Varang knew exactly what kept her breathing.
Spite.
It sat in her lungs like soot and settled behind her ribs like a coal that refused to die. Every memory she carried tasted of burned soil—blood soaking into blackened ground, screams rising like smoke. Hers. Her clan’s.
“Please, great Mother. Eywa, save us.”
It left her mouth in a whisper. Not a prayer, never a prayer.
She bent over a grove of saplings—young, thin things, barely taller than her waist. Infants compared to the old thunks that once crowned the forest. Their green made her stomach turn.
“Please, great Mother, balance of all. Eywa,” she crooned.
Her hand closed around a thin trunk, green where wood would grow. She drove it into the earth until it snapped with a soft, wet gasp.
She paused.
Do they pray? Did they beg Eywa when the sky-people burned the forest? Did they learn what refusal felt like, too?
“Tsahik.”
The voice came from behind her. Yepa stepped around a bushel of leaves, stripes still damp from the paint he had earned only days ago. A boy-turned-hunter, proud and awkward in the same breath.
Varang turned just enough to meet his eyes. Smiled. “Yes?”
He read the violence in her stance, the splintered tree at her feet, and managed a small, careful grin. “It’s Y/n. She asks for your presence.”
Ah.
Y/n.
Varang’s breath softened, just barely. Yes—spite kept her alive. Spite moved her hands, her teeth, her every step through the burned forest.
But there was something else that pulled herfrom the ruins. Something gentler. Warmer. More dangerous than any hatred she’d survived.
“If she asks for me,” Varang murmured, straightening. “it is only natural I answer.”
She stepped forward, leaving the crushed sapling behind her.
Y/n.
Y/n.
Y/n.
Her name throbbed in Varang’s chest like a second heartbeat.
“Y/n.”
