Page 72 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

You’ll survive this

Fi didn’t see Antal for the rest of that day. Or the next.

By the morning of the third, she’d grown restless.

The bite in her shoulder would take longer to heal completely, but drawing on energy capsules had sped the process, twilight sorel ointment to numb the pain and gauze to protect from cold.

Against the doctor’s wishes, Fi dragged herself out of bed and donned her coat.

There were others who needed treatment more than her.

And Fi had a pyre to build.

Nyskya’s refugees milled about the abandoned buildings of the mining outpost. Fi nodded to a woman cooking elk on a fire spit, to a man supervising his children playing in the snow.

She didn’t know what to say to them. Didn’t know how to be the anchor Boden had provided this village.

Kashvi had taken charge of the day-to-day management, ensuring everyone was fed and warm.

But supplies were limited, and their presence wouldn’t go unnoticed forever.

They had to confront Verne. Soon.

Fi grabbed the metal haft of an axe and headed into the forest.

A calm came with chopping wood. She Shaped silver energy into an axe head and let it sing against the pines, hewing branches from trunks. A rhythm came to her, the methodical swing, then crack, then drag of limbs, fuel for Boden’s funeral pyre.

Merciless Void, it hurt. Every swing spiked pain through her shoulder. Call it a form of grieving. Or of penance.

Fi should have told him sooner. She’d had seven years to apologize, to clear the air between her and Boden. Would those years have been different, if she’d confessed at the start? Would things have felt easier between them? Fi could never know.

She should have told him sooner.

She shouldn’t have chased after Astrid.

She should have been at Boden’s side.

Fi had sworn to do better, yet here she was again, always making the wrong choice.

As her pile of lumber grew, Fi started stacking, building a bed for her brother’s body to lay upon. She’d worked up to the third layer when the forest went silent. Even the foraging squirrels and songbirds, bickering over pine nuts all morning, quieted in the boughs.

She turned.

Antal watched from the edge of the clearing. Fi marveled at his stillness, rooted as if he’d stood there as long as the shiverpines. He must be older than a few of them.

She braced, the bite of their last conversation still raw.

Two days had given her time to cool, to admit how lucky she was to return alive.

She didn’t know what to expect from Antal.

Would he have carried his anger while he’d avoided her, fed and stoked it into more snarls at her recklessness?

This closeness between them was too young, untested.

“Would you like help?” he asked lowly.

Fi considered the axe rubbing blisters in her hand. The pile of logs, not half finished. “No. I need to do this. But… you can stay. If you’d like.”

A plea, as much as a peace offering. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to go back to bared fangs between them.

Fi cut the current to the axe head and leaned upon the haft, resting weary muscles. Antal stepped closer, phantom footfalls in the snow. He kept a cautious distance. Reconciliation was a new dance, one whose steps they hadn’t learned with each other.

And yet the worried crease of his brow disarmed her in an instant.

“I’m sorry, Fionamara. I shouldn’t have been angry at you.”

“No. You were right. I was lucky to get away from Verne alive.”

They exhaled together, tasting clear air. An untested dance, but they fell into wary steps.

“When you disappeared,” Antal said. “I was worried.”

He spoke without anger, though that low tone carried a different kind of bite.

And do you think that means nothing to me? he’d said, desperation hidden beneath snarls. That you mean nothing to me?

“I didn’t realize you cared.” Fi caught herself. “Not like that. I know you care , but…” Not just for her. Antal had carried every one of Nyskya’s people to safety. He’d stood with her in that room that smelled of too much blood, eyes hollowed as they watched Boden—

Fi pushed it away. The memory of him. Her grief, fighting to bubble to the surface.

Antal humored her a mirthless laugh. “I can’t fault you for that, uncommon as kindness seems to be amongst my kind.”

But he’d always been kind to her. Even when they fought, even when he was angry. Verne had dug claws into Fi like a pincushion. She’d spoken with sharp teeth and sharper dismissal, as if Fi were less than a mouse in her hand.

“You never hurt me,” Fi said. “Even in the beginning, when we were at each other’s throats. You never made me feel like you would hurt me.”

Antal studied the snow. “I’ve not always made the best decisions, Fionamara. I’ve been complacent. I’ve lost people who were important to me. But I have tried to be better than a beast. I’ll keep trying to be better.”

That hitch in his voice would ruin Fi. She noted it now, Antal’s eyes downcast. She’d noted it two days ago, when she’d put her life in danger, Antal clutching her sheets in desperate claws and snarling what it would mean to lose her.

She’d noted it every time he spoke of the last human he lost.

He was much like you.

Of course, Fi had suspected before now. She hadn’t wanted to confront him about something so personal, so raw. But the pieces fit. Verne’s cackle when she’d realized Antal had shared a bed with Fi. That blank spot on his antlers, fifty whole years of mourning.

“Your last human friend,” Fi said. “You and Razik… you were lovers, weren’t you?”

No matter how soft she spoke, it wasn’t soft enough, the silence of a snow-muffled forest amplifying each word like the plunge of a dagger.

Antal straightened. A slow inhale, too deliberate to hide.

A few weeks ago, he’d have snapped on a mask. He’d have stood there, as still as the trees, and told her nothing was wrong, only the twitch of his tail to betray him.

“Why do you ask?” He spoke low. Didn’t look at her.

“Because it matters,” Fi said. “It matters who he was to you.”

Antal’s reaction said enough. His words were salt to the cut.

“These things are frowned upon, among daeyari. Humans are useful resources: food, labor. An occasional novelty to play with. Never anything more than that.”

“Your father didn’t disapprove just because you were friends. You were…” Oh no. Oh no . “And he killed him in front of you?”

Fi’s fingers were claws on the axe. How could this be, another wound he’d hidden from her? How could he bear a grief like that?

Antal stood so very still. From the start, she’d noted that about him, had wondered if the defensive facade was a trait honed by all daeyari, or something more unique to him, a tool crafted to survive.

Just like her own cloak of barbs.

“I hid in the aurorabeast barn sometimes,” Antal said with deathly quiet. “When I needed to get away from my father. Razik found me there. He didn’t tell anyone.”

Fi heard it clearer this time: the ache and the fondness, inseparable.

“He was the first person to truly see me,” Antal said. “The version I crafted for my family, the mask I wore to exist in that world. He saw through that and found me . The person I could be.”

Fi braved a step toward him. “I’m sorry, Antal. I’m so sorry they took him from you.”

“He served a powerful daeyari house.” Antal’s words hardened. He still wouldn’t look at her. “He was useful. He was safe. He would have lived a long life. If not for me.”

“Antal—”

“And now, you .”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“Plenty of this is my fault, Fionamara. Verne acted because I was too weak. That Beast came to Nyskya looking for me. I put you and Boden in danger.”

Fi had locked her grief behind a wall. Boden’s name chiseled through the mortar. She buttressed the cracks, setting aside her pain a few seconds longer. Giving Antal this moment.

She didn’t know how to fix the loss, or suffocating expectations, or homicidal parents.

She could only reach into the quiet space between them, cupping Antal’s soft cheeks in her hands.

And she saw him. The man behind the teeth, revealed in pieces, little cracks of vulnerability.

She saw at last the depth of the grief that brought him here, saw it mirrored in the ache of her own ribs.

Her loss, a different kind of love, but no less deep.

“We chose this,” Fi said. “We chose you . And whatever lofty ego you have about your powers of seduction? Don’t think for an instant you’d have gotten me on my back if I didn’t want to be there.”

His laugh was a small thing. Fi took it as a triumph.

“I know,” he said. “But…”

Antal reached out, timid, as if whatever he touched might crack. He cradled his hand behind Fi’s neck and pulled their foreheads together, a small space to share in this too-big world.

“I was sent to this Plane as a punishment,” he said.

“Instead? I found an escape.” His thumb brushed slow across her cheek.

“But there’s this tricky thing about time.

It keeps passing. Whole lives come and go, and even grief grows distant.

I made my peace with Razik’s death a long time ago. Then I met you.”

His fangs were simpler to deal with, less breath-stilling than these quiet confessions.

“Me?” Fi said. Inside of her, a splinter. Crumbling mortar.

“You,” Antal returned. “Such sharp teeth. So unyielding, but… kind. Again and again, kinder than I deserve.”

He’d told her all this before. But these weren’t sweet nothings whispered in her ear. These were pleas, hollowed by the old grief he carried. By the fresher grief they shared.

“I don’t want to do nothing, Fionamara. I don’t want to stand still while the people I care about pay my consequences. You have your own path, your own battles to wage. But the next time you have a reckless idea, please. Let me be here with you.”

What if you hadn’t come back?