Page 72 of Untethering Dark

Tucking her into the crook of his body, Gudariks pulled a set of covers over them, though she wasn’t sure she’d need all of them. His body radiated a toasty aura. Shoving a pillow beneath his neck as he lay down, he tilted his head ever so slightly away from her, so as not to smack her in the face with his antlers.

“Never used to think you slept,” she murmured, already sinking into the darkness of sleep.

He combed his claws through her hair in slow, soothing strokes. “Don’t need to, but I do when I want the bliss of oblivion. Sleep is a small escape from eternity.”

That sounded lonely. Burrowing deeper into his embrace, she said, “So you’re immortal then?”

“I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “There aren’t any others like me, so I’ve no point of reference. But after all this time? I’m inclined to think so. If I haven’t yet withered away from age and nothing’s been strong enough to kill me...” The weight of that admission fell between them.

Not knowing the true extent of one’s lifespan, having no concept of when orifthe end would come...the uncertainty would be maddening. But he bore it all, just him, a garden, and pilfered books to while away the endless days when he wasn’t stalking through the trees, punishing those who encroached the boundaries of his clemency.

The village’s descent and destruction was all the more devastating for it. He had people. Trusted humans. Only to be proven again and again the volatility of their nature, how wildly it swung between good and incredible evil. Love, hurt, loss, these emotions weren’t exclusive to humans, and Gudariks, for all his mighty strength and ferocity, wasn’t immune to them. Twelve thousand years and he still felt keenly.

Many human stories painted grisly pictures of monsters. While they were true, they only ever focused on the sharp edges, never on the softness that was there, too. She’d seen it with Mutter, and again with Gudariks.

Perhaps cold and cruel wasn’t all she’d be, her emotions whetted, rather than dulled by time.

“I’ll become a hag soon,” she said softly, letting the magnitude of that choice hang in the air. They, too, were known to live for thousands of years.

Decades would become centuries, and centuries would become millennia. She’d never really thought about that endless stretch of time ahead, only focused on the present, but she saw how content a life Perchta lived—was still living.

Time never scared her. But loneliness? That she wouldn’t allow. Not for him, and most certainly not for herself.

“If Mutter’s anyone to go by,” she continued, trying for a lightly teasing tone, “you’re stuck with me for at least the next couple thousand years.”

He settled into her, pressing the long slope of his bony face to the back of her neck, inhaling deep. “That’s quite a commitment.”

She pulled his arm across her middle, and threading her fingers with his, clutched their clasped hands to her chest. “Mmm. That sounded presumptuous. I just meant that I’ll be around a long time, and the future is full of possibility, isn’t it?”

He squeezed her tight. “It is.”

It sounded a lot like hope.

Chapter Thirty

Sleep brought clarity, allowing the mind to unsnarl and connect previously elusive threads.

The revelation didn’t come immediately. Not when she blinked back sleep, nor when she listened to the sweet nothings Gudariks whispered in her ear. Not while in the throes of exuberant morning sex. But on her skis, zipping down the slopes on her way home with the invigorating bite of wind whipping her face, the truth of Gudariks’s age and his relationship to this tract of land hit her.

Gudariks was as old as the forest itself. He might even be older. If he was here before the trees sprang from the ground, had he tended to them as he did his flowers, ensuring they grew healthy and strong?

To think that he might have witnessed every moment of its life from seed to sapling to lush, dense forest stretching its limbs far and wide.

Astrid glided past the descendants of those trees, humbled.

The local humans called him Wald Vater—forest father. Or at least the ones who still believed.

Maybe he truly was.

Performing the hag ritual with him went beyond the personal gain her final transformation would bring. Astrid would be absorbing a piece of his life force. The very essence of who he was and ever would be. The dark, the light. The thousands of years of destruction and creation. She would wear his crown and all the burdens and joys that came with it.

Astrid always belonged to this forest. Had always felt compelled to protect it.

But if these trees were Gudariks’s children, they would become hers too.

Forest Mother.

She rather liked the sound of that.

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