When Mandy took Rusk into the forest to collect materials, he followed very closely behind and never let go of her hand. She didn’t seem to mind except that every once in a while she’d turn and bump into him. Eventually she called him out on it.

“I squashed the monster. It’s deep under now. You don’t have to hold onto me like a monkey.”

Rusk plucked his hand out of hers and then didn’t know what to do with it. He let it hang at his side and fidgeted with his pant leg, finding minimal solace in the bundling and unbundling of the material.

“I can control it,” said Mandy.

“If you say so.”

“Maybe I made friends with it.”

Rusk’s eyebrows scrunched together. His mouth dropped open.

Mandy sighed and pointed deeper into the wood before he could say anything, to a section where the light from the canopy disintegrated into shadow before it could reach the floor. Thicker trees, thicker walls. There were so many things that could hide in shadows like that, monsters or otherwise.

“I don’t know about this,” said Rusk.

“Are heroes cowards?”

Rusk crossed his arms at her.

“I’ve gone in before. I know what I’m doing, okay? You aren’t the only one who aspires to be something more than a villager.”

Rusk uncrossed his arms.

They walked toward the shadow.

“Well what do you want to be then?”

“A merchant,” said Mandy. “I’m good with my hands. I already make things in my spare time, sew and craft. Seems the logical conclusion, doesn’t it? And it would let me travel away from this place. I don’t like it here, not really. I’m just stuck for the time being since my father ran off. He didn’t leave me with many resources.”

“Has anyone ever told you you sound way older than you are?”

“The curse of being intelligent.”

Rusk backpedaled. “I didn’t mean it in a mean way. And you don’t look older. And how is being smart a curse?”

“See there.” Mandy crouched in the dirt, her dress pooled around her legs, and dipped her hand into the deepest shadow of all. It was so thick it completely blackened her fingers the deeper she reached inside it, and the shade itself swirled up, up, up around her wrist across her skin in tendrils of pure black aura. It wasn’t a shadow. It was an entity.

Rusk knelt next to her, his jaw going tight of its own accord.

“This is where you have to reach if you want a hero’s weapon. You have to seek the dark.”

The lump widening inside Rusk’s throat prevented him from speaking.

“It can be an ally,” said Mandy. “But only if you ask politely.”

“How do you ask politely?”

Mandy closed her eyes, inhaling smoothly. Her expression softened. “With your heart.”

The shadows swirled higher, climbing in slithers of ink across her skin, and her eyes blackened into the ghoulish visage to reflect the monster still inside her. She looked at Rusk and inclined her head, a gesture that was her own and not the monster’s, and Rusk’s spine went rigid of its own accord. She said she’d beaten down the monster. She said she’d made friends with it. Was this what that meant?

He inched closer and watched her hands as she swirled them around in the darkness, bending shadows like rippling water, and then pulled them out, and in her grip was the most peculiar bit of wood Rusk had ever seen. Most everything in this forest was gray, or a deep brown, or mildewed green.

The bit of wood was orangey yellow, glowing from within as if it contained its own miniature sun, and the feeling it gave off was like nothing Rusk had ever felt in his life.

No.

He had felt it before.

It felt like the swing of Iya Tarfell’s sword.

“This is called Elva forge,” said Mandy, holding the wood out to him. “It works best when given as a gift. Lucky for both of us you helped saved me, huh? My father taught me how to reach it.” When she smiled, her teeth were hers, not the jagged fangs Rusk expected from a monster’s face. “He may have been cruel, but he did teach me some things that were useful. We can use this to make a bow, or whatever weapon you favor, but I don’t know how to make anything that’s not related to archery.”

“You never told me you could shoot.”

Mandy shrugged. “There wasn’t any need.”

“And your father taught you that as well?”

She nodded.

“Hm.”

“What?” Mandy’s face tipped more toward the monster’s aesthetic. Half her tone was a dare. The other half was uncertainty.

Rusk couldn’t figure out which was really her, so he wasted a moment pondering the wooden light in his hands.

The shadows climbed back down Mandy’s arm into their pool and vanished. The forest floor became visible, all packed dirt and mushrooms poking out in a formation that was an absolute, perfect circle. When Rusk found the courage to look into her eyes again, they were their usual, human brown. No trace of the monster whatsoever.

“This doesn’t match up with how I imagined your father after what you told me.”

“Plenty of sides to every person,” said Mandy nonchalantly.

Rusk couldn’t tell if she was speaking with repression or acceptance. He lowered his eyes away from her, and his gaze fell to the Elva forge. It was warm in his palm, pleasant, but also, he knew in a visceral sense, very dangerous.