Alikne'ar had known nothing but solitude since it reached maturity.

Where others of its kind formed groups, stuck together, and created homes, it was alone, and lived in a tree's hollow remains, where once crows had nested. It adorned itself with the feathers left behind and remembered the days when it had similarly adorned itself with its mother's molted scales.

Its mother was gone now, and it had been alone a very long time.

Alikne'ar, in the others' eyes, was useless. It could not hunt, it did not wish to produce offspring, and it was not skilled with healing or caring for the sick and elderly. It was only dead weight.

Dead weight will always be cast away.

Alikne'ar understood this.

So it lived alone and accepted the loneliness as its penance. The days passed quietly and slowly. It ventured into the bogs and the forests and fed on berries that grew from bushes and vines. It drank from a small, cheerful rill. And it returned home to sleep.

Today was different.

Nearby, beyond the bogs and the forests, no more than half a day's journey, was a human village. Sometimes Alikne'ar settled in trees close to it and listened to the sounds of the humans. They, like its own kind, were social creatures and lived in groups. When it sat and listened to their sounds, their conversations and laughter, it could imagine what life would look like if it had been able to stay with its kind.

It had seen many human young in the village. Sometimes they strayed into the woods and it would become a fox or a raven and nudge them gently homeward. There was one child whom it had frequently helped back to the village.

The child was back.

But they hadn't come here of their own volition.

Upon the young one's forehead was a mark drawn with charcoal and lamb's blood. The humans drew this sort of mark on sacrificial offerings.

This child, like Alikne'ar, had been abandoned.

Alikne'ar took a human form. Its skin mottled, black and grey, patched with scales. In some places its body became only threads of flesh that wove into something limb-like. Its face had no features, only hollow sockets for eyes and a wound of a mouth. With these unfamiliar hands, Alikne'ar took the child in its arms and wiped the mark from their forehead.

"You will be called Lietni'en."

Lietni’en did not cry.

That surprised Alikne’ar more than the mark had.

The child’s body was tense, breath shallow, but there were no tears—only a wide, silent stare fixed on the hollow place where Alikne’ar’s eyes should have been. Humans usually recoiled at the sight of it in this shape. This one only trembled, as if waiting for the next hurt to arrive.

“It is finished,” Alikne’ar said, voice rough from disuse. It had spoken aloud so rarely that sound felt like tearing bark. “They will not come for you.”

The child’s fingers curled slowly into the strange fabric of Alikne’ar’s chest, clutching as if the creature might vanish. That, too, was familiar. Alikne’ar remembered gripping its mother’s scales in much the same way, long ago, when the world had still made sense.

Alikne’ar shed the human form. Scales smoothed, feathers reasserted themselves, bones rearranged into something less alarming. It became smaller, hunched and winged, eyes bright and dark like wet stones. In this shape, it could wrap around the child without frightening them.

Lietni’en finally spoke, voice hoarse.
“They said the bog would take me.”

“The bog takes many things,” Alikne’ar replied. “It does not get to choose. I will not let it.”

That answer seemed to satisfy the child.

They walked—not toward the village, but away from it. Deeper into the forest, past the rill that sang softly over stones, to the hollow tree that had once belonged to crows. Alikne’ar worried, briefly, that the place would feel too small, too empty, too much like exile.

Instead, Lietni’en smiled.

“There are feathers,” the child said, as if announcing a treasure.

“Yes,” Alikne’ar said. “They are not mine. You may use them.”

That night, the child slept curled against Alikne’ar’s side, warm and solid and real. Alikne’ar did not sleep at all. It listened—to breathing, to the forest, to the unfamiliar presence of another life sharing its space. The loneliness it had worn for so long did not vanish, but it shifted, no longer a weight. Now it was something like a scar: proof of survival.

Days followed.

Alikne’ar learned that it could hunt—not with teeth or claws, but with patience, guiding small animals into traps of fallen branches, showing Lietni’en which berries were safe and which would sicken. Lietni’en learned to fetch water, to listen for storms, to recognize when Alikne’ar’s silences meant thinking rather than absence.

Sometimes humans came searching. Alikne’ar turned them aside with fox-steps and raven-cries, leading them in circles until they forgot why they had come. No one spoke the child’s name aloud anymore. Sacrifices, once given, were meant to be gone.

One evening, as the sun bled gold through the trees, Lietni’en asked, “Why did you keep me?”

Alikne’ar considered the question carefully.

“I was told I was useless,” it said at last. “So were you.”

The child frowned. “But you saved me.”

“Yes,” Alikne’ar said. “And you stayed.”

Lietni’en leaned against it, small and stubborn and alive.
“Then they were wrong.”

For the first time since its mother’s passing, Alikne’ar allowed itself to believe that might be true.