The forest breathed differently now, after the war. Where once the canopy had thrummed with unbroken song the air carried ash on its tongue even here, leagues from the scorched eastern ranges. Tarsem felt it settle on his skin like fine grief, a faint gray film he could never quite brush away. The Omatikaya had won, yes. The sky people were pushed back again, their machines twisted metal husks rusting into the soil. But victory tasted of smoke, and the price was etched in the eyes of those who had come as prisoners.

You were among them.

Jake had brought the remnants of the Mangkwan himself, a ragged handful guarded by trusted hunters. Not as trophies, he’d said, but as a chance. “They followed her,” he’d told Tarsem that night. “Varang’s sister. Young. Raised in fire and lies. If anyone can reach her, it’s you. Watch her. Teach her.”

Tarsem had only nodded. What else was there to say? Leadership had come to him in blood and ceremony. Wise beyond his years, they called him. He felt only the weight.

Now, three weeks later, he watched you from the high root of an ancient kelutral, where the hunters gathered to sharpen bone blades and speak in murmurs. You sat apart on a flat stone near the riverbank, knees drawn up, tail curled tight around your ankles like a shield. Your skin bore the marks of your old life: faint ash-gray streaks across your arms and throat, remnants of ritual paint that no one here would help you renew. Your queue hung loose down your back, unadorned, the neural tendrils occasionally twitching as if seeking a connection that wasn’t there.

You looked small. Not in stature—Na’vi were Na’vi—but in the way hurt things look small. Your shoulders hunched against the breeze. The forest noise swelled around you but you flinched at none of it. You simply stared at the water, as though it might tell you why Eywa had let your home burn.

Tarsem’s fingers tightened on the vine he held. Compassion, Jake had said. Not pity. But Eywa, it was hard not to feel it curl in his chest like smoke when he saw the hollow under your eyes, the way your lips pressed thin when one of the younger Omatikaya hunters passed too close.

He dropped silently to the moss below, feet sinking into the damp green carpet. You didn’t look up as he approached, but your ears flicked back, alert.

“Still angry at the water?” he asked, voice quiet, pitched to carry only between the two of you.

Your gaze lifted then. Golden eyes, sharp as fresh obsidian, met his. There was fire in them, banked but alive. “The water doesn’t answer,” you said. Your voice was rough from disuse. “Neither does your Great Mother.”

He crouched a respectful distance away, elbows on his knees, letting the silence stretch. The river hurried past, silver over black stones, carrying petals that glowed faintly blue. A small school of fish darted beneath the surface, scales flashing like scattered stars.

“She answers,” he said finally. “Just not always in words you want.”

You laughed—short, bitter, a sound like dry wood snapping. “She answered my sister with flames. She answered me with chains.”

Tarsem felt the words land like a blade between his ribs. He had seen the aftermath of Varang’s wrath: villages reduced to charcoal, bodies arranged in offerings to a god that devoured instead of nurtured. He had killed Mangkwan warriors himself, their black ash-paint streaking across snarling faces. And here you sat, sister to that destruction, marked for tsahìk before the volcano took everything else.

He should hate you. Part of him still did—the part that remembered the screams, the smell of burning flesh. But hate was heavy, and he carried enough already.

“I’m not here to chain you,” he said. “Jake asked me to watch. To teach. If you let me.”

Your tail lashed once, tip brushing the stone. “Teach me what? To bow? To sing to plants that won’t sing back?”

“To see again.” He gestured to the forest around you—the soft pulse of bioluminescence beginning to wake as dusk crept in. “This isn’t ash. This is life. You were raised to burn it. I want to show you how to belong to it.”