above, and steel flashed at the cavern mouth. Lydia dove into the pond. The cold clamped down on her wound. She swam deep, past the place where she had dropped the trader's body, until she found the underground channel. The current grabbed her. She let it drag her through the dark, lungs screaming, until light broke ahead and she surfaced in open air beyond the cavern. She launched into the sky. Blood streaked from her shoulder. Then arrows came. They whistled past her wings, one after another, from the men who had climbed above the road. She banked hard and beat toward a clifftop. She dropped behind a shelf of rock and pressed herself flat. Her chest heaved. The wound throbbed with each breath. Below, she heard the men calling, hunting the road for her body. Gregorio had not come alone, and Gregorio had not come to be lured. He had come to end her, and he had brought a hunt. Lydia touched her torn shoulder and stared toward the cavern she could no longer reach. The song had failed. The beast had spared him. She was hurt, driven out, hunted in her own sky. But she was alive, and so was he. If she meant to keep him, she would have to take him another way now. And first she would have to survive the men who wanted her dead.

Lydia lay flat behind the rock shelf and listened. Below, the men still called to each other along the road. An arrow had grazed her wing. Her shoulder burned where Gregorio's sword had opened it. She could not stay here. The hunt would climb these slopes soon, and she had no cave to hide in now. Her home was lost to her, filled with the men who wanted her dead. She needed a place to rest and heal before the beast inside her tore free from hunger. She forced her wings open and rose. Pain shot down her side. She stayed low, skimming the treetops so their bodies could not track her against the sky. Ahead rose a great cliff wrapped in trees. Vines hung down its face. Thick green growth spilled from every ledge. The men could not follow her up there on foot. She beat toward it and dropped into the canopy. Branches caught her fall. She crashed through leaves and landed hard on a mossy shelf. For a moment she only breathed. No shouts reached her here. No boots. The forest swallowed all of it. She had escaped them. She pressed a taloned hand to her torn shoulder and felt the bleeding slow. But safety was not enough. The hunger was waking. She felt it under her ribs, the same blind urge that had reached for Gregorio's throat. If she did not feed, she would weaken, and a weak siren could not sing, could not plan, could not take the knight another way. She had spared him. Now her body demanded payment. She crouched and went still. Her hawk's eyes swept the growth. A rabbit moved in the ferns below. She dropped on it before it could bolt. Her talons closed. She ate fast and raw, the way she had eaten fish in her cavern pond. She caught a second creature near a hollow root, then a bird startled from a branch. Her strength crept back with each kill. The wound stopped weeping. The trembling in her wings eased. When the hunger finally quieted, she perched high on the cliff and looked out. She could see the pale line of the western road far below. Somewhere on it, Gregorio moved with his men, alive because she had chosen to spare him. He believed her dead or fled. He would let his guard drop. Lydia flexed her healed wing. Her cavern was gone, but that no longer mattered. She did not need to lure him to a stone anymore. Her song had failed because she waited for him to come to her. This time she would go to him. She fixed her eyes on the road and settled in to watch which way the knight would walk.

Weeks passed on Timbermane Cliff. Lydia healed, but she could not sing the way she once had. Her cavern gave her song its reach. The stone walls caught each note and threw it far down the road. Now she had only open air. Her voice slid into the trees and died. Without that reach, she could not draw Gregorio close, and without a strong close song, she could not hold him once she did. She needed a new vessel for her voice. She thought of his ocarina. A small thing of bone, yet it carried sound across a whole clearing. Bone. That was the answer. She had eaten many creatures on this cliff and left their bones scattered in the moss. She gathered a long, hollow limb bone and cleaned it. She hollowed the marrow and shaped the ends with her talons. Then she raised it to her lips and hummed through it. Her voice came out changed. It pushed forward, thin and bright, and carried past the far ferns. Lydia lowered the bone and smiled. It worked. But the horn was small. The sound it threw was small too. A rabbit's bone could not hold the weight of a real lure. She needed something bigger. She needed the long bone of a man. Animal bone made the horn, but animal flesh could not feed her. She had learned that in her cavern. Fish and rabbits filled her belly, yet they left her hollow and weak underneath. Only human blood sharpened her song and steadied her power. To build a horn strong enough for Gregorio, and to feed the strength she needed to use it, she required a human. She waited at the cliff's edge and watched the broad crossing below. On the third day, a lone traveler came up the wooded slope, following an old trail. He carried a pack and hummed to himself, unaware. Lydia lifted her small bone horn and sent a low note down through the trees. His humming stopped. He turned toward the sound and began to climb. She let him come. When he reached a mossy ledge near the top, she dropped on him from above. Her talons took him before he could shout. She fed until her power rang through her like a struck bell. Then she took what she truly wanted. She cut the long bone from his arm, clean and pale and strong. Back on her high perch, she shaped the new bone through the night. She hollowed it, smoothed it, and cut a mouth for her voice. When dawn touched the cliff, she raised the finished horn and sang a single note through it. The sound leapt from the cliff, crossed the whole broad crossing, and rolled far down the western road. It reached farther than her cavern ever had. Lydia lowered the horn and looked toward the road where Gregorio walked. She had her voice back, and this time she would carry it to him.

The bone horn gave Lydia her reach again, but not her home. She needed the cavern. Its stone walls could hold her close song, the one that would bind Gregorio to her side. So she climbed from Timbermane Cliff and down toward Rou-Do Cavern Pass,She arrived at the mouth. The passage yawned dark and quiet ahead. Then a shape stepped from the shadow of the entrance. Gregorio. He had been waiting. His armor was dull with weeks of dust, and his sword was already drawn. He had killed every beast the kingdom feared, and he had spent those weeks camped here, guarding the one stone he knew she would return to. "You came back," he said. "I knew you would." Lydia backed toward the ledge. Her horn would not help her now. He was too close. She opened her mouth to scream, the sound that had felled him once, but he closed the gap first. His shoulder drove into her chest and slammed her to the stone. He pinned her with his weight. One gauntlet clamped her throat, cutting her voice to a thin rasp. His knee pressed her wing flat against the rock. "Change," he said. "I want the beast. Not this." He shook her against the ground. "Show me the thing I came to kill." Lydia understood. If she shifted, her true form would rise with all its strength, and it would tear him apart before he could strike. She would kill him. She could not do that. She needed him alive. She needed him whole and beside her, not bleeding out on her doorstep. So she held the change back. She fought her own body, the part of her that wanted to break free and rend. Her talons stayed half-formed. Her scream stayed locked in her crushed throat. She lay under him as small as she could make herself, refusing to become what he demanded. His face went hard. "Change," he said again, louder now, though his voice stayed flat. He pressed harder. "I don't kill women. I kill monsters. Give me the monster." She shook her head against his grip. Tears cut down through the dust on her cheeks. He stared at her, and something in his jaw tightened. He wanted a clean kill with a clear name. She would not give him one. His hand shook on her throat, caught between the sword and the woman under it. Lydia felt the panic rise. She could not sing. She could not shift without killing the one thing she wanted, or him killing her. She could not throw him off. For the first time in her long life, she had no plan and no song and no way out. Her breath came in short, wild gasps beneath his hand, and the cavern that had always answered her stayed silent.

Gregorio's sword hand rose. Lydia braced for the blade. Then hooves struck stone behind them, fast and close. A second knight burst into the cavern mouth. He was young, his cape white with road dust, and he took in the scene in one glance: a man crushing a woman to the ground with a gauntlet at her throat. He did not ask questions. He drew his sword, gripped it by the blade, and swung the heavy pommel hard into the base of Gregorio's neck. Gregorio dropped. He hit the stone beside Lydia and did not move. His hand slid off her throat. Lydia gasped. Air rushed into her crushed windpipe. She had spent a year hunting this man, and now he lay senseless, freed for her by a stranger who thought he was saving her life. She almost laughed. Her plan had failed a dozen ways, and chance had handed her what her song never could. "You're safe," the young knight said. He knelt beside her, quick and gentle. "Can you stand?" Lydia looked up at him. His eyes searched her face for fear, and he found it, because she was starving for breath and shaking. He read it as a woman's terror at a violent man. He had no idea what she was. "He would have killed me," she rasped. It was true. She let the tears keep falling. "Not now," the knight said. He glanced at Gregorio's fallen shape without pity. "I've seen men like him. I'm sorry I came late." Before Lydia could answer, her body gave out. The choking, the wounds, the long climb down from the cliff, all of it caught her at once. The cavern tilted. Her sight went gray at the edges. The last thing she felt was the knight's arm sliding under her shoulders as she went limp. She woke to a wooden ceiling and a soft bed. No stone. No cavern. Sunlight lay across a plain, clean room. A hearth crackled low. She was tucked under a blanket that smelled of cedar. On the floor beside the bed, the young knight lay with his back against the wall. He had given her his bed and taken the ground.

Lydia lay still under the cedar blanket and listened. Her body ached from the fight and the long climb. Across the room, the young knight stirred on the floor. She had learned his name in her half-sleep. Bastion. He had carried her here, given her his bed, and never once guessed what she was. She kept her eyes shut and her breathing slow, and she waited to see what a man like this did when he thought no one watched. Bastion rose. He stretched, quiet, careful not to wake her. Then he began to hum. The sound reached her before she understood it. Low, warm, an old tune with no words. It filled the cabin the way her own song filled the stone passage. Lydia had spent a year hunting a knight for a melody he played on an ocarina. She had never once been sung to. Her eyes almost opened. She caught herself and held them shut, but her chest tightened around the sound. She was the one who lured. Now something pulled at her, and she had not chosen it. She risked a look through her lashes. The cabin was warm and plain. Someone had painted stars across the wooden ceiling, small and careful, so a person on their back could see a night sky indoors. Bastion moved to the hearth, still humming, and set a pan on the coals. Bacon hissed. Eggs cracked against the pan's edge. The smell reached the bed and Lydia's stomach clenched. Her hunger was old and sharp, the kind that fed on travelers. This was different. This made her mouth water like a woman's, not a siren's. "You're awake," Bastion said. He did not turn around. "You breathe different when you sleep." She opened her eyes fully. "I didn't want to trouble you." "No trouble." He lifted the pan off the coals. He came to the bed with a plate and a fork. He saw her try to sit and fail, her arms shaking under her weight. Without a word he sat on the edge of the bed. He cut a small piece and held the fork to her mouth. Lydia hesitated. She ate. The food was better than anything she remembered. Salt and warmth and care all at once. She smiled at him, weak and real, and the smile surprised her more than him. She had come to this pass to take a knight and keep him. She had planned a song and a horn and a trap. She had not planned this. Bastion fed her slowly, one small bite at a time, because she could hardly move. He hummed between them. Lydia watched his face and felt her whole plan shift under her. She still wanted a knight forever. But the knight she wanted had changed, and she no longer needed a song to hold him.

The eggs sat half-eaten on the plate. Lydia reached for the fork herself, and her hand shook worse than before. The old hunger woke in her gut, sharp and deep. Care and warm food had not filled it. Nothing filled it but prey. She felt her skin pull tight along her arms. Feathers pushed up through it. She jerked back against the wall. "No," she said. "Not now." Her voice cracked into something lower. Her fingers curled into black claws. The blanket tore under them. She had held her human shape for days, and now the beast climbed out on its own. Her true form meant the scream. It meant she would feed, and the closest warm body was his. "Get back," she snarled. "You don't know what I am." Bastion did not move away. He set the plate down and crossed to the bed. He did not flinch at the auburn crest, the beak, the talons that scraped his floor. He knelt close, took her jaw in one hand, and pried her mouth open. With the other he tipped a small vial past her teeth. Bitter liquid ran down her throat. Lydia thrashed. Her wings knocked a chair over. She swung a claw and missed. Then the shaking slowed. The heat under her skin cooled. The feathers sank back. Her hands were hands again, and she lay panting on the torn blanket, human once more. "What was that," she said. "Something for the hunger. I traveled with a healer once." He righted the chair. "It quiets bad appetites." She stared at him. Fear turned fast to a cold edge she knew better. She bared the truth like a weapon. "I am a siren," she said. "I kill men. I lure them into the dark and I feed on them. I killed a knight and dropped him in a pit.” Bastion looked at her. He did not reach for a sword. He did not back to the door. He smiled, small and steady. "I know what you are," he said. "I saw the claws before tonight. I carried you here anyway." "Then you're a fool." "Maybe." He sat on the bed's edge, near her, without fear. "Everyone gets one chance at a life. Monster or not.” Her threat had bounced off him like rain off stone. No man had ever done that. Gregorio had answered her with a sword. This one answered with medicine and a chair set upright.

The first potion had quieted her hunger. Lydia lay still on the torn blanket, waiting for Bastion to fear her at last. He did not. He rose, crossed the cabin, and returned with a second vial. It was smaller than the first, and the liquid inside glowed faint green. "Drink this too," he said. "What does it do?" "You'll see." She took it because she was tired of fighting him. The liquid was sweet, not bitter. Warmth spread through her chest. Then her skin pulled again, but slower this time, without the tearing pain. Feathers pushed up along her arms. Her fingers curled into black claws. She braced for the hunger to follow, for the scream and the need to feed. It did not come. The beast stood in her skin, and her mind stayed clear. She was fully her true form now, the fierce harpy with the auburn crest and the hooked beak, and yet she felt no wish to kill. She turned her taloned hands over and stared. "The first potion stops the shift," Bastion said. "This one brings the beast without the hunger. I wanted to see the real you. No danger to either of us." Lydia opened her beak and closed it. No man had ever asked to see her true shape. They saw it only at the end, when she fed. Bastion pulled a stool near the bed. He took a scrap of parchment and a stick of charcoal from a shelf. Then he began to draw. His eyes moved from her crest to her wings to her clawed feet. He made quick marks, then studied her again. He measured the span of one wing with his hands held apart. "Hold still," he said. "Your wing keeps twitching." She held still. He hummed while he worked, low and even, the melody that pulled at her the way her own song pulled at other men. She let it. She watched him fill the parchment with lines of her body, her feathers, the scars the arrows had left. He wrote small notes beside each part. He was not afraid, and he was not hungry for her either. He only wanted to know her. When he finished the drawing, he reached for a third vial on the shelf and pressed it into her claws. "Last one," he said. "This brings you back." She drank. The feathers sank. Her hands were hands again. He set the parchment aside and knelt to her arm, where an old wound had reopened in the thrashing. He cleaned it and wrapped it in clean cloth, humming the whole time.

When the wound was wrapped, Bastion did not rest. He gathered his notes on Lydia's beast form and spread them across the table. She watched him from the bed, still weak, still unsure why he studied her instead of running. He lit a lamp and pulled down every book from his shelf. He worked through the night. Vials clinked against each other. He crushed dried leaves, mixed powders into water, and read passages aloud under his breath. He measured a feather he had pulled from her wing earlier and dropped it into a bowl. Steam rose. He frowned, poured it out, and began again. Lydia did not understand any of it. The stars he had painted on the ceiling watched them both. She only knew that he read faster than any man should, and that he kept glancing at his drawing of her wings, her crest, her scars. Near dawn he stood up straight. "Aha," he said. He held a small vial. The liquid inside was clear and still. "What is it?" she asked. "For you." He crossed to the bed. "Drink it and the beast is gone. Not quieted. Gone. Only the woman stays." Lydia sat up. "Gone how?" "For good. There is no going back once you drink." He set the vial in her palm. His hand did not shake. "No more shift. No more hunger to feed. No more scream. You would be a woman and nothing else." She stared at the clear liquid. Her whole life sat inside that glass. The cave that called her. The song that pulled men to their end. The wings that carried her from the arrows. She had never once thought of losing them. "Why would I want that?" she whispered. Bastion knelt to meet her eyes. "Because you have to choose now. Tonight." He pointed at the notes. "I worked under a man before. Gregorio. I know where he lives. He knows where I live too." Her fingers closed around the vial. "He hunts your kind," Bastion said. "He will not stop. When he finds you a beast, he kills you. When he finds you a woman, he has no monster to slay." He paused. "It is the only way I can keep you safe." Lydia thought of the knight she had wanted for a year. The ocarina. The dragon. The song she had saved only for him. She had crossed a kingdom to make Gregorio hers. And now the beast that let her chase him was the very thing that would get her killed. She looked at Bastion. She looked at the clear vial. "I need until morning," she said. He nodded and rose. "Then decide by morning. He does not wait." Lydia held the potion against her chest and did not drink. Outside, the first gray light touched the trees. Somewhere down the western road, Gregorio was already moving.

Morning light spread across the cabin floor. Lydia had not slept. She sat on the bed with the clear vial pressed to her chest, right where she had held it all night. The painted stars on the ceiling had faded with the dawn. Bastion stood by the table, his notes still spread out, waiting for her word. She uncurled her fingers and looked at the glass. Inside it sat the wings that carried her from the arrows. The scream that dropped a knight where he stood. The hunger that made her hunt. The cave that had called her first, so long ago she could not remember choosing. All of it. She thought of the beast as a thing apart from her. It was not. It was her. Losing it meant losing the part of herself that had crossed a kingdom. "You are quiet," Bastion said. He did not push. "I keep thinking it will feel like cutting off my arm," she said. "It might." He crossed the room and knelt in front of her. "But an arm can't get you killed." She looked at his face, at the eyes that had studied her wings without fear, and she understood that he was not asking her to become nothing. He was asking her to stay alive. Outside, far down the road, she heard nothing. But she knew Gregorio was walking. She knew what he did to beasts. She had felt his sword at her throat. She had felt his arrows in her back. He would find her the way he found every monster in the kingdom. And when he did, the wings would not save her. She choose herself. She had spent a year hunting the wrong man's love. Bastion had given her his bed and asked for nothing. The choice was not really between woman and beast. It was between living and dead. Lydia pulled the stopper. The small sound seemed loud in the quiet room. "You do not have to," Bastion said. "I know." She raised the vial. "That is why I am." She drank it. The liquid was cool and tasted of nothing. For a moment she felt only her own heartbeat. Then something turned over deep inside her, like a fire going out. The pull of the cave, the itch under her skin that had never once left her, the hum that answered her hunger. Gone. She reached for the beast the way she always could and found empty space. She gasped and pressed a hand to her mouth. "Lydia?" Bastion caught her shoulders. "It is quiet," she whispered. "For the first time, it is quiet." She looked up at him, human..

The quiet in Lydia's mind held for one breath. Then a fist hit the cabin door. The blows came hard and steady, rattling the frame. Lydia knew the weight behind them before Bastion said the name. Gregorio had walked the road all night, and now he stood outside. Bastion rose. "Stay," he told her. He crossed to the door and opened it wide. Gregorio filled the doorway in battle-worn iron. His dark eyes swept the room and stopped on Lydia. She sat on the bed, hands folded. He drew a slow breath through his nose, the way he read every beast he had ever hunted. "She smells human," Gregorio said. His voice stayed flat. "No siren under it. Nothing." He looked at her longer, and something in his jaw tightened. He had crossed a kingdom to kill a monster, and the monster was gone. "She is," Bastion said. "There is nothing left to hunt." Gregorio stepped inside anyway. He pointed at Lydia. "Do you know what she is? What she did? Merchants. A shepherd. Travelers who never came home. Their families still wait at the road." His hand shook once, then went still. "She killed them. All of them. And now she sits on your bed like a girl." Lydia met his eyes and said nothing. She did not defend herself. She did not beg. The names he threw at her were true, and she let them land in silence. "Say something," Gregorio said. "Tell me you're sorry." She kept her mouth shut. Bastion moved between them. He was younger, smaller in his plain shirt, but he did not step back. "Your oath was monsters," he said. "You told me that yourself. Kill the beast, spare the man. There is no beast here anymore." "There is a killer." "There is a woman." Bastion's voice dropped, steady and low. "You wanted out. A small piece of land where nobody knows your name. Go have it. That was the whole reason you left the crown." Gregorio's hand drifted to his sword hilt. Lydia watched it. She had no way to save herself. If he drew, she would die as a woman. Bastion did not reach for a weapon. He only held Gregorio's gaze. "You buried a man alone once. You don't want another grave, because I will make you bury me alone as well." For a long moment nobody breathed. Then Gregorio's hand fell away from the hilt. "She's yours now," he said. "Whatever she is." He looked at Lydia one last time. He turned and walked out. The door swung shut behind him. Lydia listened to his boots fade down the road and did not stop listening until they were gone.

The boots faded. Lydia let out a breath she had held too long. Across the room, Bastion did the same. His shoulders dropped. He shut the bolt and turned to face her. For a moment neither spoke. The hunter was gone. So was the beast he had come to kill. Only the two of them remained, and the quiet felt strange and new. "Thank you," Lydia said. Her voice sounded small in her own ears. She had never thanked anyone for saving her life. She had never needed to. Bastion only smiled. He crossed the room and sat on the floor near the bed, the way he had every night since he found her. "You can stay here," he said. "If you want. As long as you want." She looked at him. The young knight who had once been a bard. He offered her a home the way another man might offer bread, plainly, without asking for anything back. She had spent her whole life pulling men toward her with a song. He had come to her by choice. "You hum," she said. "When you think I'm asleep. The same song, over and over. What is it?" Bastion went still. He looked at his hands. "My mother sang it. The night my father didn't come home from a war." He shrugged, but the shrug was slow. "I don't know why it stays with me. It just does." Lydia said nothing. Once that song would have been a weapon she could steal. Now it was only his, a wound he carried and hummed without meaning to. Her eyes drifted up. The ceiling above the bed was painted dark, and small points of white spread across it. Stars. Hundreds of them, set in careful shapes. "You painted these," she said. Bastion looked up too. Something opened in his face. "I always wanted to study the stars," he said. His plain voice quickened. "Learn the names, the maps, all of it. I never got the chance. So I painted them instead. As close to the real sky as I could get” "I'll stay," she said. Bastion nodded once, like the matter was settled, and did not make it more than it was. She lay back and watched his painted sky. She had crossed a kingdom to trap a legendary knight and keep him forever. That knight was gone from her life.

Morning came. Lydia woke under the painted stars, human and hungry in a way she did not know. Her stomach ached, but no beast stirred beneath it. Bastion stood at the small stove, turning something in a pan. The smell was strange and warm. She had eaten travelers and raw fish her whole life. She had never smelled bread. "Sit," he said. He set a plate before her. Eggs, a slice of bread, a cup of water. Lydia stared at it. Then she leaned down and bit into the eggs without hands, the way she had always fed. Bastion said nothing at first. He watched her tear at the plate. Yolk smeared her chin. She swallowed too fast and coughed. "Slower," he said. He sat across from her. "It won't run away." She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. "I don't understand this," she said. "The heat. Why cook it. Why wait." Bastion picked up a fork. He held it up so she could see. "You use this," he said. He speared a piece of egg and lifted it. "Then this." He ate it, slow, and set the fork down. Lydia frowned at the fork. She took it like a dagger and stabbed the bread. It skittered off the plate onto the floor. She hissed at it. Bastion laughed. It was quiet, but real. "Not a spear," he said. He came around the table and stood behind her. He wrapped his hand around hers on the fork. His grip was warm. "Loose. Let it hold the food. Not you." She let him guide her hand. The fork lifted a bite. She brought it to her mouth without dropping it. The egg was soft and salted and good. "There," he said. He did not make it more than it was. He went back to his chair. They ate. Lydia dropped the fork twice more. Each time she picked it up again. She watched how he chewed with his mouth closed, how he drank between bites, how he did not rush. She copied him. By the end of the plate she ate like a woman, not a beast. When she finished, she looked at the empty plate. She felt full, and warm and content. He stood and took her plate to the basin. "Tomorrow I'll teach you to hold a knife." Lydia watched him wash the dishes in his quiet cabin.

The plate was clean. Lydia set the fork down without dropping it. She felt proud of a small thing. But a bigger want pulled at her. She had a voice once. She wanted to find it again. Bastion sat by the window, humming his mother's tune while he oiled his blade. Lydia opened her mouth to match him. She reached for the note that used to bend men toward her, She sang. The sound came out thin. It cracked in the middle. No echo lifted it, no pull curled inside it. It was just a woman's voice, plain and small in a wooden room. She stopped. Her face went hot. "Again," she said, to herself. She tried a higher note. It wobbled and died. She tried the low hum that once dropped travelers to their knees. Nothing answered. The cabin stayed a cabin. Bastion stayed himself, calm at the window. "I can't," she said. Her hands shook. "It's gone.” Bastion set the blade down. "You have a voice," he said. "You used it just now." "It's ugly." She hated how her throat tightened. "It doesn't work." "It's new." He turned to face her. "You didn't sing like a siren the first day you were one. You learned it. Years, I'd guess." She glared at him. "I don't have years." "You have more than you did as a beast." He said it plain and stopped there. Lydia opened her mouth to argue. Then she understood what he meant, and it was worse than an insult. The song had never been hers. The stone made it. The hunger made it. Without them she was a beginner, clumsy as her hand had been with the fork. She would have to grow this too, slow, from nothing. It was too much. The eating, the fork, the human stomach, and now this. She had been the most beautiful sound on the western road. Now she squeaked like a bird with a stone in its throat. "I'm done," she said. She stood, crossed to the bed under the painted stars, and pulled the blanket over her head. The wool smelled of him. She curled small and shut her eyes. The dark helped. Nothing asked anything of her here. She heard him cross the floor. He did not pull the blanket back. He sat on the edge of the bed, near her shape, and began to hum. His mother's tune, low and even. He did not need magic to make it beautiful. He had only practiced. Lydia stayed hidden. But she listened. Under the blanket, in the dark, she moved her lips and shaped the notes with him, so quiet he could not hear. She could not sing yet. She could learn the melody.

Morning light filled the cabin. Lydia sat up and let the blanket fall. The melody still moved in her head, but the room around her felt strange. She had lived in a cave for as long as she could remember. There she knew only stone, water, and her own voice. This place held too many things. Cups. Spoons. A kettle. A chair with a cushion. She did not know what a person did with all of it. Bastion moved through the room like the objects were part of him. He filled the kettle. He hung his cloak on a peg. He wiped the table in three strokes and set two bowls down without looking. Lydia watched every motion. She wanted to belong to this the way he did. So she tried. She stood and reached for the cloth he had used. She wiped the table too. But she pressed too hard and knocked a bowl to the floor. It did not break. She picked it up and set it wrong, upside down. She hung a cloth on the wrong peg. She lifted the kettle before the water was warm and did not know why he had waited. Bastion watched her without a word. Then he said, "You don't have to copy me." "I don't know how else to be here," she said. Her hands were empty and useless. "You know where each thing goes. I know rock and water. Nothing here." He set his spoon down. "I didn't know a kettle either. Once." "You were a child then." She turned the bowl over in her hands. "I'm learning it all at once. I feel like a stranger in your house." He did not argue. He did not soften it. He only nodded, as if he had heard the true thing under her words. That was worse than pity. It meant it was real. Lydia set the bowl down. The walls felt close. She needed air that no one had arranged. "I'm going out," she said. Bastion looked up. "The road is safe now. Gregorio won't come." She stopped at the door. She had never walked outside as only a woman, with no song, no beast, no cave to return to. Her hand rested on the wood. "Go," he said. "The house will still be here." She stepped out. Cold air met her face. Grass, not stone, gave under her feet. A small pool sat near the porch, still and bright. She had not made this world and did not understand it. But she could stand in it. She could learn the ground the way she was learning the melody, one step at a time. She walked past the pool and did not look back at the cabin. For the first time she was not fleeing and not hunting. She was simply going for a walk, and choosing to come home after.

The walk carried Lydia farther than she meant. The grass gave way to trees, and the trees closed behind her. Once she had flown over ground like this. Her wings had known every ridge and gap. Now she walked on tired legs and did not remember the way back. The cabin was gone from sight. She kept moving, telling herself the path would open. It did not. The woods changed as she pressed on. Some trees stood plain and brown. Others shimmered, their bark laced with faint light. Their roots crossed the ground in tangled ropes. She stepped over one and her foot caught. She fell hard on her knees. Her palms scraped the dirt. As a beast this fall would have meant nothing. Now it stung, and she stayed down a moment, breathing. A sound reached her. Not a voice. A high, clear ringing, like glass touched by wind. It came from ahead, past the thickest trees. She had spent her whole life making sounds that pulled others in. Now a sound pulled her. She rose and followed it, one careful step after another. The trees parted around a clearing. At its center stood a crystal taller than a man. It glowed pale blue and threw light across the roots. The ringing came from it. Lydia stopped at the edge. She knew this feeling. It was the same call the cave once used on her. But she had no song left to answer with, and no power to take from it. She almost stepped forward. Then a root shifted under her foot, slow and alive. Branches leaned in around the clearing. The light in the crystal brightened, and the ringing sharpened into something that hurt her ears. Slowly but surely the ringing settled into a sound she could understand the tone of…. A warning. Why she was being warned was beyond her but it was a warning nonetheless.

The warning grew louder. The roots near Lydia's feet moved, sliding over her boots like slow snakes. She tried to pull free and stumbled back. A branch snapped down and raked her arm. She turned to run, but the trees had closed the path behind her. The glowing crystal at the center of the grove flared brighter, and the whole forest seemed to lean toward her at once. She called out. Her voice came thin and small, a human voice with no power in it. Once that sound would have bent a man to her will. Now it only echoed off the shining bark and died. A root caught her ankle and dragged. She fell again, harder this time, and clawed at the dirt to hold her place. Then she heard steel. A blade cut through the roots ahead of her in one clean stroke. Bastion stepped through the gap. He was the young knight who had carried her from the ruins, who had fed her and made her human. He did not stop to speak. He swung again, and the severed roots recoiled. "Up," he said. "Now." Lydia grabbed his hand. He pulled her to her feet and put himself between her and the crystal. The roots surged after them, faster now, ropes of wood snapping at their heels. Bastion cut a path forward and pushed her ahead of him. "Run.” She ran. Branches whipped her shoulders. The ringing rose to a scream behind them. Bastion swung at anything that reached for her, never breaking stride. A root coiled around his leg and he hacked it loose without a word. They broke past the last shimmering trees, and the plain brown woods opened ahead. The roots stopped at the grove's edge, as if held by a line they could not cross. The ringing faded behind them. Bastion did not slow until the cabin came into view through the trees. Only then did he sheath his sword. Lydia bent over her knees, breathing hard. Her arm bled where the branch had torn it. Inside, he sat her by the fire and knelt to look at the wound. He cleaned it with a wet cloth, slow and steady. "You went far," he said. Not angry. Just true. "I couldn't find the way back," Lydia said. "I know." He wrapped a strip of cloth around her arm and tied it. "That grove has a heart in it. It calls things. It doesn't like being answered." He looked at her. Lydia stared at the fire. She had lost the song that once ruled such places. Now those same places could kill her, and she had no defense but a man with a sword. She pressed her bandaged arm to her chest. She was human now, fully, and the world she once ruled had become a thing she must survive.

The fire had burned low by the time Bastion finished with her arm. He tied off the last strip of cloth and sat back on his heels. Lydia looked at the neat wrap, at his steady hands, at the sword resting by the door. Without him, the grove would have taken her. She knew that plain fact now, and it sat in her chest like a stone. "Thank you," she said. The words came out small. Bastion shrugged. "You're welcome." "No." She caught his wrist before he could rise. "I mean it. I would be dead. I couldn't have gotten out. Not without you." He went still. "You'd have found a way." "I wouldn't." Her voice shook. "I called and nothing came. My voice did nothing." She let go of his wrist and pressed her bandaged arm to her chest. "I never needed anyone. Not once. I fed myself. I healed myself. I never waited for a hand." The truth of it frightened her more than the roots had. For a year she had hunted. She had killed men and felt nothing but hunger. She had ruled the places that now wanted her dead. And here she sat, wrapped in cloth a man had cut for her, alive only because he came. Her breath came fast. She stared at the floor and could not make it slow. She had built her whole life on needing no one. That life was gone. The stone was gone, the song was gone, the wings were gone. What was left of her needed this man to walk into the woods. Bastion watched her. He did not tell her to calm down. He picked up the poker and stirred the fire until it climbed again. "When I took the arrow," he said, "the princess held my face and cried. I didn't want it. I didn't know what to do with someone needing me back." He set the poker down. "You learn it. That's all." Lydia looked up at him. His plain brown eyes gave nothing back but patience. The panic in her did not leave, but it changed shape. She was still afraid. She still hated how much she needed him. And under the fear, she was glad. Glad it was him. Glad he had come. She made a choice. She reached out and pulled him toward her and held on. Her arms went around his shoulders and gripped. She pressed her face against the cold plate of his armor. Bastion did not pull back. He did not know where to put his hands. After a moment he set one on her back, light, and let her hold him. "You're mine now," Lydia said into his shoulder. "My human. I decided." "That so," Bastion said. "That's so." In that moment Bastion grabbed and kissed Lydia and it felt magical. Like the whole world was ending, and they were the only ones left

Morning came, and Lydia could not lift her head. Her arms felt heavy. Her legs would not hold her when she tried to stand. She sank back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling stars Bastion had painted there. "I'm weak," she said. "Not tired. Weak. Something is wrong." Bastion set a hand on her forehead. He frowned. "You went into the grove twice. Those woods take something from a person." He looked toward the window, where the crystal forest sat past the tree line. Its faint ring carried on the still air. "It saps the strength. Rest will bring it back." Lydia wanted to believe him. But the weakness felt older than the grove. It felt like the pond in her cavern, when she went days without feeding and her body began to fail. She knew that hollow feeling. She had healed herself a hundred times by feeding. Now she had no way to feed at all. "I'll fix it," Bastion said. He pulled on his cloak. "A neighbor down the road keeps a pot going. Hearty stuff. It puts strength back in tired men. I'll bring you some." He crouched by the bed and touched her cheek. "Don't go anywhere." "I couldn't if I wanted to," she said. He gave her a small smile and left. She lay alone and listened to the far ring of the crystal. Once a call like that had pulled at her blood. Now it was only a sound. She felt less than the woman she was learning to be. Less than the beast she had buried. Something in between, and fading. Bastion returned near dark. He carried a covered bowl close to his chest to keep the heat. The smell filled the cabin, meat and root and pepper. He sat on the edge of the bed and lifted her against the pillows. "Slow," he said. He fed her from the spoon the way he had taught her to eat, one careful bite at a time. She swallowed. The stew was warm and good. She finished the bowl. Her stomach was full. She felt it press against her ribs, heavy and satisfied. But her arms stayed weak. Her legs stayed weak. The food filled her, and nothing more. Bastion watched her face. "Better?" "Full," she said. "Not stronger." He set the bowl down. "Give it the night." Lydia nodded, but she knew. A woman ate to fill her belly. She had eaten, and her belly was full, and her body had taken nothing from it. Whatever had kept her strong all her life had run on something else. Blood. Fear. The scream and the feeding. That well was sealed now, and no stew could reach it. Something gnawed under her ribs, past the fullness. Not hunger. She knew hunger. This was quieter and worse, and she could not name it. She lay in the dark and felt her strength keep draining while the crystal rang on, far away.

By morning Lydia was worse. Her hands shook when she raised them. The ring of the crystal came through the window, and now it seemed aimed at her, only her. It pulled at something under her skin. Bastion sat on the bed's edge and pressed water to her lips. "I have to go to town," he said. "The healer keeps records. If the grove drained you, she'll know how to fix it." He tucked the blanket to her chin. "Rest. Don't move." "I'll try," she said. It was a lie. She heard the door close and the sound of his steps fade down the road. The ring grew louder. It was not in her ears. It was in her blood, the way the cave had once called her. She had lost her powers, but this call did not care. It knew her. She turned her head to the window and saw the far tree line, dark and shining. She put her feet on the floor. Her legs folded, so she crawled. She pulled herself across the boards, out the door, into the grass. The pull got stronger the closer she came, and stronger still fed her. She stood, staggered, walked. The forest opened before her, trees knotted together, some green, some pale, some with crystals grown into their bark. She expected the roots to strike. Last time they had trapped her, and Bastion had cut her free. Now they moved differently. They rose and curled beneath her feet, gentle as hands. They lifted her forward, passing her along, deeper into the wood. She did not fight. The ring filled her whole body now, warm, and it drowned the hollow ache that had been eating her. The roots set her down at the center. There stood the heart of the grove, a great crystal taller than a man. It threw blue and pink light across the moss. Cracks ran through it, and inside them Lydia saw shapes like branches, like breath. It was alive. The ring came from it, and up close the ring was not a warning. It was a welcome. Behind her the roots wove together. They rose in a wall, thick as arms, closing over her head. They did not crush. They sealed. She stood in a green room with the crystal, cut off from the world, from the road, from Bastion when he returned. Her weakness eased. Standing near the heart, the draining stopped. She felt the crystal reaching into the empty place inside her, the well that stew could never fill, and beginning to pour something back. She should have been afraid. She was not. For the first time since she lost her powers, the hollow under her ribs went quiet. She pressed her palm to the crystal's cold face. It hummed against her skin. The forest had taken her in and shut the door. Lydia was fed, and she was caught, and Bastion was walking home to an empty bed.

Lydia woke inside the green room and knew at once that something had changed. The day before, the forest had warned her. Its ring had pushed her back, sharp and cold. Now the same wood cradled her. The roots held her like a mother holds a child. She pressed her hand to the crystal and felt it welcome her. Her strength had returned in the night. She stood without shaking. The hollow ache under her ribs was gone. The crystal fed her the way blood and fear once had, and it asked nothing in return. She turned in a slow circle. The walls of living wood shimmered pink and blue. Crystals grew from the bark of trees pressed close around her, some green, some pale. Why the change, she wondered. Yesterday the grove had feared her hunger. Today it had filled her. She laid her palm flat on a cool root. It pulsed under her skin, steady as breath. She understood. The forest had judged her again and decided she was no longer a danger. She had come to it empty, a woman with no beast left inside. So it took her in. Then she heard him. From far off, past the wall of roots, a voice called her name. Bastion. He had come home to the empty bed and followed her tracks. His voice carried the same warmth that once slipped under her skin, the hum that moved her the way her own song moved men. "Lydia!" it came again, closer now, rough with fear. She ran to the wall and pushed. The roots did not give. "Bastion," she said. "I'm here. I'm inside." She dug her fingers between the coils and pulled. The wood only tightened. It curled over the gaps, sealing them, shutting his voice out. "Let me go," she told the forest. "He's mine. I want to be with him." The roots did not loosen. They drew closer around her, gentle and firm, the way arms shield a child from a storm. She could not understand it. The grove had healed her. Now it would not let her leave the one who healed her heart. It wanted to keep her the way she had once wanted to keep him. Then the crystal made a sound. It was low, pitched so only she could hear it. She knew that sound. It was the same note the crystal had given her the day before, when the whole forest had told her to run. A warning.

The warning note held in Lydia's ears. The roots would not open. Bastion's voice pressed against the wall of wood, close now, ragged with fear. She struck the roots with both fists and got nothing but her own bruised hands. Then a shape rose from the crystal heart. It pulled itself out of the great jewel, blue and faceted, with sharp offshoots for arms and legs. It stood taller than her. Its voice did not come through the air. It spoke inside her mind, quiet and clear. "You do not know what he is," the crystal said. "He took what you were. He drank your power for himself. He left you his weak human self and kept your beast." Lydia shook her head. "No. He gave me the cure. He gave me a home." "He gave you a cage of flesh," it said. "Look how you starve. Ask why food no longer feeds you. He carries your hunger now. He carries your song." "You're lying." Her voice cracked. "He hums my song because he learned it. He is a bard. He saved me from the knight." She pressed her palm to the wall. "Let me out. He's mine. I claimed him." The crystal did not move. "I will not open. I keep you from him." The wall of roots split with a wet crack. Bastion came through. Not with a sword. He struck with claws, long and dark, curved like a hawk's. They tore the wood apart in one pull. His arm ended in talons. Feathers ran up past his wrist, brown streaked with black. His eyes had gone flat and yellow. Lydia stepped back. Her heart slammed. She knew that shape. She had worn it. The beast the potion had taken from her stood inside her man. "Bastion," she said. "Is that you?” He did not answer. He came for her, claws raised, moving fast. There was no song in his throat now. Only hunger, the kind she had felt a hundred nights on the road. The crystal being threw itself between them. Its stone arms spread wide. Bastion's talons raked across its faceted chest and struck sparks. A crack ran up the blue surface. The crystal did not fall. It held its ground and shoved him back through the broken wall.

The crystal shoved Bastion back through the broken wall. But the blow had cost it. The crack up its chest widened, and a high sound rose from the great jewel at the grove's center. The whole crystal began to shake. The ringing note bent and split, no longer clean. Lydia pressed her hands to her ears as the sound climbed. The forest heart crystal was breaking its own frequency. It shuddered so hard that small stones jumped from the ground. Where the roots had held her, they loosened and drooped. The seal that fed her strength was failing. Lydia looked at the crystal guardian and knew it could not fight and hold the grove at once. Bastion did not stay beastly. As the sound tore through him, his wings folded and shrank. The feathers pulled back into skin. He dropped to his knees in dark robes, a man again, gasping. A deep black hood hid his face until he tore it back. His hands shook. "It's in my head," he said. "The note. It's ripping me apart." He was the man who had carried her from the road. The man who fed her by hand and painted stars on his ceiling. Now she knew he had stolen her beast and left her starving. She stood frozen between hate and the old pull toward him. "Lydia." His voice cracked. "Help me. Please. I'll give it back. I swear it." His fingers dug into the dirt. He was begging for his life, the way her prey once begged in the cavern. The crystal's note struck a single terrible pitch. Bastion threw back his head and screamed. The scream was hers. It was the siren cry she had lost, torn from his throat, raw and huge. It shook her ribs. It shook the crystal too. The great jewel caught the same sound and threw it back, and its own frequency shattered like ice. The grove went silent. The guardian sank to the ground, its cracked body gone still. The roots fell limp. Lydia crawled free of the dead seal, weak, empty of the strength it had lent her. Bastion staggered up. The scream had not killed him. It had freed him. His shape rippled, and the beast rose again, brown feathers streaked with black, talons and wide wings. He did not come for her now. He looked at her once with flat yellow eyes, then beat his wings and rose above the trees. The broken forest could not catch him. He flew off over the ridge and was gone. Lydia knelt in the ruined grove. The crystal that had fed her lay silent and would not wake. Her one shelter was dead. And the beast that carried her power, her song, her only way back to what she was, had flown out of reach. She was human, starving, and alone, with a thief to hunt.

Lydia knelt in the wreck of the grove. The great crystal lay split and dark. She had watched it shatter. She was sure it was dead, its light gone with the beast that stole her power. She pressed her hand to a cold facet and waited for nothing. Then the roots under her fingers stirred. A thin blue thread of light crawled up the broken jewel. The crack sealed itself, edge to edge, like ice knitting over water. The crystal woke. It had not died. It was healing, fast, the forest pouring itself back into the stone. Roots wound up her arms before she could pull away. They lifted her, wrapped her, drew her against the humming crystal. She fought until she had no strength left. The light closed over her eyes. She stood in a place with no floor. Before her rose a figure of blue crystal, taller than a man, with jagged limbs and offshoots for arms. Its great faceted head glowed. This was the will of the forest, the thing behind the guardian she had watched fall. It looked at her, and she felt every death she had caused laid out plain. "You have killed," the crystal being said. Its voice was many tones at once. Faces flickered in its light. A knight with silver hair. A trader. Travelers on a road she had baited with song. Lydia's throat closed. She had never asked forgiveness in her life. "I killed them," she said. "I lured them and I fed. I made the road a trap." She thought of the bone horn, the men who never went home. "I am sorry. I know it changes nothing for them." The crystal held her in its light and weighed her. "A beast cannot repent," it said. "You are no longer a beast. You are a woman now. To such a one, a second chance may be given, if she wants it." "I want it," Lydia said. The words came out fast and true. "Then hear the price," the crystal being said. "You took life. You will repay it by saving life. Every soul you saved shall stand against every soul you took. And you must give up your hunger for what you were. Reclaim your siren power and this bargain breaks." Lydia thought of the beast flying over the ridge, carrying her song, her wings, her old strength. "I accept," she said.

The light held Lydia in the crystal for a long time. She could not count the hours. She felt roots feed into her skin, threading warmth through her tired flesh. She had accepted the bargain. Now the forest set about remaking her. She waited, still, and let it work. The blue glow around her began to fade. The great crystal at the grove's center dimmed, its cracked facets going quiet. The living cocoon of roots loosened, then peeled back one strand at a time. Cool air touched her face. Lydia opened her eyes. She stood on her own feet. That alone surprised her. For days she had barely crawled. Now her legs held her without shaking. She flexed one hand and watched the fingers close, sure and quick. The starving weakness was gone. Something new had taken its place. Her skin caught the light. It glowed faintly, warm as a coal under ash. She pressed a palm to her chest and felt her own heartbeat, steady and human. Not the hunger of a beast. Not the empty ache of a dying woman. She understood her body now, every muscle and breath, the way a person knows a house they were born in. Then she saw the dress. Blue crystal sheathed her arms and chest, fitted like war armor but cut with an open, wild grace. Fine green vines wound through the plates. It shimmered exactly as the great crystal had shimmered before it dimmed. She lifted an arm. The crystal moved with her, light as cloth, hard as stone. "You wear a piece of me now," the crystal being said. Lydia turned. The will of the forest stood at the heart of the grove. Its faceted head glowed pale blue above spiked, dark limbs. Crystal offshoots served as its arms. She had knelt before it as a killer. It looked at her the same way still, patient and unafraid. "What is this?" she asked. She touched the plate over her heart. "A part of the grove, given to you," it said. "You forfeited the beast. In its place you carry the forest. The armor holds while you keep your bargain. Break it, and the crystal leaves you bare." "Then I will keep it," she said. The crystal being dimmed. Its light sank back into the great jewel and went still. The roots withdrew into the earth. Lydia stood alone in the quiet grove, a woman remade, and turned toward the trees to begin walking out.

Lydia walked out of the dead grove and back toward the cabin. She wanted Bastion's home again, the painted stars, the warm bed.But when she pushed through the last trees, she stopped. The cabin was gone. In its place slumped a rotting hovel. Broken planks leaned against a sagging roof. Moss ate the walls. It looked as if a clean, bright house had only ever been a picture laid over this ruin, and now the picture had peeled away. Lydia touched the doorframe. The wood crumbled under her fingers. "You." She turned. A man in iron stood at the edge of the clearing, sword loose in his hand. Gregorio. He had hunter. he only watched her, his sharp face tired. "I saw something in the sky moments ago," he said. "A beast with wings. It looked like you." His eyes moved over her human face, her crystal armor. "But it wasn't you. Its shape was wrong. Male." "It wasn't me," she said. "I can't fly anymore." "No. I see that." He lowered the sword fully. "I gave up on ending you… I keep my word. You're no beast now." His voice flattened. "But if you ever act as one again, I'll finish it." Gregorio looked at the hovel. "I found a body this morning. Under those boards." He pointed with his chin. "Long dead. Months of rot on it, maybe more. The gear was his. It was Bastion." Lydia's mouth went dry. "That can't be…." She stopped. The winged shape in the sky. The stolen hunger. The thing that wore her old form. "That thing isn’t Bastion, Bastion is dead” Gregario hissed He walked. Lydia stood frozen between the ruin and the rotting truth. The man who healed her had been a corpse for months. The thing in his cabin had never been Bastion. And it now carried her wings across the sky. She ran after Gregorio. "Wait." She caught his arm. He stopped and looked down at her. "You've hunted this thing your whole life. I can't fly. I can't fight it alone. Let me come with you." Gregorio studied her a long moment. The crystal armor. The vines. The woman who was no longer a monster. "You'll slow me," he said. "I'll keep up." He pulled his arm free and started walking again. He waved his arm for her to follow

They walked until dark. Gregorio picked a flat spot and built a small fire. He raised his tent, set his shield against a log, and leaned his spear within reach. Then he spread his bedroll on the far side of the fire, as far from Lydia as the clearing allowed. He lay down with his back to her and said nothing. Lydia sat by the flames. The distance stung more than she expected. She had killed his kind. She had lured his friend. Still, she wanted him to look at her once without his hand near his sword. "Gregorio." He did not move. "I need to tell you why I hunted you." "Sleep." "I heard you play once. A year ago. You sat by a fire like this and played a bone flute. A dragon came and you killed it, then you played again as if nothing happened." She pulled her knees close. "That sound reached my cave. I had never wanted a person before. Only prey. But I wanted you. I wanted to sit near that music and never leave." Gregorio rolled over. His face was hard in the firelight. "A beast wanted me," he said. "You built a trap out of my own song. You wore a woman's face to steal me." His mouth twisted. "That is the foulest thing you have told me yet." "I know how it sounds." "You do not." He turned his back again. "Don't speak of my music." Lydia let the silence take the camp. She had reached for him and he had shut every door. She lay down on the bare ground and stared at the fire until it dropped to coals. This was her answer. He would travel with her, but he would never soften. She had traded her wings for a hunt beside a man who hated her. She closed her eyes. Then a note drifted across the coals. Lydia opened her eyes. Gregorio sat up, his back still to her. He held the bone ocarina to his lips. The smooth curves caught the firelight. He played low and slow, the same haunting line she had chased for a year. His fingers moved over the hollow holes without thought, the way a man breathes. He was not playing for her. She understood that. He played to settle himself, the way he always had. But the sound still reached her across the fire, and it still pulled at something under her ribs. Lydia lay very still. Her human ears heard every note. She could not sing it back. She could not answer with any lure. She could only listen, the way any woman listens, wanting and unable to take. The song ended. Gregorio lowered the ocarina and lay down without a word.

Lydia woke to the sound of buckles. Gregorio stood over the dead fire, already packed. His shield hung on his back. His spear was strapped tight. He tested the strap on his boot and turned toward the tree line without waiting for her. "You slept late," he said. "The beast flew north. I'm following the trail while it's fresh." Lydia scrambled up. "You mean to go without me." "You can't fly. You'll slow me." He started walking. "Catch up or don't." She caught up. The crystal armor let her move faster than her human body should. She fell in behind him, and he did not slow, but he did not send her back either. The trail bent uphill through thinning pines. Then the air changed. Ahead, a line of glowing spheres hung in the air, each one burning a different color. They floated in an even path up the slope, blue and gold, humming faintly. Gregorio stopped at the edge of them. "A mage's ground," he said. "We go around." "There's no around. The trail runs straight through." Lydia pointed. Broken branches and clawed earth led up between the floating lights. The beast wearing her stolen form had passed here. A man stepped out from the trees beside the path. He wore a dark coat stitched with faded stars. Half his face was smooth. The other half was ruined, laced with red scarring like cracked glass. He looked young, but his good eye was tired. "Thane," Gregorio said. His voice lost its edge. "You're alive." "Barely." Thane looked at the spheres, not at them. "They killed every mage in the spire. I built this trail to keep hunters off my ground." His hand moved, and one sphere drifted lower. "You're chasing the winged thing. It came through my lights last night. It didn't slow. Nothing living moves that fast." "Can you track it?" Gregorio asked. "I can do better." Thane finally turned to Lydia. His good eye narrowed on the crystal at her shoulder. "The forest marked you. That thing you hunt wears a shape that was yours. I felt it pass. I can hold its trail in the air for a day, no longer." Lydia stepped forward. "Then show us." Thane raised his hand. The spheres shifted. They peeled off their path one by one and floated up the slope, marking the beast's route through the trees like lamps on a road. The trail glowed clear ahead of them. Gregorio looked at the lit path, then at Lydia. For the first time he did not tell her to stay back. "Move," he said. They climbed together, following Thane's lights. The trail led north, and somewhere ahead the beast carried Lydia's stolen wings. She was closer now than she had been since the grove. But the day was short, and the lights would fade by nightfall.