Varang returned to the forest with blood still on her hands and nowhere else to put it.

When Quaritch left—chasing old ghosts, old vendettas, a war that refused to die—she did not follow. Jake Sully was a name already carved too deeply into too many bones. Let the sky-person finish that hunt alone.

Instead, Varang turned inland, away from ash and iron, toward trees that still whispered.

She hadn’t walked this far into the forest in years.

The exile line had been drawn with certainty back then, her judgment sharp and absolute. Her sister had spoken of Eywa as if she still listened, as if the Great Mother had not turned her face away from the Mangkwan. Faith, Varang had decided, was weakness dressed up as hope.

So she had cast her out.

Now that same sister lived among roots and shadow, woven into the forest like something the Mangkwan had failed to kill. Older. Leaner. Still breathing prayers into the leaves like they mattered.

Varang stopped at the edge of the clearing, watching her from a distance. No guards. No weapons raised. Just a woman who had survived because she believed the world still cared enough to answer.

For the first time, Varang felt the weight of her certainty crack.

Quaritch had left her with a war.

The forest had given her something worse.

A reckoning.