She tried to turn, her legs heavy as if they had turned to lead, but she wasn't fast enough. From the dense darkness just behind the door, a large, cold hand shot out like a snake and gripped her wrist with brutal strength. The fingers dug into her flesh, right where Etan could still feel the phantom pain of his missing pinky. Tsuki let out a choked groan as she was dragged with a violent jerk into the cabin, away from the sunlight and into the darkness where the Prince and the Monster finally had to face reality.

  ?Terror was no longer an abstract concept learned from Etan’s memories; it was an electric jolt paralyzing her lungs. Those hands... they weren't made of flesh. They were translucent magical manifestations, bluish ectoplasms floating in the air following Silas’s convulsing gestures. They had clamped around Tsuki’s wrists and ankles, pinning her against the cabin wall with a cold, inexorable force. Silas moved with a twitchy energy, his eyes pits of an obsession that went beyond greed. “My mother wanted to send you away, little sparrow,” Silas murmured, his voice reduced to a feverish hiss. “She said you’re a danger, that you had to disappear before the soldiers arrived. But it’s not right. It’s not right at all!”

  ?As he spoke, he placed the shining stones on the table with a maniacal delicacy, making them tinkle like small, stolen treasures. Then, with a brutal gesture that contrasted with the care given to the gems, he let go of Martha’s body. The woman fell to the ground with a dull thud, a sack of bones and heavy clothes that remained motionless on the earthen floor. “You’re staying here,” the man continued, drawing closer until the space between them vanished, suffocating her. “You will give color to our gray life. You will give us wealth. And you will give my mother a granddaughter. A magical creature, silver like you.”

  ?Tsuki didn't understand the meaning of those words, but the primordial terror Etan was unleashing in their shared mind made her knees tremble. She heard Etan screaming, a roar of desperation scratching at her skull. “TSUKI! REACT! REARRANGE THE AIR, TURN THOSE HANDS TO SMOKE, DO IT NOW!” Etan yelled, but she was helpless. “Why can't you do it?! You destroyed a room with Marcus! Use that strength, damn it, use it!” But Tsuki couldn't concentrate. With Marcus, it had been pure survival instinct, an explosion against a declared enemy. Here, the betrayal of that human warmth, the sight of the “kind lady” tossed away like trash, and Silas’s suffocating proximity had emptied her. Her strength had abandoned her, leaving her as a fragile shell. Silas was now over her. The magical hands, obeying his darkest desires, clawed at Tsuki’s tunic. The fabric tore with a sharp, brutal sound, exposing the girl’s pale chest.

  ?In that instant, the memory of the slimy fish surged back with unheard-of violence. The contact of Silas’s magic on her bare skin provoked a revulsion so total it broke the block. Tsuki began to scream, a subhuman sound that was neither a girl’s nor a boy’s voice. She began to thrash with a wild frenzy, her body twitching just like that fish on the riverbank, desperately trying to slip away from those invisible fingers that were dirtying her. “DON’T TOUCH US!” It wasn't just Etan’s voice anymore. It was a single thought, a fusion of hatred and disgust that began to make the cabin walls vibrate.

  ?Silas pressed his body against Tsuki’s, a damp, suffocating weight that smelled of sweat and upturned earth. Despite the violence of the act, his voice was thick with a sick tenderness—that of a man who never learned the boundary between love and possession. “It’s always just been me and Ma, you know?” he slurred, his hot breath against the girl’s ear. “Pa died when I was real small. Ma did everything herself. I wanted to help her, I wanted to be good, but I only caused damage... broke everything. I only knew how to hunt, because with my magic the arrows go where I say. But now... now there’s you.” Silas’s fingers brushed her cheekbone while his eyes wandered over the precious stones scattered on the floor. “We’ll go to the city. All together. We’ll be a real family, happy. We’ll have so many expensive stones, we’ll be rich, we’ll never be hungry again. And you’ll give us children, sparrow...”

  ?Silas closed his eyes and leaned in, seeking Tsuki’s lips for a kiss that tasted of betrayal. But as soon as his face brushed the girl’s, the impossible happened. The very matter of Tsuki’s body gave a violent jolt. Her neck strained, and her delicate, feminine features began to seethe like molten wax, deforming under the pressure of a furious will pushing from within. In an instant, the girl’s gentle traits vanished, replaced by the sharp, pale, hate-filled face of Etan. Etan flung his brown eyes open, ablaze with a rage that didn't belong to this world. “DON’T TOUCH HER, MONSTER!” he roared. The voice was no longer Tsuki’s ethereal whisper, but a boy’s guttural cry.

  ?Silas froze millimeters away from that transformed face. His expression shifted in a second from lust to doubt, then to a paralyzing shock, and finally to pure, visceral terror. The magical hands holding the girl vanished like smoke in the wind, his concentration shattered by the blow. “W-what... what...” Silas stammered, stumbling backward. His legs gave out and he tripped over the table, sending it flipping over with a tremendous crash. The bread-diamonds rolled everywhere, mixing with the dust. “Then it’s true! You are a demon! You are an evil being, a shapeshifting monster!”

  ?Etan rose slowly to his feet. The scene was a visual abomination: the body was still Tsuki’s graceful, small form, with the torn tunic hanging from her shoulders, but atop that slender neck sat Etan’s masculine head, his short dark hair contrasting with the girl’s long silver strands. It was a broken union, an error of creation. Etan stared Silas down, ignoring Martha’s lifeless body on the floor. “The only monster here, Silas,” Etan said, his voice vibrating with a metallic resonance, “is you, who confused hunger with love.”

  ?Silas recoiled, tripping over his own steps. The shock—that vision of a man’s head on a maiden’s body—had acted like a bucket of ice water, clearing his mind of the fumes of greed and lust. He looked at the stones on the table, then at his mother’s body, slumped on the floor like a discarded garment, and finally at that monster staring at him with the eyes of a warrior prince. The weight of what he had done, or was about to do, crashed down on him. With a disjointed cry, a wail that had nothing human about it, Silas turned and threw himself toward the door. He bolted out like a madman pursued by wolves, disappearing into the dark green of the pines, leaving behind only the sound of breaking branches and the terror flaying his lungs.

  ?Etan stood motionless. The silence that followed was almost deafening, broken only by the dying crackle of the hearth. He was shocked. He hadn't expected his mere appearance to devastate a man in that way. “Thank you...” Tsuki’s voice was the slightest breath, a caress of fresh snow falling in the darkness of their mind. It was pure, fragile gratitude that made the heart Etan was occupying vibrate. In that moment, Etan looked down. The tunic was still torn. He saw Tsuki’s bare chest, the whiteness of the skin that seemed to glow in the cabin’s dimness, and a sudden heat rushed to his cheeks. It was a childish shame, the reaction of a boy discovering himself violating a secret temple. He immediately looked back up, staring at the ceiling with a rigidity that bordered on pain. “The body... is not mine,” he murmured, and his masculine voice, coming out of that slender throat, sounded foreign even to him.

  ?He reached out a hand toward the cabin wall, seeking contact with the rough wood to anchor himself to reality. He touched it but felt nothing. He didn't feel the texture of the bark, nor the coldness of the damp. He felt only his own face: the prickle of the skin that had changed, the weight of his own eyelids. The rest of the body was a deaf shell. “What will we do now?” Tsuki’s distant little voice asked, trembling. Etan didn't answer immediately. He looked around, observing the cabin. It was a hovel of misery and lost warmth: the wooden beams blackened by smoke, bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling like forgotten fetishes, the mess of bread-diamonds that now seemed like meaningless stones. But it was the only refuge they had, and now it had become a trap. “We arm ourselves,” Etan replied curtly, trying to stifle the confusion.

  ?He moved tentatively, ignoring the strange sensation of moving legs that weren't his. He found a grease-stained hunting knife on a shelf and an old satchel. With trembling hands, he tried to cover Tsuki’s chest, pulling the edges of the tunic together with a piece of rope found in a corner. Every gesture was steeped in desperate haste. As he turned his back to the door, focused on stuffing what little edible bread remained into the bag, a shadow lengthened across the earth floor. Silas’s figure appeared on the threshold again. He wasn't running anymore. He wasn't screaming. He stood still, a dark silhouette against the blinding morning light behind him. He held something in his hands, and the way his chest rose and fell said that the madness of the wolf had been replaced by something much calmer and slower.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  ?Silas’s shadow on the threshold grew long, deformed and flickering, until it touched Tsuki’s bare feet. He wasn't holding his bow, nor the tools of his trade. He gripped a heavy ash staff, a gnarled and raw piece of wood that seemed like the physical extension of his blind rage. The air inside the cabin had become unbreathable. The sickly-sweet, metallic smell of Martha’s blood mixed with the pungent stench of fish that still fouled Tsuki’s hands, creating a nauseating combination that made the throat burn. “Evil spirit!” Silas yelled, and his voice was nothing but a rattle broken by tears and madness. “You took my mother! You stole her soul to make yourself a nest of bones! I'm sending you back to the mud you came from!”

  ?He lunged forward. It wasn't a calculated attack; it was the fury of a wounded animal. Etan saw the staff spin through the air, ready to smash the skull he now felt as his own, but Tsuki’s body reacted with a speed his logical mind could not yet process. It was an electric reflex. As the staff descended, Tsuki’s right hand shot forward, taut and rigid as a pike. The fingers were no longer flesh; they had become an invisible diamond point that pierced Silas’s sternum with a wet, atrocious sound—a crack of breaking bones that seemed to make the whole cabin shake. The staff slipped from Silas’s fingers, hitting the ground with a dull thud. For an infinite moment, they remained locked together. Silas’s eyes went wide, his breath trapped in his throat, and in that moment of agony, his mind seemed to clear of greed. He looked at his mother’s lifeless body, understood the horror of what he had allowed, and his desperation became a superhuman force.

  ?With one last, violent effort, Silas ignored the wound in his chest and raised his calloused hands, stained with earth and hard life. He closed them around Etan’s throat. He squeezed. Etan felt his windpipe crush under the hunter’s massive thumbs. His vision began to spot with black; the heat of blood rushed to his face like a burst of fire. He tried to gasp, but there was no air, only the sharp pain of vertebrae creaking. He saw Silas’s face inches from his: the man’s eyes were pits of suffering, trying to understand why the world had become so cruel. “Die... die...” Silas rattled, spitting blood onto Etan’s lips. In that instant, Tsuki’s revulsion and Etan’s hatred fused into a single silent cry. The contact between the thin skin of the neck and Silas’s sweaty hands became the conductor for a magical eruption.

  ?Etan felt the pressure on Silas’s fingers change nature. They were no longer warm and alive; they became cold, rough, devoid of elasticity. The ash-gray of bark climbed from the hunter’s wrists up his arms, sucking out every drop of moisture and turning blood into thick sap. Silas tried to scream, but his throat had already become a hollow, dry trunk. His hands, still locked around Etan’s neck, froze forever in that murderous grip, turning into twisted, lifeless ebony branches. Etan collapsed backward, coughing and gasping, dragging that dead weight with him until he managed to wrench himself free from the fingers that were now petrified wood. Silas stood there, in the center of the room: a dark tree-statue, arms outstretched in an eternal gesture of strangling, his face carved into a mask of terror that would never fade.

  ?Silence reigned once more, broken only by Etan’s hacking coughs and the sound of bread-diamonds rolling on the mud floor. Etan touched his throat, still feeling the ghost of those wooden fingers on his skin. Tsuki, deep within, was weeping without tears, shaken by a tremor that started in her bones. “We really did it,” Etan murmured, his voice reduced to a scratch. He looked toward the door. The woods outside were still; the leaves shone under a sun that knew nothing of the massacre committed within those walls of mud and magic. They were alone in a house of statues, and flight was the only thing left.

  ?Chapter 4: The Silence of Ash. The silence that followed Silas’s death was not peace, but an unbearable pressure. Etan and Tsuki remained motionless, the girl’s body shaken by tremors she could not control. Yet, in that chaos of blood and transmutation, their minds sought each other. “Breathe, Tsuki. Slowly,” Etan’s voice murmured in their head. It was no longer the command of a master, but the whisper of a castaway to his companion. “It’s cold,” she replied aloud, in a tone that seemed to come from a distant era. They moved like automatons. They knew that staying there meant death—or worse, being discovered. Together, coordinating their movements with an unnatural slowness, they began to scavenge the cabin for what remained of their brief peace. Etan used Tsuki’s hands to collect Martha’s meager savings—small copper coins hidden in a clay jar—and stuffed dry bread, hard cheese, and an old man’s tunic of Silas’s into a leather satchel to cover their rags.

  ?As Etan tightened the bag’s straps, a sharp noise made him jump. Crick. It wasn't Martha. It came from the floor. The feet of Silas’s wooden statue were sinking into the mud, turning into thick, gnarled roots. But the most chilling thing was the speed: the branches that were once his fingers were growing, stretching toward the ceiling and the walls with the hunger of a millennial vine. “It’s... eating the house,” Tsuki whispered, watching a gray branch wrap around the leg of the overturned table. “We have to leave. Now,” Etan ordered, feeling a shiver of pure terror. “That’s no longer nature; it’s your strength trying to anchor itself to the earth. If we stay here, we’ll become part of the root.”

  ?They staggered out the door. As soon as they set foot on the grass, the cabin behind them gave a violent jolt. The ancient wooden beams began to creak under the pressure of Silas’s branches pushing from within, trying to engulf everything: the roof, the memories, even Martha’s body, which was being slowly lifted by ash-colored vines. Tsuki turned for one last look, but Etan forced her to look ahead. As they faded into the thick of the woods, the sound of wood splintering and earth heaving was the only farewell they received. Behind them, the cabin was no longer a house, but a mound of living, distorted wood that continued to grow in the silence of the clearing.

  ?The stream cut through the clearing like a blade of liquid glass. The sound of the water was the only noise capable of drowning out the obsessive buzz of Etan’s thoughts. They had moved away from the cabin until Tsuki’s legs had begun to shake with fatigue, and only then did he decide to stop. Etan took control of the body. It was a fluid transition, but the weight of responsibility crushed his chest. When he pulled off Silas’s tunic—heavy and soaked in the pungent smell of the woods—he found himself staring at a body that did not belong to him, exposed to the cold autumn air. He dipped the rag into the icy water. He knew, by logic, that the cold should have taken his breath away, but for him, it was like looking at a picture in a book.

  ?“Etan... go easy,” Tsuki’s voice whispered in their mind. It was a tense whisper, loaded with nervous electricity. “The water stings like needles.” Etan placed the rag on her shoulder. His eyes immediately registered the goosebumps flowering on her white arms; he saw the muscles jolt under the frozen touch, but his brain received no stimulus. He was a surgeon operating through glass. “I'm trying to be delicate, Tsuki,” Etan said aloud. His deep voice, coming from that slender neck, seemed to clash with the fragility of the scene. “But understand me: I see your skin give way under my fingers, I see the water flowing, but I don't feel your temperature. It’s like trying to maneuver a silk mannequin without being able to truly touch it.”

  ?He moved the rag toward the base of her throat. There, the purple marks left by Silas’s fingers were like ink stains ruining a precious parchment. Etan felt a flash of rage and, without realizing it, increased the pressure to erase that horror. “Ow! Stop!” Tsuki didn't think it, she shouted it. She pulled away sharply, nearly making them both lose their balance. “You’re flaying me, Etan! What’s wrong with you?” Etan withdrew his hand, staring at Tsuki’s fingers that he himself was moving. “Sorry. Truly, Tsuki. I can't calibrate the strength. To me, it’s as if I’m rubbing a stone; I don't feel the resistance of your flesh. I'm not doing it on purpose.”

  ?Tsuki breathed heavily. Etan saw her chest rise and fall, felt her heart beating like a caged bird, but that beat was a distant echo. The girl forced herself to calm down, staring fixedly at the flowing water. “Listen to me, Etan,” she said, and her tone had turned sharp, veined with that cynicism she used as a shield. “I understand you’re a ‘guest’ and that this is just a machine for you to drive. But look at how I react. If I turn red, you’re pressing too hard. If I shiver, it means I'm cold. Use those eyes of yours, since the rest of your senses stayed at the castle.” Etan bowed his head. For an instant, his dignity seemed to waver before that brutal logic. “You’re right. I was negligent. I focused on the cleaning and forgot you were in here with me.”

  ?He resumed the washing, but this time with an almost exasperating slowness. He studied every minimal change in pigmentation, every contraction of the pores. It was a silent dance between his sight and her pain. “Is that better?” he asked, passing the rag with the lightness of a feather along her side. “Let’s just say you’ve gone from a butcher to a distracted spectator,” Tsuki replied, and though the tone was cutting, her body relaxed slightly under that more cautious touch. “It’s a horrible feeling, you know? Feeling my hands moving on me and knowing it’s not me wanting it. I feel your attention, Etan. It’s... intrusive.” “I know,” he murmured, wringing out the rag. “But we’re stuck in this hell together. At least now you don't smell like that woodsman anymore.” They dressed quickly, struggling with Silas’s clothes, which pricked Tsuki’s skin. She cursed the coarseness of the wool while Etan tried to figure out how not to trip over the overly long trousers.