After checking on Ethan one final time, Lila returned to the kitchen where Marlin Gust still sat at the worn wooden table. The tremor in his hands had worsened, she noticed—barely visible but unmistakable to her healer's eye.
"Are you all right?" she asked again, settling beside him with practiced concern.
"I'm fine," Marlin replied, but his voice carried the weight of untruth.
Without asking permission, Lila took his hands in hers. Warm green light flowed from her palms, seeping into his skin like sunlight through water. The tremor eased, and color returned to his weathered features.
"How bad is it?" she whispered when the healing light faded.
Marlin flexed his fingers experimentally, then met her eyes with grim honesty. "No ordinary human could survive his touch. And he's only eight."
The words hung between them like a death sentence.
"Is it that bad?" Lila's voice was barely audible.
Marlin nodded slowly. "Today we were lucky that no one saw him. But what happens when he removes it again? What if someone witnesses what can we do?"
Lila had no answer. They both knew the village's reaction would be swift and merciless.
"Should we tell him everything?" Marlin asked after a long silence. "About what he is? About us?"
"No." Lila's response was immediate and firm. "It would only add to his burden. He's already struggling with what little he knows."
Marlin nodded reluctantly. He understood her reasoning, even as it pained him to watch their son suffer in ignorance. The boy couldn't control his nature if he didn't understand it, but the truth might destroy what remained of his childhood.
"Honey, I know you're worried about him," Lila said softly, reaching across to touch the pendant that always hung around her neck—a smooth stone that seemed to pulse with its own inner light. "But let's wait for them. They told you they would come, didn't they?"
Marlin's gaze fixed on the stone, and some of the tension left his shoulders. "Yes. They promised."
"Then we need to protect him until they arrive. Once they come, we can tell him everything. Show him what he truly is and how to control it."
Marlin looked down at his hands—hands that had just survived a power that would have killed any ordinary man. "I can't bear to watch him suffer. But do we have any other choice?"
"Who expected that the horn would manifest so soon?" Lila replied, her own voice heavy with regret. "None of the signs pointed to such early awakening."
"I thought there was a chance," Marlin admitted. "But I didn't take it seriously. It's my mistake."
They sat in the dim kitchen light, two guardians bearing the weight of impossible secrets.
"With his horn grown now, it's even harder to keep his true nature hidden," Marlin continued. "I just hope the king will ensure that rumors about him don't spread beyond the village."
"The king knows what Ethan could mean for the balance. He won't risk exposure," Lila reminded him. "Ethan is too valuable to risk exposure."
They spoke no more of it that night. Eventually they made their way to bed, but sleep came fitfully to both. Outside, the twin moons continued their ancient dance, indifferent to the small family struggling with forces that could reshape kingdoms.
For Ethan, nothing was the same after that night.
The world had become a minefield where every step might bring death. The creatures that had once brought him joy now filled him with terror—not of them, but of what he might do to them.
When the glowmice came chittering around his feet as they always had, he threw stones until they scattered with wounded squeaks. When Shimmer, his beloved crystal-scaled drake, tried to perch on his shoulder, he shoved her away so roughly that she tumbled to the ground with a cry of confusion.
"Go away!" he shouted at a family of fawncats that had come seeking their usual gentle pets. "Stay away from me!"
He hurled rocks at them too, watching with a breaking heart as they fled with their tails low and their eyes wide with hurt bewilderment. They didn't understand why their gentle friend had turned cruel. They only knew that the boy who had once meant safety now brought pain.
Ethan told himself this was what he wanted. Better for them to fear him than to die by his touch. But each time he drove away another innocent creature, another piece of his heart crumbled away.
He began to avoid even the safe parts of the forest. What if he tripped and fell? What if the glove slipped? What if his control failed at the worst possible moment?
Instead, he spent his days alone in the cottage or sitting in the herb garden where nothing living grew wild—only the carefully tended plants his mother needed for her healing work. Even then, he kept his gloved hand pressed tightly against his chest, as far from everything else as he could manage.
Lila and Marlin watched their son withdraw into himself with growing desperation. They tried to coax him out with games and stories, with hunting lessons and herb-gathering expeditions. But Ethan had learned to fear his own nature, and that fear had made him a prisoner in his own life.
"I don't want to hurt anyone," he whispered to his mother one evening when she found him crying in his room. "I don't want to be a monster."
"You're not a monster, little bird," Lila said, but her words felt hollow even to her own ears. How could she comfort him when she couldn't tell him the truth? When she couldn't explain that his deadly touch was just one facet of a heritage that was both blessing and curse?
"Then why do I kill everything I touch?" Ethan asked. "Why am I like this?"
Lila had no answer he could understand. Not yet. Not until the promised visitors arrived to help them navigate the treacherous path ahead.
So she simply held him as he wept, and whispered empty reassurances, and prayed to whatever gods still listened that their son would survive long enough to learn the truth about what he was meant to become.
Outside the window, the creatures of Kyros went about their nightly business, but they gave the cottage a wide berth now. The horn-boy's aura had changed, tainted with fear and self-hatred. Where once they had felt welcome, now they sensed only danger and despair.
The boy who had been nature's friend had become nature's exile, and the forest mourned the loss as deeply as any human tragedy.
In his small bed, Ethan pressed his gloved hand against his chest and stared at the ceiling, counting the hours until dawn and wondering if the glove would always be his skin now, and if the boy beneath it had already died.
The answer, he feared, was no.