SEBASTIAN
Salt water scrubbed the inside of his throat raw as he sank, utterly alone again.
There was no gradual descent, nor slippery slope; only the cold slap of an unrelenting void, hungry as the spaces between the stars. One moment the wolf cub was cradled in his mother's arms; the next he was thrown into the sea and paddling desperately for the surface.
He tried to swim back to the woman on the shore, cold and proud with a veil of moonlight obscuring her eyes, but she dismissed his pitiful whine for help with an elegant hand motion, willing the tide to take him further. The cold sept into his bones and unseen forces worked beneath him, pulling him out to sea.
That was the cub's first lesson in the way of the world. Life was something to be fought for, and it could be taken away at any moment. He protected his fiercely, desperately, barely keeping his head above water as the riptide drew him out across the channel. By the time it dumped him on a distant shore, he was utterly soaked, cold beyond shivering. The body shut down and dragged the mind with it.
It's a wonder I didn't die that day, Sebastian thought, looking back with a measure of detached nostalgia. As difficult as things had been, life was simpler then, as an animal with nothing to care for save where to find its next meal and steal an hour of sleep. Always moving, always watching and listening, but never feeling.
He felt so much these days. It was overwhelming at times, the way a simple glance from Red or the brush of her skin against his could leave him aching more. Other times he felt like he was going to explode from frustration or need, and the pressure only mounted with every day that he didn't vent his feelings.
But this was well before he'd learned the torture of love. Before he'd even had a name, or a human body, or a sense of where he was. At first he'd thought it pure coincidence — a lucky stroke of fate — only to realise later that his mother had deliberately stranded him on the Wyld Heart, an isle of myth and legend that no boat had ever managed to dock due to unpredictable storms and vicious sea serpents.
He'd thought it was normal, back then; the sand that glistened like crushed gold, the moss that sparkled like emeralds on the trees. The thousands of little deaths that lurked his every step, taking on the guise of succulent berries, fat and fluffy rabbits, water so crystalline it sparkled as it fell over cliffs, turning to actual diamonds before shattering back into liquid on the rocks.
The Wyld Heart had two canopies: the forest itself, and the gigantic wisteria that sprouted from the centre of the island, whose branches stretched all the way to the beach, trapping the humidity and making the plants sweat. When the sun set the rainforest came alive, from the neon hides of bug-eyed frogs to the brilliant plumage of previously unassuming birds, all brought out by the faint violet glow of the highest branches. It was laughably easy to hunt at night, and therein lay his next lesson: that some things were too good to be true.
It had only taken one night of brain-melting fever and relentless puking to realise anything plump or particularly colourful was to be avoided. It thrived for a reason, and that reason was usually a venomous one. Only rainwater was safe to drink, and only if the puddle had formed recently; anything longer would soak up the magic in the soil and become something else entirely. He could still recall the taste of his vomit from the night he saw crystal shards puncture a thirsty deer's hide from the inside out, turned solid as soon as the liquid settled in its guts.
And so the little cub tided himself over with bugs and bark, drinking water from muddy puddles when the moisture from his kills wasn't enough to sustain him, until he was strong enough to hunt fish and sea otters that drifted over from the mainland.
He lingered by the beach until a close call in the water drove him inland. He never saw the monster lurking in the deep; only felt its teeth in his hind leg, as the thrashing battle for his life whipped the water white and red, but it was enough to squash his hazy dreams of crossing the channel to the mainland. One could just make it out on a clear and sunny day, a smudge of brown and green on the horizon, like a thin layer of oil atop the sparkling water.
The cub was a rangy wolf when he left the sea for the forest, and could no longer rely on the environment to shelter him from the prying eyes of predators. He fought them head-on, tooth and nail, a bloody and constant contest for life that only became easier with time. He stayed shy of the Great Tree, for the tinkling of the crystal flowers unnerved him, and the soft light they emanated was too pretty to be trusted, but the rest of the isle was his to roam, and he turned it inside out. By the end of his journey he was the creature to be feared and avoided, for his experience as prey had taught him to exploit the clever and the vulnerable, as he had once been.
The wolf ate his fill and reigned supreme over the weak. All was well in the world, for as far as he was concerned, it all belonged to him.
Until a crystal arrow caught him in the back.
Unbeknownst to the wolf, the fair folk at the heart of the isle had marked his disruption of the natural order, dubbing him a vengeful Wraith that needed to be exorcised. They fashioned arrows from wisteria petals and dipped them in the poisonous sap of their Great Tree, and it was that poison that brought him to his knees in the space of a heartbeat, as the memories of the tree scorched through his veins and burned alien pictures into his mind, scrambling his senses.
Before the next beat, the wolf slowed his breathing and brought his heart to a shuddering stop, hoping the hunters would presume him dead and leave him be. To his dismay, they shouldered his body and carried him all the way to the Great Tree, where the royals were seated amongst the loftiest branches. The wolf peered at them through slitted lids, tongue lolled for dramatic effect, unable to name the curious feeling that accompanied a wave of recognition when he laid eyes upon the woman. Queen, they called her, though the rest of their words were lost on him.
She looked like his mother, but was nowhere near as beautiful. With the white throat of a lily and a carpet of wildflowers growing along the backs of her arms, she was at once graceful and fragile, poised and weak, with an expression fixed somewhere between boredom and pity. Her hands were soft when they lifted up one of his ears and let it flop, and he fought the urge to shudder as he recalled the hands that cast him into the water all those years ago, torn between longing and hatred.
It didn't take long to settle on the latter. He decided he would enjoy ripping out the Queen's throat, if only to imagine it was his mother in her stead.
The King, by contrast, was strong and sure of himself, seemingly hewn from a single slab of oak. And yet as trees could bend with the wind, so too could he move with sturdy grace, ushering his wife back as a gnarled hand came to rest on the hilt of his sword. Suspicion gleamed in the woodgrain of his eyes, and only when he poked the Wraith in the side did the wolf realise his mistake.
Dead bodies were supposed to be stiff, and he was the opposite.
What was supposed to be a trophy corpse turned out to be very much alive, as the Wraith realised he'd lost the element of surprise. Even so, he ripped and rent the guards as if they were paperbark, saving the soft-clad royals for last.
The Wraith turned to find king's sword inches away from his neck. He prepared to thrust when something slippery intruded on the wolf's thoughts, reaching through and into him, pushing a hole through the false bottom of his heart. Power sprang up as Nya caressed her son for the first time since she cast him aside, smoothing away the monster's fur and leaving a shivering boy in its wake.
The Fae King took pity, for he was a father first and a warrior second. He took the boy under his wing and called him Bastion, training him to be the last line of defence for the Fae Princess, for even at his weakest Bastian had bested the king's finest men.
At first Bastian raged against the bit of his new life, but over time he came to love the taste of magic and the feel of a bow in his hands; the safety of long-range weapons after fighting tooth and nail for so long. The well of power in his chest deepened, and while the ways of the Fae were lost on him, he found that he could do things they could not, lifting and throwing and crumpling and pinning things in place, as if the air itself was subject to his will.
The fae marvelled over his strangeness, loving and hating him in turns: the feral boy who earned the king's favour by violating their most sacred law: to never kill one of their own. Bastian remained suspicious of all of them, but he came to love the King as the father he never had, and even came to tolerate the capricious Queen and her audacious toddler, a pudgy little girl that pulled on his hair and insisted on riding him like a horse whenever he shifted. She treated him more like a dog than a person, and he resented her learned helplessness and the way the King's eyes smiled whenever she stumbled into a room, but he tolerated her in an attempt to make his guardian proud.
If only I could have saved you from myself, Sebastian thought, going rigid as the whirlwind of memories slowed down, pausing on a moonlight terrace. You deserved better, Arabella.
After eight years among the fae, Nya finally came back for him, reaching down from the heavens in a beam of moonlight. My son, she crooned, tousling his silvery locks with a balmy breeze. You have grown strong, but you have learned all you can here. It is time to come home.
Once again, Bastion had grown too confident in his power. "I want to stay," he'd said, jutting his chin out in defiance. "This is my home."
That was when he learnt his third and most painful lesson, an extension of the second: the power within him was not a well, but a tunnel. The magic he thought his own was borrowed from another source, and just as he could reach for the Night Goddess's power, so too could she reach back. Like fingers slotting into a puppet, she filled him from within and controlled his every move, stifling his very thoughts. Bastion could only watch in mute, impotent horror as Nya stole into the princess's room and murdered her in cold blood, right before announcing it to the guards outside her room.
Only when the guards were hot on Bastion's heels did the Night Goddess relinquish his body, offering him his first and final choice. They chased him down to the beach, where the waves parted for him all the way to the mainland, two shimmering walls of death.
Like a coward, he chose to run rather than accept the consequences of his actions, selfishly fighting for his life as he had the first time he crossed the channel, mud sucking at his every step. Water crashed down behind him, sweeping away anyone who dared to follow, adding more deaths to his conscience.
Not even their screams could drown out the sound of the Fae King's hoarse and broken voice as he called out for Bastion to come back. The sound of his weeping followed for years afterword, burned forevermore into the wild boy's mind.