It had been two long years of dark punctuated only by death and constant new horrors, two long years of learning how to live inside a new normal only to have it change again. Revert. But it wasn’t easy to revert after living like this, after doubting your friends and your families because the faces they wore weren’t safe anymore, because some of the beasts could look inside you and know what it was you needed to see to gain your trust. It was even worse to kill one when they wore the skin of someone you knew. To taste the bitter metallicity of blood, to feel skin and carapice rend beneath claws driven by a bloodlust that hadn’t existed in the light. To look into familiar eyes as the life faded from them.

You knew, but sometimes your mind rebelled against the knowledge anyway.
It was easy to doubt in the dark, easy to sink into the worst parts of yourself and fester like a living wound.

There had been one thing he found solace in, one thing growing like a beacon of steadfast hope in the roiling everdark. The lantern mare. He had met her only once, and her eyes had been heavy with a kind of sleep he was sure he could not fathom. She had smiled at him, and there had been such a gentleness inside her eyes that the boy inside him had clung to it.

I think the lanterns birds come from you. He had told her, looking up into the branches of the tree that had entombed her so gently. There were more birds than he had time to count roosting darkly in the tree. But even as he watched them, the birds began to rustle and wake, and as each one flared to life with light, the lantern mare grew more distant. I’ll come back. He had promised, not understanding but knowing this was more than sleep, likely a kind of magic he could not fathom. Maybe his mother would know. My name is Sorren.

And then he’d disappeared into the dark again, though he’d waited until her eyes were closed. Each time after that she had always been asleep, always quiet and beautiful as though she had been carved from stone out of his deepest dreams. It was impossible to visit every day, and then impossible to be near her without feeling like he was tainting something fragile with his new wickedness. Eventually, he had stopped visiting entirely. He’d come only close enough to see that the tree still stood, that two others now grew from beside it, and then he would leave again.

But it is light now, it is day and things are normal again, and yet he is still someone better suited for the ruined world that got left behind. He can be in his born form if he chooses, can be that mottled grey and blue, wear that chestnut and white marking on his face that so closely matches his mother. He can have his tall, proud antlers and the blue and yellow flowers that twine around them and disappear into his mane and tail. But he stays inside the manticore because it makes it easier to blame the wickedness on the instincts of this predatory form.

On silent paws he follows a path he’s worn down to bare dirt. Past the volcanic rivers and beyond the rocks to a place that feels like a haven. He is so used to it being unchanged, even in the light unchanged, that he freezes entirely and stops to stare when his feline eyes settle on the impossibly delicate silhouette of a porcelain pale mare dressed in iridescent gold and heavy flowering vines. He could be a statue the way he watches her, something carved from sandstone and empty of life. He hardly breathes, hardly blinks, and then before he’s made the decision to do so he is slipping through the lesser trees on racing feet to stand before her.

He is entirely predator in this leonine form, and though she will likely have noticed his approach, it is not because he drew any attention to himself. His movements are quiet and graceful, and the leather wings at his back lift like sails behind him. He stalks forward, and those red-brown eyes like burning chestnut hardly blink as he moves to where she stands. He has taken no notice of the children yet, has noticed nothing but the fact that his lantern mare is awake. That she is delicate and doelike in a way that makes him want to end worlds to keep her safe.

He sits, and the barb at the end of his armored tail curls restless behind him while he watches her. “Do you know my name?” His voice is a low growl and the twin horns between his ears do nothing to make him seem any less savage. “Do you know me?” There is an intensity in him that he can do nothing to hide, a war inside his chest that both wants her to know him and to fear him. Then, softer than any beast like him has any right to be, “I have waited two years to know you, but I do not think that who I was survived the dark, and I am not sure that this version is worth knowing at all.”