He looked up. The geological hatred was gone, smoothed over so completely it was as if it had never been there. His face was back to its usual, inscrutable calm—but it felt thinner now, a mask placed carefully over a smoking crater.
"Do you trust me, Eva?"
His voice was soft, but it carried in the firelit clearing like a command.
Eva looked up from Lily, who was finishing the last of the stew with Maya's quiet help. She met Wolfen's golden eyes, seeing the ghost of that terrible rage still lingering in their depths. She thought of the scythe at Maya's neck, the jump into the exploding lab, the cold efficiency of the rescue. She thought of the rabbit stew.
"Yeah," she said, her voice so quiet it was almost swallowed by the crackle of the fire. It wasn't a declaration of faith. It was a surrender to necessity.
"All of you," Wolfen said, his gaze sweeping over Leo, Derek, Jordan, Maya. "Close your eyes. And cover your ears."
"Why?" Leo asked, suspicion warring with the ingrained habit of obedience to the one who'd kept them alive.
Wolfen didn't answer. He just looked at them, the expectation absolute. "Do it."
One by one, they complied. Leo grumbled but shut his eyes, clapping his hands over his ears. Derek did the same, his enhanced senses making the act feel especially vulnerable. Jordan, ever analytical, noted the precise decibel reduction of his own palms before closing his eyes. Eva gave Lily a final, worried glance before shutting her own.
Maya squeezed her eyes shut, but after a count of sixty, a sick, curious dread gnawed at her. She cracked one eyelid open, just a sliver, peeking through her lashes.
Wolfen was standing before Lily, who sat staring blankly at the ground. He knelt, bringing his face level with hers. He didn't touch her at first. He just looked into her hollow blue eyes, his own gaze intense, searching for something in the ruins.
Then, he raised his hands. Not in a threat, but with a strange, almost ceremonial slowness. He placed his palms gently on either side of Lily's face, his thumbs resting near her temples. His lips began to move.
Maya couldn't hear the words. Wolfen's voice was a sub-vocalized vibration, a frequency below sound, a language of will and memory not meant for human ears. She saw his eyes glow, not with fire, but with a faint, internal light, like embers seen through stone. Lily's expression didn't change at first. Then, a flicker. A twitch in her brow. A rapid darting of her eyes behind closed lids, as if watching a horrific film.
Seven minutes passed in utter, strained silence for the others, in terrifying, voyeuristic clarity for Maya.
Then, Lily's jaw went slack. Her eyes flew open, wide with a terror that was suddenly, vividly present. And she screamed.
It wasn't the rasp from before. It was a raw, ragged, full-throated shriek of pure, unadulterated agony and revelation—the sound of a soul being violently, painfully reassembled after being shattered into dust. It tore through the silent clearing.
Wolfen let go of her face as if releasing a live wire and sat back on his heels, his own face pale, his eyes instantly snuffing their inner light and returning to the fire, his expression closed and empty once more.
The scream broke the trance. Eva's eyes snapped open. Lily, gasping, trembling violently, her eyes now blazing with a shocking, painful awareness, searched the faces around the fire. They landed on Eva.
The fog was gone. The hollow stare was burned away by the trauma of whatever had just happened.
"Eva?" The name was a sob, a prayer, a recognition so profound it shook her tiny frame. Then she launched herself forward, wrapping her arms around her sister's neck, burying her face, and weeping—deep, wracking, human sobs of grief, terror, and impossible relief.
The others lowered their hands from their ears, blinking in the firelight. They saw Eva holding a now-weeping, aware Lily. They saw Wolfen sitting silently, staring into the flames as if nothing had happened.
But Maya had seen. And as she looked from the sobbing sisters to the impossibly calm man by the fire, a cold realization seeped into her bones.
What did he just do?
He hadn't just pulled her from a lab. He hadn't just fed her. He had reached into the scrambled wreckage of her mind, the place the Architects had meticulously broken, and he had… rearranged it. He had burned out the conditioning, confronted the ghosts, and forced her consciousness back into coherence. It wasn't healing. It was a psychic battlefield triage, brutal and absolute.
The jovial bastard who made cow jokes. The lazy immortal who couldn't be bothered. The ancient weapon who made stew.
After all this time, after the fights and the training and the stories, she understood with chilling certainty: she didn't know him at all. None of them did. They had been traveling with a force of nature that occasionally wore the shape of a man who told bad puns.
And as she watched him stare into the fire, his face a blank slate, she wondered what other depths, what other horrors, what other unimaginable powers lay hidden beneath the surface of Wolfen Welfric. And what it meant that he had just chosen to reveal this one.