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.

Lietni'en grew quickly.

The bloom of their body revealed that they were female. The interaction of their spirit with this body, however, was not as constant. At times she was a girl, at others they were not constrained by the form of their body. Alikne'ar's body shifted shapes while its spirit remained solid, and Lietni'en's body remained solid while their spirit shifted shapes. It was a harmonious state of fluctuation and change, like the auroras in the night sky.

Alikne'ar had never wished for offspring, but it did its best to raise Lietni'en well. It taught them how to sit in the rill, silent, waiting, until the fish leapt into their hands. It taught them which plants would cure the cramps which plagued them each month. It taught them both its own language and that of the humans, and all on their own Lietni'en learned to speak with ravens. They learned to weave pieces into a whole and made Alikne'ar a robe for the cold winters it had once slept through. And for themself they made a garment of raven feathers and peat.

It had not been easy at first, and some days it still wasn't. But with the patience and persistence of two creatures who have decided to watch out for each other, they both learned to live with the other, and then learned how to make it easier.

Alikne'ar now heard Lietni'en's voice echo to its ears through the forest. It didn't understand the words of ravens, but Lietni'en had taught it some simple signals. This one meant 'come look'.

It listened, morphing into a many-legged form to move with more speed. Lietni'en was a curious creature and often spent their time digging up the secrets of the bogs and the forests. Their first toys had been a set of bones from a bird's wings. Now those bones hung around their neck with the other treasures they had reclaimed from the earth.

Alikne'ar slowed as Lietni'en became near. It became a moss that covered the ground, then took in the scene Lietni'en watched from the trees.

There were some sparse, small clearings in the bogs and the forests. One of them lay here. In its center was a wounded human boy.

His wounds had been inflicted by his kind. An arrow sprouted from the hub of his shoulder. The tip was barbed where it stuck through the front. The knees of his pants were torn, and so was the skin of the knees themselves. One hand rested at the base of the arrow in his shoulder, and his face was stricken and tearful. The other hand clutched a wicked knife as if it were his last hope.

"Who's--who's there?" he called out. His voice was high and tremulous. Like Lietni'en, it seemed he was female. And like her, it seemed he had been left to the wolves.

Alikne'ar took its human form, which over the years it had refined to have something of a face, and approached the wounded boy.