Chapter Text

The first thing Damin felt was the taste of metal, sharp and electric, as his eyelids flickered against the harsh white light. His fingers twitched against the cold gel lining of the cryopod, sticky with residue, and then he remembered he couldn’t move his legs.

A voice crackled overhead, distant and mechanical. "Welcome to Hell’s Gate, Mr. Sully. Cryosleep termination successful." He tried to lift his head, but the muscles in his neck burned like they’d been welded stiff. Around him, other pods hissed open, bodies stirring in slow, groaning unison. Someone retched violently.

His last memory was Earth— the claustrophobic press of the departure bay, his sister’s fingers gripping his wrist too tight, her voice swallowed by the roar of the launch sequence. Now, six subjective hours later (six years objectively, not that it mattered), he was here. Pandora. And his legs were dead weight beneath him.

"— You will be weak and you will be hungry! If you feel nauseous please—"

He blocked out the rest of it.

[Yada yada we all know how Damin got on Pandora because it’s how Jake got on fucking Pandora, So. Timeskip.]

The briefing room smelled like recycled sweat and stale coffee grounds. Damin slumped in his chair, fingers tapping an uneven rhythm against his useless thighs, while Colonel Victory Quaritch paced the front like a caged viperwolf. Her boots clicked against the metal grating, which was fucking annoying in Damin’s opinion.

"Let’s skip the kindergarten tour," she said, voice sharp enough to flay skin. "You’re not on Earth, you’re not even in a war zone— you’re in the war zone. Pandora doesn’t give a shit about your degrees, your contracts, or your cute little survival training."

"Out there? Everything lives, and everything lives to kill you bastards. Plants’ll strangle you, animals’ll gut you. And the Na’vi?" A dry chuckle.

"They’ll put an arrow through your eye socket before you even hear the twang."

Damin exhaled through his nose. Beside him, a tech shifted uncomfortably. "You got a problem, Spellman?"

"N— No, ma’am."

"Good! Because here’s the fun part—" She leaned forward, palms flat on the table. "Their arrows? Neurotoxin, one minute, that’s all you get. And their bones? Carbon fiber. So unless you’ve got a death wish, you stay inside the fence. You follow my rules. And you pray—" She straightened, lip curling. "— that I’m feeling generous when you fuck up.”

From the back, someone muttered, "Christ."

Quaritch’s grin was all teeth. "Not here, he isn’t. I’m Colonel Victory Quaritch, but you can call me Colonel Victor or just Colonel Quaritch. I am RDA’s Chief of Security, and it is my job to keep you alive."

"I will not suceed, not with most of you anyway."

Damin blinked slowly, repeating the Colonel’s words in his head and his jaw tightened. He’d heard the horror stories, sure, everyone had, but hearing it spat like a challenge, like some sick pep talk, made his fingers curl against his wheelchair’s armrests. His gaze flicked to the others in the room and thought if she could really say that shit.

"Mr. Sully," she said, and he swore the room’s temperature dropped five fucking degrees. "You got a motherfucking problem?" 

Every head swiveled toward him. Damin hadn’t realised he’d been frowning, and slowly turned his head towards the woman. He weighed his options, play dumb, apologise, or— 

"No, Colonel." His voice came out drier than he intended. "Good, that’s what I fucking thought."

The hallway buzzed with the disoriented shuffle of new arrivals, boots scuffing metal flooring, muttered curses as someone’s duffel clipped a doorway, the occasional yelp when a stray elbow connected. Damin wheeled himself through the chaos, dodging a pair of techs arguing over a misplaced crate, when a shadow fell across his lap.

"Hey. You look like you could use a hand. Or two." The voice was warm, edged with humor. Damin glanced up to find the man with the purple beanie grinning down at him, one thumb hooked under the strap of his overstuffed duffel.

Up close, the freckles were more pronounced, scattered like rust dust across the bridge of his nose. His amber eyes flicked to Damin’s wheelchair, then back to his face, deliberately avoiding pity. "Tristan Spellman. You’re the twin, right?"

Damin’s fingers tightened on his wheels. "That obvious?"

"You look just like Nate Sully, I went through Avatar training with him." Damin exhaled through his nose, rolling his shoulders back. "Yeah, well. Nate always did have the better face."

Spellman snorted, shifting his duffel strap higher. "Doubt that." He extended his hand to Damin. "He was a great guy, honestly. You should be proud! We all were wrecked when we got the news."

Damin hesitated for half a second before gripping Tristan's hand— firm, calloused, the kind of grip that didn’t treat him like glass. He released it just as quickly, nudging his wheelchair forward with a practiced twist of his wrists.

Behind him, Tristan’s footsteps matched his pace effortlessly, the duffel bouncing against his hip. "You look just like him," Tristan said again, quieter this time, like he was turning the thought over in his head. Then he chuckled, scratching the back of his neck.

"Well, obviously. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a match."

"Yeah." Damin’s voice was flat. "That’s the whole fucking point." The wheels hissed against the polished floor, the sound grating in his ears. He knew what came next, the awkward silence that crickets could fill if there were any, the careful sidestep around the corpse-sized elephant in the room. Nate’s corpse, specifically.

But Tristan just shrugged, swinging his duffel around to his other shoulder. "So. Wanna go see your new body?"

Damin almost stalled his chair. He glanced up, searching Tristan’s face for the punchline, but the guy’s grin was genuine, eyebrows arched in casual invitation. Like he’d just asked if Damin wanted to grab a beer, not inspect a genetically engineered alien-hybrid clone of his dead brother.

"You’re serious?"

Tristan rocked back on his heels. "Why wouldn’t I be? It’s kinda the whole reason you’re here, man. And trust me, it’s way cooler than whatever shit Quaritch was spewing back there."

Damin exhaled sharply through his nose. The guy was either impressively oblivious or deliberately skating past the minefield of Nate’s death, either way, it was almost refreshing. "Lead the way," he muttered, jerking his chin forward.

Tristan’s grin widened. "Hell yeah. Just don’t blame me when you get addicted to breathing unfiltered air." He pivoted on his heel. "Wait, that can happen?"

The bio-lab doors hissed open with the sterile bite of pressurized air, revealing a cavernous space that smelled like disinfectant and something unnervingly organic, like wet earth and copper. Damin’s wheels rolled forward almost of their own accord, his gaze snagging on the shipping containers being uncrated by a team of techs in scrubs.

The nearest one had its sides peeled away, exposing a towering acrylic tank that glowed under the lab’s harsh LEDs. Inside, suspended in viscous fluid, was—

"Holy shit," Tristan breathed beside him, frozen mid-step.

Damin didn’t answer, he couldn’t. His throat tightened as the figure in the tank turned lazily, its— his—limbs drifting in the amniotic haze. Nine feet tall if it was an inch, muscles corded under blue skin that shimmered with bioluminescent traceries where the light hit just right.

Black hair fanned out like ink in water, and the tail— fuck, the tail— coiled and uncoiled with unconscious grace. The face, though.

That was what punched the air from Damin’s lungs. High cheekbones, the same stubborn jaw, the exact fucking arch of the eyebrows. Nate’s and his face, but sharper, wilder, alien.

"They got big," Damin muttered, voice rough.

Tristan snapped out of his daze with a nervous laugh. "Oh, yeah. They mature on the trip out. Like, uh, really aggressive wine."

A woman in a stained lab coat sidled up beside them, her dark braid swinging as she checked a tablet. "Dr. Vivaan Patel," she said without looking up. "You must be Sully’s spare." Her tone was clinical, but her eyes flicked to Damin’s chair for half a second too long. "And Spellman, always a pleasure."

Tristan saluted with two fingers.

Tristan turned toward Dr. Patel, nudging his chin at the tank with a grin. "So, the proprioceptive sims worked pretty well, huh?"  

Vivaan didn’t glance up from her tablet, tapping something with a stylus before responding. "Better than expected. Neural mapping synced cleanly, no rejection flags. And look at those quads."

She gestured vaguely at the avatar’s legs, where corded muscle flexed subtly even in suspended animation. "Great muscle tone. Give us a few hours to flush the tank stabilizers, and you can take them for a spin."  

Them. Not it.

Damin barely registered the distinction. His focus snagged on the sleeping face— tilted toward them now, slack with artificial sedation. The features were sharper, the nose more pronounced, the jawline elongated into something predator-graceful, but the bones beneath were unmistakable. His own. Not Nate’s.  

"It looks like him," Damin muttered, half to himself.

Tristan shook his head, folding his arms. "Nah. That’s you, man." He jabbed a thumb toward the tank, then at Damin’s chest. "This one’s yours."  

Damin’s jaw worked.

The stereocam's red recording light blinked like a lazy predator’s eye. Damin stared into the lens, acutely aware of his own reflection in the glass— pale, unshaven, the dark circles under his eyes more pronounced under the lab’s cold lighting.

He cleared his throat. "So, uh. Apparently our nervous systems are... in sync. Or whatever." His fingers tapped an uneven rhythm against his thigh. "Which is why they dragged my ass out here. Because I can link with Nate’s avatar." He paused, mouth twisting. "Which was, y’know. Insanely expensive."  

Off-camera, a beaker clinked. Damin’s gaze flicked sideways, then back to the lens. "Is this right?" he called over his shoulder. "I just say whatever in these fucking things?"  

The shot widened abruptly, revealing Tristan elbow-deep in a storage locker, tossing discarded biosensor pads over his shoulder while Dr. Vivaan Patel scowled at her tablet.

"Yeah," Tristan said without looking up. "Just get in the habit of documenting everything— what you see, what you feel—it’s all part of the science." He paused to kick the locker shut with his heel. "Good science starts with good observation!"

Damin exhaled through his nose. "Right." He squared his shoulders to the camera again, deadpan. "So. Whatever. Here I am. Doing science." His gaze wandered over the lab— the humming servers, the tangled IV lines snaking from ceiling hooks, the row of empty avatar tanks gleaming under their UV sterilizers.

He’d never seen so much tech crammed into one room. "Never been in a lab before," he muttered, more to himself than the stereocam.  

Vivaan’s voice cut in sharply. "Log off, time to meet your boss for the next five years."  

Damin reached out to tap the stereocam’s off switch, but hesitated, fingers hovering. The reflection in the lens stared back, not Nate, not the sleeping giant in the tank, just him. Damin Sully, wheelchair and all. His thumb jabbed down. The light died.

The link room smelled like antiseptic, the dozen psionic units humming with eerie synchronization. They stood in neat rows like high-tech sarcophagi, their curved lids frosted with condensation from the cryo-coolants inside. Damin’s wheelchair rolled to a stop just shy of the nearest one, his reflection warping in its polished surface.

Tristan nudged him with an elbow. "Dr. Irene Augustine is a legend," he whispered, grinning. "Head of the Avatar Program. Wrote the book on Pandoran botany! literally. The RDA slapped her name on like, twelve manuals."

Vivaan snorted from behind them, not looking up from her tablet. "That’s because she likes plants better than people."

A sudden hydraulic hiss cut through the room as one of the link units cracked open. A woman hauled herself upright with a grunt, rolling her shoulders until her neck popped audibly.

Dr. Augustine was all sharp angles and impatience, her ginger silver-streaked hair escaping its messy braid. She scrubbed a hand over her face before bellowing, "Who’s got my goddamn cigarette?!"

A tech practically teleported to her side, offering a lit cigarette between trembling fingers. Irene snatched it, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling vents. Only then did her gaze land on their little group.

Vivaan folded her arms. "And here she is! Cinderella back from the ball."

Irene ignored her, stepping out of the unit with the practiced ease of someone who’d done it a thousand times. She took another drag before pointing the cigarette at Tristan. "You. Spellman." Tristan straightened like he’d been yanked by a string. "Yes, ma’am?"

"I hear good things." Her voice was gravel and nicotine. "How’s your Na’vi?"

Tristan blinked, then cleared his throat. "Awvea ultxari ohengeyä, Nawma Sa'nok lrrtok siveiyi," he recited, the syllables rolling off his tongue with careful precision. (May the Great Mother smile upon our first meeting.)

Irene’s mouth twitched. "Tsun tivam," she conceded. "Aylì'u ngian nì'it skepek lu." (Not bad. You still sound a bit too formal, though.)

"Zìsìt amrr ftolia ohe, slä zene fko nivume nìtxan," Tristan shot back, grinning when Irene’s eyebrows lifted. (I studied for five years but there is much to learn.)

Damin watched the exchange like a spectator at a tennis match, fingers drumming against his armrests. Irene’s attention swung to him next, her stare peeling him open layer by layer. "And you’re the spare."

His jaw tightened. "Damin Sully."

"Yeah, yeah," Irene muttered around her cigarette, waving a hand dismissively. Ash flaked onto Damin's lap. "I know who you are. And I don’t need you— I need your damn brother." She turned abruptly to Vivaan, jabbing the cigarette toward her like an accusation. "You know, the PhD who trained three goddamn years for this mission?!"

Damin’s fingers dug into the armrests. "Nate’s dead," he said flatly. "I know, it’s a big fucking inconvenience to everyone…"

Irene’s gaze snapped back to him, her nostrils flaring as she exhaled smoke through her nose. "How much lab training you got, Sully? Ever run a gas chromatograph?"

"… No."

"Any actual lab work at all?"

"High school chemistry." He shrugged. "Ditched most of it."

Irene whirled back to Vivaan, throwing her hands up. "You see? You see?! They’re pissing on us without even the courtesy of calling it rain!" She spun on her heel, knocking Damin’s shoulder with her elbow as she stormed past. "I’m going to Selfridge."

Vivaan reached out, fingers brushing Irene’s sleeve. "That’s not a good—"

The door slammed shut behind her, cutting off the rest. The lab buzzed with awkward silence (shame there wasn’t any crickets…), paired by the distant clang of Irene’s boots fading down the corridor. Vivaan sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

When she looked at Damin, her expression was equal parts exasperation and resignation. "Congratulations," she said dryly. "You just managed to piss off the only person who could’ve made this transition marginally less painful for you."

Damin flexed his fingers against his armrests. "She started it."

Tristan coughed into his fist, badly disguising a laugh, before sidling over to inspect a nearby terminal. Vivaan ignored him, tossing her tablet onto a cart with a clatter.

"Here. Tomorrow. Oh eight hundred." She jabbed a finger at him. "And try to use a proper vernacular when you inevitably fuck something up. It makes the incident reports marginally less depressing to write."

Damin rolled his wheelchair forward half a foot, just enough to block her path.

The ops center's panoramic bay windows framed Pandora's dusk like a burning oil slick, violent purples and reds bleeding into the encroaching black.

Marcus Selfridge exhaled through his nose, adjusting his grip on the putter. The Titleist rolled cleanly across the brushed metal flooring before Irene's boot hooked the practice cup sideways, sending it skittering into a server bank with a hollow clang.

"Marcus," she said, voice scraping like a match strike. "Used to think you were just negligent. Now I know you're actively sabotaging us!"

Selfridge didn't flinch. He watched the ball coast past where the cup had been, lips quirking. "You know I love our little chats." Retrieving it with two fingers, he polished the dimpled surface against his sleeve. "Actually, we got lucky with him."

"Lucky?" Irene's laugh was sharp enough to draw glances from the ops staff. "How is a wheelchair-bound Marine with zero lab experience lucky?!"

Selfridge sauntered toward his glass-walled office, twirling the ball between his knuckles. "Lucky your guy had a twin. Luckier the twin wasn't, say, a dental hygienist." He paused at the threshold, nodding at the two armed guards flanking his door. "He's your security escort now. Final offer."

Irene followed, boots punching divots into the soundproofing foam. "Last thing I need's another trigger-happy asshole contaminating my samples!"

Inside, Selfridge's fingers danced across a holoscreen, summoning a security feed of Damin wheeling himself through the mess hall.

"You're supposed to be winning hearts and minds, Doc. Na'vi trust you— or rather, your blue-faced stunt double— because you look like them. Talk like them." His smile didn't reach his eyes. "Yet after so many years, relations are somehow worse."

"They tend to decline," Irene snarled, "when you machine-gun their sacred sites!"

Selfridge plucked a floating metallic rock from its magnetic pedestal, raw unobtanium, glinting dully under the LEDs. He rolled it between his palms like a gambler's die. "This little bastard's why we're here. Twenty million per kilo. That's what funds the research."

He leaned in, close enough for Irene to smell his cologne, something expensive and woodsy, undercut with sweat. "Comprendo? Those savages are torching our equipment. We're one arrow-storm from all-out war. So use what you've got," He tossed the rock back into its field, where it hovered, spinning lazily. "… and get me results."

Chapter Text

The link unit’s interior smelled like sterilized plastic and the faint tang of coolant. Damin braced his palms against the seat, arms trembling as he hauled himself up from the wheelchair in one brutal heave.

His legs dragged behind him like dead weight, the sound of fabric scraping metal loud in the sudden silence of the room. Irene’s cigarette dangled forgotten between her fingers, ash threatening to drop onto the pristine floor.

Through the pressure window, Damin caught a glimpse of his avatar— no, himself— twitching slightly on the gurney as med-techs adjusted IV lines. The thing’s chest rose and fell in slow, deep breaths, Pandoran air filling lungs grown for this exact moment. It was surreal, like watching his own bloody autopsy.

Tristan, already strapped into his unit, shot him a thumbs-up. "First time’s always weird," he said, voice muffled by the biosensor pads plastered across his temples. "Like jumping into a cold pool. You’ll get used to it."

Irene flicked ash into a tray. "How much link time have you logged?"

"Five hundred and twenty hours," Tristan said proudly. "Maybe more if you count—"

She cut him off with a sharp look at Damin. "And you?"

Damin wrestled his legs into position, fingers digging into his own thighs to maneuver them. "Like… an hour maybe." Irene’s cigarette froze halfway to her lips. "Tell me you’re joking." But he didn’t.

Irene swore under her breath, stubbing out the cigarette with unnecessary force. "So you just figured you’d come out here," she hissed, "To the most hostile environment known to man, with no training of any kind, and see how it went?" Her voice dropped to something dangerous. "What was going through your head?!"

Damin met her glare head-on, fingers tightening around the edge of the unit. "Maybe I was tired of doctors telling me what I couldn’t do!"

Something flickered behind Irene’s eyes, anger, recognition, he couldn’t tell. She exhaled sharply through her nose, stepping back to let him finish settling in.

Tristan cleared his throat. "Uh, so— protocol. You’ll feel disoriented at first, don’t panic when you open your eyes, just—"

"I read the manual," Damin muttered, though he hadn’t. Irene snorted. "Of course you did."

The gel packs clung to Damin like a second skin, warm and suffocating. He inhaled, too sharp, too fast, and felt the fluid seep into the fabric of his shirt.

Above him, Irene's cigarette-scarred face loomed, her fingers adjusting sensors with clinical detachment. "Relax," she muttered, "And let your mind go blank." Her smirk was razor-thin. "That shouldn't be hard for you."  

Damin bared his teeth. "Kiss the darkest part of my lily white—"  

The clamshell slammed shut, cutting him off mid-taunt. Darkness swallowed him whole. Inside the link chamber, his pulse thundered in his ears. Vivaan's voice crackled through the comms: "Initiate link." Somewhere beyond the shell, a tech's fingers danced across controls. A monitor flickered to life— Damin's brain rendered in three dimensions, neurons firing in cascades of electric blue and molten gold.  

"Gorgeous brain," Vivaan mused. "Nice activity…"

Irene snorted. "Go figure." Her footsteps retreated. "I'm going in." A tech's voice, tinny through the speakers: "Phase-lock at forty percent. He's in transition."  

On the display, two ghostly nervous systems pulsed, Damin's and the avatar's, threading together in a luminous braid. Vivaan leaned in. "That's it. Find your way home."  

Light tore through him, violent and blinding. Radiant streamers twisted into a tunnel, yanking him forward like a hooked fish. His thoughts shattered, reformed, shattered again. The world resolved into blurry smears, masked faces hovering above him, backlit by surgical lights. He tried to speak. His tongue was lead.

Golden irises flooded his vision, pupils contracting against the assault of light. His— its— chest heaved. Air scraped raw down a foreign throat.  

"Damin's in," Vivaan announced.  

"Phase-lock ninety-nine percent. Link stable."  

The avatar— him— twitched. Hands, blue, long-fingered, wrong, flexed. Damin sat up, the motion effortless, his new muscles singing with unused strength. He touched his chest. The heartbeat beneath was thunderous. Alien.  

"Take it slow," Vivaan ordered. "Motor control check. Touch your fingertips together—"  

Damin wasn't listening. His gaze locked onto his legs— thickly corded, blue-veined, alive. He swung them off the gurney. The impact of his feet against concrete sent a shockwave up his spine. He stood.  

Nine feet tall. The med-techs gaped up at him like startled children.  

Something moved in his periphery— a sinuous twist of muscle. He whirled, tail lashing out, and sent a tray of instruments crashing to the floor. A laugh burst out of him, wild and disbelieving.  

"Easy, Damin," a tech pleaded. "Sit down—"  

He stepped forward. Wires tore free from his chest.  

"Damin, wait—"  

But he was already moving, pushing past outstretched hands, toward the door, toward the light—  

Sunlight speared his eyes. Damin reeled, blinking against the glare. The compound sprawled before him, a patchwork of training equipment and low-slung domes. Nearby, two avatars collided mid-air, their laughter ringing as a basketball arced toward a hoop hung comically high.  

Damin lifted his hands, turning them over in the sun.

Damin's toes flexed in the soil, real, living soil, feeling the grit of Pandora between them. He exhaled, lungs expanding in a way they hadn't in years, and the air tasted like iron and something sweetly floral. His footprint stared back at him, deep and deliberate in the dark earth. 

"Hey, Marine!"

The voice cut through his reverie. Damin turned, tail flicking instinctively for balance, and there she was, Irene's avatar, all nine and a half feet of her, sauntering toward him with the casual arrogance of someone who owned the ground beneath her. Her t-shirt strained across shoulders corded with muscle, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms that looked like they could snap tree trunks. 

Damin blinked. "That... you, Doc?"

Irene snorted, plucking a fist-sized fruit from a nearby plant. "Who'd you expect, numbnuts? Think fast." She underhanded it at him without warning. 

Damin's hand snapped out, catching it mid-air— without fumbling. The fruit's skin was pebbled and warm from the sun. He bit into it without hesitation. Tart juice flooded his mouth, dripping down his chin. 

"Motor control's looking good," Irene observed, arms crossed. "No tremors, no lag! You're syncing cleaner than Spellman did his first week." 

"Hey," came an indignant shout. Tristan's avatar emerged from behind a hydroponic rack, flexing both biceps with exaggerated flair. "Check it out! Living. God." He pivoted, showcasing his back muscles with a dramatic flare of his dorsal stripes. 

Damin choked on a laugh, juice spattering his chest. "Don't get ahead of yourself, Spellman." 

Tristan grinned, tail curling. "Says the guy who just discovered legs!" He mimed Damin's earlier stumbling steps with ridiculous exaggeration, nearly tripping over his own feet. 

Irene rolled her golden eyes. "Children. Both of you." She snatched the remains of Damin's fruit from his hand and took a decisive bite.

The braid twitched between Damin's fingers, alive in a way that made his stomach flip. He rolled the end between his thumb and forefinger, watching the neural tendrils writhe like blind worms seeking soil. "This is kinda freaky," he muttered.

Across the longhouse, Irene threw a boot at the light panel with practiced accuracy. The overheads died with a click, plunging the space into violet twilight. "Lights out," she announced around a yawn, already folding her lanky frame onto a cot that looked two sizes too small. "See you maggots at dinner."

Damin lay back, the woven reeds of his bed creaking under his weight. Outside, the jungle screamed, screeches and hoots layered over the constant drone of insects.

Damin blinked against the sudden brightness as the link unit hissed open. The sterile air of Hell’s Gate tasted thin and lifeless compared to Pandora’s humid richness. His legs, dead weight again, slumped uselessly as he hauled himself onto the wheelchair’s seat, muscles trembling with the effort. Across the room, Irene stretched like a cat, plucking the offered cigarette from the tech’s shaking fingers and inhaling deeply.

"You look like shit," she observed, blowing smoke toward the ceiling vents.

Damin rolled his shoulders, still feeling the phantom weight of his avatar’s tail. "Feels like getting stuffed back into a shoebox…"

Tristan, already freed from his unit, tossed him a protein bar with a grin. "Wait till you try the commissary’s eggs. Really puts the hell in Hell’s Gate."

The mess hall smelled like grease and exhaustion. Damin picked at his tray while Irene argued with a botanist about xenofungal spore viability. Around them, miners and troopers shoveled food into their mouths like they were fueling machines, not bodies.

Ramona Chacón cut through the room, her flight suit was streaked with hydraulic fluid, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms mapped with old burns. A toothpick danced between her teeth as she stopped at their table, hazel eyes locking onto Damin.

"Sully," she said, voice rough from years of shouting over rotors. "Colonel wants you in Armour Bay. Now."

Tristan’s fork froze mid-air while Damin wiped his hands on his pants. "Why?"

Ramona’s smirk didn’t reach her eyes. "You’ll find out." She turned on her heel, throwing over her shoulder, "Wheels or no wheels, Marine, keep up."

The mess hall buzzed with sidelong glances as Damin pivoted his chair after her. Irene’s stare bearing into his back like a laser designator.

Ramona didn’t slow down. Her boots echoed against the grated flooring as she led him deeper into the belly of the base, past repair bays where mechanics cursed at sparking machinery.

Damin rolled his chair through the armor bay's industrial gloom, the air thick with hydraulic fluid. Tilt-rotors hung in repair cradles like dissected insects, their rotor blades stripped bare.

To his left, a row of Scorpion gunships gleamed under work lights, their missile racks loaded with ordnance the size of his forearm. Ramona walked ahead, her boots kicking up loose bolts as she jerked a thumb toward the nearest Samson, its door guns freshly retrofitted with belt-fed incendiaries.

"Door guns and rocket pods?" Damin whistled. "You boys expecting an airshow?"

Ramona snorted, snagging a wrench from a passing tech's cart. "We ain't the only thing flyin' out there, Sully. Or the biggest." She tossed the wrench onto a tool tray with a clatter. "Lost two crews last month— one to a goddamn banshee flock, the other to something bigger that did not like us snoopin' near the Hallelujahs." She leaned in, voice dropping. "I'm down a gunner. You're up."

Damin tapped his wheels. "Not exactly airborne-qualified."

"Don't need your legs to pull a trigger." Ramona extended a grease-streaked fist. "Zero nine hundred. Don't be late."

He bumped knuckles with her just as a metallic screech echoed from the far end of the bay. Through the forest of AMP suits, their servos whining as techs calibrated targeting arrays, Colonel Quaritch was bench-pressing enough weight to snap a normal human's spine. He thinks. 

The bar shuddered as she pressed the final rep, veins standing out along her neck like cables.

"Low gravity makes you soft," she grunted, racking the weights and sitting up. Sweat sheeted down the scars raking her shoulders— jagged, organic marks that looked like something had tried to peel her. "Get soft here?" She smirked, tapping the nearest AMP suit's armored shin. "Pandora eats you."

Damin rolled closer. "Corporal Sully, ma'am."

"Venezuela." Quaritch wiped her face with a towel, eyes sharp. "Mean bush. Nothing like this." She gestured toward the bay doors, where dusk painted the jungle beyond in violent purples. "Got heart, kid. Coming out here."

"Thought it was just another hellhole, if I’m gonna be honest."

Quaritch barked a laugh, clapping his shoulder hard enough to rattle his teeth. "Chief!" she bellowed over his head. The lead mechanic scampered from behind an AMP suit's leg actuator. "Servo's in, Colonel! Wanna test-drive?"

Quaritch stood, stretching until her spine popped. "First Recon," she said, almost conversational. "Couple tours ahead of you. Nigeria? Not a scratch." Her fingers brushed the scars. "Then this." She tilted her head, letting the fluorescent lights catch the twisted tissue. "Earth docs could fix it." A pause. "If I left."

Something in her voice made Damin glance up, but her expression was already shuttering, smoothing into something neutral.

"War's here," she said softly, staring at the tree line like she could see through six inches of plasteel. Then she was moving, hauling herself into the AMP suit's cockpit with practiced ease. The turbine shrieked to life, drowning out whatever else she might've said.

The AMP suit's optics flared red, locking onto Damin's face as Quaritch's voice crackled through its external speakers: "Stick around, Corporal." The servos whined, the machine taking its first step. "Show's just starting."

The AMP suit's servos screamed as Quaritch pivoted, her machine's hydraulic limbs slicing through the air with precision, right elbow tucked, left arm extended like a blade. Every movement was calculated violence. Damin had seen wu-shu katas before, but never performed by two tons of weaponised alloy. 

"Avatar program's a joke," Quaritch's voice crackled through external speakers, distorted by the suit's growling turbines. "Buncha lab-coat limpwristers playing dress-up with taxpayer dollars."

The AMP's right foot stamped down hard enough to dent the plating, its knee joint hissing as it stabilized. "But you?" The optics flared brighter, painting Damin's face red. "You're a goddamn opportunity that fell right in my lap."

Damin's fingers twitched against his wheelchair's pushrims. He could still feel the phantom flex of his avatar's toes. 

Quaritch's suit crouched suddenly, its back actuators whining under the load. "Recon Marine in a native skin?" She laughed, a sharp, static-laced sound. "You'll walk right into their goddamn treehouses, eat their bugs, sing their little songs." The AMP stood abruptly, one massive hand flexing in front of its chest cam. "And then you'll tell me how to break them."

The bay lights flickered as the suit's turbines cycled higher, heat shimmer distorting the air around its exhaust vents. Somewhere behind them, a mechanic dropped a wrench. 

Damin exhaled through his nose. "Sounds real good, Colonel." He tilted his head. "Am I… still reporting to Augustine?" 

"On paper." Quaritch's AMP leaned down, its optics level with his eyes. Close enough for Damin to see his own warped reflection in the scratched polycarbonate.

"You quack like her ducklings, you shit in their pond, but you whisper in my ear." The suit's fingers twitched, miming a puppet's strings. "Comprende?"

Damin nodded once. 

The AMP straightened with a hydraulic sigh. "Look, son—" Quaritch's voice dropped, almost gentle beneath the mechanical rasp. "I take care of my own." The suit's hand rotated, palm up, then clenched into a fist hard enough to make servos groan. "Get me what I need? Earthside docs'll have you walking by next available Christmas. Real legs." 

The canopy slammed shut like a guillotine. Damin watched Quaritch's AMP stride past, its footfalls ringing against the deck plating. He didn't move until the bay doors swallowed that hulking silhouette whole.

Then, slowly, he looked down at his own dead legs, his knuckles white against the pushrims.

Chapter Text

The coffee sloshed dangerously close to the rim of Irene’s mug as she shoved through the bio-lab doors, her boots skidding on a stray biosensor pad. "Vivaan!" She tossed the clipboard without looking. "Start calibration— flight line in ten."

Vivaan snatched it mid-air, already pivoting toward the link room. "Why are we always sprinting?" she muttered, but the complaint lacked actual anger as the door hissed shut behind her.

Damin rolled forward, Tristan falling into step beside him as they trailed Irene into the corridor’s sterile glow. The overhead lights flickered, another power fluctuation, maybe. "So," Irene said, gulping coffee like it was oxygen. "What did Atilla want?"

Damin kept his gaze ahead. "Just Marines comparin’ tattoos."

Irene stopped so abruptly Tristan nearly plowed into her. She turned, mug dangling from her fingers, and drilled Damin with a look that could’ve stripped paint. "Yeah. Well, listen to me, Marine." She jabbed a finger at his chest. "You’re driving an avatar now. That means you’re in my world. Got it?"

Damin’s jaw flexed. "I got it, Jesus…"

She whirled and strode into the link room, leaving the scent of burnt coffee and irritation in her wake.

The link room had techs darting between stations like agitated ants while Irene beelined for Damin’s unit, slapping controls awake with the heel of her hand. "That son of a bitch has screwed up this program enough," she announced to no one in particular.

Tristan sidled up beside Damin, whispering, "She only calls Quaritch ‘son of a bitch’ when she’s really pissed. Normally it’s ‘that armoured moron’ or—"

"Spellman!" Irene didn’t look up from the neural calibration display, her fingers flying across the interface. "Prep Sully’s unit. Standard— I don’t want him twitching like a damn seizure patient." 

Tristan snapped a mock salute and pivoted toward the med carts. Damin rolled closer, studying the biometric readouts flickering above his designated link pod. The vitals weren’t his, not yet, but the steady pulse and respiration matched his own resting rate.

Irene exhaled sharply through her nose. "Quaritch turned this place into an occupation," she muttered, stabbing at the touchscreen hard enough to make it wobble. "We were supposed to learn from them. Now? Half the clans won’t even let us within arrow-range of their damn homes."

Damin flexed his fingers against his armrests. "… So how’s this supposed to work?"

Irene stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray, exhaling sharply through her nose. "We've got a new face now." She turned abruptly toward Tristan, who straightened like a cadet on inspection day.

"You're fluent. You've studied the culture. Ergo—" She flicked her fingers at him, "— you're non-threatening. The Omatikaya might actually tolerate you long enough to get us back to the damn negotiating table before this whole shitshow collapses into genocide."

Tristan blinked. "That… is failing spectacularly as a pep talk."

In the background, Damin grunted as he hauled himself from his wheelchair into the link pod's gel-cushioned seat, his legs dragging lifelessly behind him. "How exactly do we contact these people? Smoke signals?"

Irene whirled on him. "You don't. If they see us taking samples properly—" Her glare could've melted titanium, "—respecting the forest instead of bulldozing it like some trigger-happy jarhead—"

"Or they skin us alive and turn my face into a fucking drum," Damin muttered, lowering the sensor array over his chest.

Irene slammed the clamshell shut with enough force to make the techs wince. "Keep your mouth shut and let Tristan do the talking," her voice filtered through the pod's speakers, tinny with static. Then… darkness.

The Samson's turbines screamed as it banked hard over a sea of emerald canopy, its shadow darting across the treetops like a startled stingbat. Through the open side doors, pandoran wind roared, thick with the scent of pollen and something metallic, like lightning about to strike.

Ewan Wainfleet braced against his door gun, his exo-mask's filters clicking with each breath as he scanned the cloud-wreathed cliffs.

Across the cabin, Damin's bare blue feet rested on the skids, his toes flexing unconsciously against the rushing air. The sensation of legs, real, working legs, still sent a disorienting thrill through his nervous system every time.

The Samson’s shadow skimmed across the river like a hunting ikran, its turbines kicking up spray as Ramona banked hard to follow the winding waterway. Over the intercom, her voice crackled: "Sturmbeest herd, one o’clock."

Tristan practically vaulted over Damin’s knees to press against the open doorway, his tail twitching with excitement. "Look! Look!"

Damin twisted in time to see the herd— six-legged behemoths the size of tanks, their armoured hides glistening with river water as they surged across the shallows. The lead bull bellowed.

"Bull, six cows," Irene muttered, leaning between the pilots’ seats, her cigarette clamped between her teeth. "Juveniles at three o’clock."  

Tristan squinted. "Dorsal armor’s red, yeah?"  

Irene nodded. "Mm. Good eye!"  

The herd vanished into the undergrowth just as the Samson jolted upward, Ramona wrenching the stick back to avoid a sudden updraft. The horizon tipped violently, and for a second, the world was nothing but sky before the helicopter righted itself.

Below, a lake erupted into motion as hundreds of winged creatures took flight, their four violet wings skimming the water’s surface so close their reflections blurred into them.  

"Tetrapterons!" Tristan shouted, grinning like a kid at a fireworks show.  

Then the ground dropped away, nothing but air beneath them as the Samson crested a waterfall that plunged hundreds of feet into a mist-shrouded gorge. Ramona rolled the ship into the drop like she was lining up a strafing run.  

Wainfleet whooped. "Yo Chacón! Get some!"

Tristan made a strangled noise, his fingers digging into his pants.

The meadow was small, barely larger than the Samson’s rotor diameter, ferns flattening in concentric circles as the ship settled onto the spongy earth. Damin yanked the door gun free, hefting the massive weapon like it weighed nothing in his avatar’s grip.  

Wainfleet hit the ground beside him, his carbine sweeping the tree line. "Clear left."  

"Clear right," Damin rumbled, his ears twitching at the distant screech of something unseen.  

Irene jogged forward, her long legs eating up the distance to the cockpit in seconds. She motioned sharply at Ramona through the windshield— kill the engines. The turbines whined down, leaving only the buzz of Pandora’s unseen fauna.  

"You." Irene jabbed a finger at Wainfleet. "Stay with the ship." Wainfleet smirked, slinging his rifle. "Whatever you say, Doc." She turned to Damin, nostrils flaring. "One idiot with a gun’s enough."  

Wainfleet’s laugh followed them into the jungle. "Have fun out there!"

The forest swallowed them whole, its cyan gloom pressing tight as a burial shroud. Every breath tasted thick with spores and something muskier, animal sweat, maybe, or the slow decay of leaves fermenting underfoot.

Above, a prolemuris shrieked, its six-limbed silhouette flickering through shafts of amber light as it vaulted between branches. Damin’s grip on the rifle tightened, his knuckles bleaching white against the composite stock.

"Relax, jarhead," Irene muttered, shoving past him with the effortless grace of someone who’d spent years navigating these roots. "You’re making me twitchy."

A vine recoiled at her touch, tendrils curling inward like startled fingers. Damin watched it writhe, his pulse hammering. Nothing here behaved like Earth flora, no passive greenery, only predators and prey. He exhaled sharply when something brushed his calf, only to find a fern frond slowly uncoiling around his ankle.

The trail steepened without warning, forcing them to scramble up a moss-slick embankment. Tristan slipped, his tail lashing for balance before he caught himself on a root. "They’re here," he panted, grinning when Damin shot him a look. "The Omatikaya. Watching us right now."

Damin spun, scanning the undergrowth. Shadows pooled between towering trunks, deep enough to hide a dozen hunters. His nape prickled. "Asshat…" He muttered.

The school emerged like a mirage, weathered timber ribs jutting through a skin of strangler vines, its thatched roof sagging. Tristan hesitated at the threshold. "How do we—"

"They know," Irene said, kicking aside a rotting textbooks, its pages disintegrated into mulchy pulp.

Inside, the air was stale with the scent of mildew and an equivalent of guano, or at least that’s what he thought it was. Damin’s boots crunched over brittle leaves, the sound obscenely loud.

Behind him, Irene rummaged through a warped cabinet, tossing Tristan a soil probe in a yellow case. "And don’t drop the calibrator this time."

Something rustled overhead. Damin looked up to find stingbats clustered in the rafters, their membranous wings twitching. One hissed, baring needle teeth.

Irene bent, retrieving a waterlogged copy of The Lorax. She smoothed its warped cover with her thumb before slotting it back onto a shelf. "They knock them down," she said, more to herself than anyone. "I keep putting them back."

Tristan frowned. "Why don’t the kids—"

"They learned enough." Irene’s voice went flinty.

Damin’s attention snagged on the blackboard. He crossed to it, tracing the pockmarks stippling its surface. The holes were too precise, too evenly spaced for anything but automatic gunfire.

Damin turned from the bullet-riddled blackboard. "What happened here?"  

Irene didn't look up from the soil probe she was calibrating. "You gonna help with this gear? We've got a lot to do." She snapped the device shut with more force than necessary and shoved past him into the humid afternoon light.  

Damin watched her go, the stiff set of her shoulders, the way her tail lashed once before stilling. He grabbed a pack off the floor and started jamming equipment into it, the straps biting into his palm as he cinched it too tight. Outside, the rainforest hummed with unseen life, a constant reminder of how exposed they were.  

Irene's blue fingers brushed away a layer of loamy soil, exposing a tangle of root tendrils glistening with bioluminescent sap. "See, right here," she muttered, her voice low enough that the forest didn't swallow it whole. "Where the roots interact."  

Tristan crouched beside her, his device emitting a soft ping as it scanned the network. "Symbiotic exchange?"  

"More like a ceasefire," Irene said, extracting a sliver of tissue with her needle probe.

Damin, already bored, scuffed his boot against the moss and scanned the tree line. A glade ahead shimmered with movement, shoulder-high spiral plants, their fronds coiled tight like unfurling fists. He drifted toward them, rifle slung loose over his shoulder.  

The first helicordian recoiled with a wet SHTOONK! vanishing into the earth before he even registered the motion. Damin blinked. He touched another— SHTOONK!— and another— SHTOONK!— until the whole colony collapsed in a chain reaction, the ground swallowing them whole.  

Then a hammerhead titanothere emerged from the disturbed soil like a submarine breaching, its armored head swinging low. Six legs, each thicker than Damin’s torso, churned the earth as it swung its three-meter-wide skull toward him, nostrils flaring.

Damin's rifle was up before he'd fully processed the creature's size. "Don't shoot!" Irene's voice crackled through his throat mic. "You'll just piss it off!"  

"It's already pissed off!" Damin hissed, backing up as the titanothere pawed the ground, its bellow vibrating through his ribs. "That's a threat display," Irene snapped. "Do not run or it'll charge!"

Damin's fingers flexed around the rifle stock. "So what do I—"  

"Hold your ground!"  

The hammerhead charged.  

Damin didn't think. He screamed,, arms spread wide, and ran straight at it. The titanothere skidded to a halt, its oversized bleat of confusion almost comical. Damin grinned, adrenaline singing in his veins. "Oh yeah! Who's bad?!" He took another step forward, tail lashing. "That's right, moth—"  

A guttural snarl unzipped the air behind him and Damin spun.  

The thanator was already airborne, a black tsunami of muscle and armoured plates, its distensible jaws gaping wide enough to swallow his head whole. It landed between him and the fleeing titanothere with a crunch of splintering saplings, its roar peeling bark from the trees.  

Damin's throat mic crackled.  

"Run," Irene said, panicked. "Definitely run!"

Damin bolted as the thanator leapt after him, muscles coiled like steel springs, claws carving furrows in the earth where his heels had been half a second earlier. He launched himself between two massive trunks, forcing the beast to wrench its armoured bulk sideways with a screech of frustration.

Roots tore like paper under its momentum as Damin scrambled up, around, over a tangled knot of vegetation, each breath razor-edged in his throat. Claws slashed the air behind him, exploding bark off a trunk in a shower of splinters that peppered his shoulders. 

The world narrowed to the hammering of his pulse, the burn in his lungs, the thanator's fetid breath hot on his nape. With a rippling snarl, the beast gathered itself and sprang again, blacking out the sun.

Damin dove under a massive root system an instant before— CRASH!— kindling rained around him as six-inch claws reduced the arching roots above to matchsticks.

Wooden shrapnel stung his cheeks as he rolled, belly-crawling through the debris. Glistening jaws smashed and snapped against the barrier trunks, sending chunks of wood flying like artillery shrapnel. Spittle sprayed across Damin's face, rank and metallic, as those dagger teeth gnashed inches from his scalp. 

Rolling onto his back, Daimn fired his AR point-blank into the thanator's gaping maw, only for the rifle to be snatched from his hands as the beast whipped its head sideways.

The creature screeched, an ungodly wail of pain and rage that vibrated in Damin's molars, and ripped the entire trunk free with a sickening crack of parting cellulose.

Damin scrambled backward on elbows and heels, but the thanator was already lunging, glossy black jaws plunging downward like a guillotine. They snapped shut around his backpack straps, yanking him skyward as the beast shook him like a terrier with a rat. 

"SONOFA—!" Damin's fingers clawed at the quick-release buckle. The strap gave with a metallic ping, sending him tumbling free just as the thanator's crushing bite reduced his pack to crumpled alloy and shredded fabric.

He hit the ground running, boots skidding on wet loam before finding purchase. Behind him, the thanator bellowed, a sound that shook rain from the canopy, and gave chase— a glistening black tornado splintering saplings in its wake. 

Damin's vision tunneled. Trees blurred past. Something blue and wet glinted ahead— water. He poured every ounce of strength into a final sprint and dove outward, arms outstretched… just as the thanator's jaws snapped shut on empty air behind him.

Then he was plummeting, wind screaming in his ears, before slamming into the river's skin with a slap that drove the breath from his lungs. 

The current seized him instantly, tumbling him like laundry in a spin cycle. Through the churn, he saw the thanator leap down after him, bounding from rock to rock with nightmarish agility.

It swiped at the water like a grizzly fishing for salmon— FWHOOSH!— black claws slashing past Damin's face amid the turbulent bubbles. He ducked deeper, ribs scraping stone, and the river rewarded him with a mouthful of iron-tinted water. 

A new roar joined the chaos, not the thanator, but the throaty rumble of cascading water. The waterfall's edge loomed, frothing white and terrible.

Damin had half a second to suck in a desperate breath before the current yanked him over the brink. The thanator made one final, futile swipe from its perch, claws skimming the spray where Damin's fingers had been, before he vanished down the thundering cataract's throat.

Damin's lungs burned like he'd inhaled liquid fire. He clung to the fallen tree, fingers digging into the slick bark as he hacked up river water.

The thanator's roar reverberated through his skull, closer than he expected. Too close. He rolled onto his stomach and dragged himself along the trunk toward the bank, every muscle screaming.

Damin spun, spear half-formed in his grip, scanning the canopy. Nothing but leaves trembling in the humid breeze. He exhaled sharply and resumed whittling the sapling's end to a jagged point, his ears straining for any sound beyond the jungle's constant drone.

Nothing moved.

He exhaled through his nose and pressed forward, spear tip probing the gloom ahead like a blind man's cane.  His bare feet sank into loam still warm from filtered sunlight. 

Chapter Text

Above him, Mo'at shifted her weight by millimeters, her toes curling around the branch. The Avatar’s blue skin glistened with river water, his strange clothes clinging to the hard planes of his torso. Her nostrils flared at the scent of him, chemical and wrong, like metal left in rain. 

Her arrow tracked the nape of his neck as he passed beneath her perch. The fletching brushed her lower lip, tasted of cured sinew and the ghost of poison. Her draw tightened—

A woodsprite spiraled down, its cilia brushing the arrowhead with impossible delicacy. Mo'at's breath caught. The creature glowed in the sunlight, bioluminescent veins flickering in a pattern.

The arrow trembled in her grip. Below, the sky-person stiffened, his ears swiveling toward a sound she hadn't made. 

Mo'at lowered her bow by increments, muscles coiled to spring should he look up. The woodsprite drifted away, its glow fading into the canopy's gloom. She watched it go, then studied the intruder again, his clumsy steps, the white-knuckled grip on his crude weapon. Not a hunter. Prey.

The Samson's turbines howled as Ramona banked hard, the setting sun staining the cabin's interior bloody. Irene braced herself against the doorframe, her knuckles white against the metal. Below, the jungle sprawled in deepening shadows, a living thing swallowing Damin whole.

"One more pass," Irene growled.

Ramona shook her head, fingers dancing across the console. "Fuel's low and Quaritch'll have my wings if we break curfew." She thumbed the intercom. "Calling it, guys. Night ops are a no-go."

Tristan slumped against his harness. "He's got training. He'll—"

"He'll die," Irene snapped. Her breath fogged the plexiglass as she stared down at the darkening canopy. Somewhere beneath those writhing branches, Damin was breathing too hard, bleeding too much, being hunted by things with too many teeth.

The Samson banked sharply, Polyphemus swelling in the windshield like a baleful eye. Ramona didn't look back as she punched the throttle. "Sunrise. First light."

Irene didn't answer. The forest swallowed the last of the light behind them.

"… But he won’t last to sunrise."

Damin's spear tip caught the fading glow as he whirled, his makeshift torch casting wild shadows across the grasping vines. The laugh came again, closer this time, a sound like bones rattling in a tin can. Sweat slicked his grip around the sapling shaft.

Something moved in the canopy.

A viperwolf dropped onto the trail behind him with the silence of spilled oil, its six limbs flexing as it landed. Damin's torchlight caught the nightmare geometry of its face, too many teeth, too many eyes, all gleaming with predatory intelligence.

"Fuck. Fuck." Damin's whisper was raw as he fumbled the waterproof match against the striker. The third try caught, flame licked up the sap-soaked fabric wrapped around his spear, casting shuddering light across the trail. Shadows leaped like living things, revealing nothing but more shadows beyond.

The laugh came again, closer now. Not from ahead, but above. Damin jerked his torch upward just as something sleek and black melted between branches, its six-limbed gait unhurried. Another flicker of movement to his left, a viperwolf pacing him at ground level, its too-many eyes reflecting the firelight in sickly green pinpricks.

Damin tightened his grip on the torch-spear, backing toward the nearest massive tree trunk. His bare shoulder blades hit bark still warm from the vanished sun. 

Flank left. Rear clear. Two overhead— no, three. His Marine training cataloged threats even as his pulse hammered against his ribs. The pack was testing him, probing for weakness. He bared his teeth, torch held outward in a shaking arc. "Back the fuck off!"

The torchlight carved frantic arcs through the blackness as Damin bolted, his breath sawing through clenched teeth. The viperwolves' chittering barks ricocheted between trees, left, right, everywhere.

He hit the streambank at a sprint, barely registering the fallen trunk bridging the water before his feet found purchase on the moss-slick bark. Three bounding steps and he was across, only to skid to a halt so sudden his tail whipped around for balance.

The torch's flicker caught emerald pinpricks ahead. Not reflections. Eyes.

Damin spun, too late. The pack had him encircled, their chitinous hides drinking in the firelight. Six limbs each, moving with unsettling synchronicity. One darted in from behind, Damin whirled, thrusting the torch into its muzzle.

The stench of burning chitin filled the air as the beast yelped and veered away. Another lunged; his spear found meat. It snarled, retreating to bare needle teeth set in corpse-pale gums.

Fear evaporated like morning dew. Damin bared his fangs. "Don't got all goddamn night!" He swung the torch in a wide arc. "Come on! Come on!"

They came in a snarling wave. Damin's spear cracked down on a spined skull, the shaft broke across another's ribs. A shadow blurred at his periphery, jaws clamped on his forearm. White-hot pain lanced up his nerves as he slashed blindly with the knife. The blade bit deep; the wolf released with a shriek.

Then the torch was gone, kicked into the underbrush during the struggle.

Darkness.

Panting. The wet click of jaws.

A weight hit his back, claws raked his shoulders, Damin rolled, driving his elbow into something leathery. He scrambled upright just as three shadows converged. The lead wolf's leap carried it straight for his throat—

THUNK.

An arrow sprouted from its chest. The corpse collapsed onto him, warm blood soaking his tunic. Damin shoved it aside in time to see the blue blur descend from the trees, Mo'at's second arrow already nocked. The bowstring sang; another wolf crumpled mid-leap.

Then she was there, vaulting over him like he was terrain. Her bow became a staff, CRACK, the sound of chitin fracturing under impact. A wolf tackled her; she rolled with the motion, coming up astride its back. Moonlight flashed on her knife as it plunged hilt-deep between armored plates.

Damin barely registered the next attacker— instinct had him catching its throat as fangs snapped inches from his face. The thing thrashed, its hind claws scoring his thighs. His vision greyed at the edges from the strain—

CRACK.

Mo'at's bow shattered across two wolves' skulls. The survivors faltered— she roared, a sound that shouldn't come from a humanoid throat, and they broke.

Silence, save for Damin's ragged breathing and the dying twitches of the wolf beneath him. He released its throat, watching the life leave its too-many eyes.

Mo'at stood silhouetted against the bioluminescent undergrowth, her tail lashing like a metronome. She didn't spare him a glance as she retrieved the smoldering torch and plunged it into the stream with a hiss.

"Wait— don't—" Damin blinked as the torch's afterimage faded from his vision, and suddenly the darkness wasn't dark at all. The jungle glowed around him— bioluminescent constellations swirling across fungal caps, vines dripping liquid emerald along their edges, even the soil exhaling faint cobalt breaths where his knees pressed into it.

His fingers scrambled for the broken spear shaft as his pupils dilated, drinking in the alien radiance. 

Mo'at knelt beside the shuddering viperwolf, its six limbs twitching in erratic circles as dark blood bubbled from its chest wound. The creature's whimpers were thin, desperate things that made Damin's gut clench. She pulled her knife free with a wet schlick, then murmured something low and melodic—

"Oeru txoa livu. Ma oeyä tsmukan, ma oeyä tsmukan"— before slicing its throat in one smooth motion. The paws stilled. Her fingers lingered on its brow, tracing the ridge between its too-many eyes with something like grief. 

Damin swallowed. "Look, I know you probably don't understand this, but... thanks." He gestured at the other corpses. "I owe you." 

Mo'at didn't glance up. She moved to the next wolf, yanking her arrow from its heart with a practiced twist before folding over it, palms pressed together. It was a prayer, if that's what it was. "Hu nawma sa'nok tivul ngeyä tirea." 

"I'd be screwed if you hadn't—" 

She stood abruptly and strode into the undergrowth. 

"Hey— wait!" Damin lurched after her, vines snapping against his shins. "Where are you— slow down a second, will you? I just want to—" His hand closed on her shoulder. 

WHACK. The bowstock cracked against his temple hard enough to send him sprawling. Stars burst behind his eyelids, real ones this time, and when they cleared, Mo'at loomed over him, her braids swinging like pendulums. The bowtip pressed against his Adam's apple. 

"Don't thank!" The English words came out guttural, sharp with disgust. "This is sad. Very sad, only." Damin rubbed his jaw. "Okay, shit— sorry! Whatever I did—" 

She jabbed the bow toward the carnage. "All this! Your fault!" 

"They attacked me!" Damin spat blood onto the glowing moss. "How'm I the bad guy here?" 

The bow dug deeper. Mo'at's nostrils flared. "You are like baby! Noise, no knowing, don’t know what to do!" Her free hand mimed clumsy flailing. "You not belong here. All you—" She swept her arm out into the horizon. "Only come, make problems. Only!"

Damin got to his feet slowly, keeping his palms raised. The bow was still trained on his chest. "Okay, fine," he rasped. "You love your little forest friends. So why not just let them kill my ass? What's the thinking?"  

Mo’at's nostrils flared. For a long moment, she looked away, then, reluctantly, her eyes met his for the first time. Those golden pupils dilated slightly, swallowing the bioluminescence. "Why save you?" she hissed.  

Damin wiped blood from his lip. "Yeah. Why save me?"  

Mo’at exhaled sharply through her nose. "Strong heart," she admitted grudgingly. "No fear." Then she leaned in close enough for him to smell the crushed leaves in her braids. "But stupid! Ignorant, like child!"  

She turned abruptly and stalked off, leaping onto a massive root that curved upward like a natural bridge. Damin scrambled after her, his bare feet finding purchase on the slick bark. He hadn’t realised until now how high they were, the forest floor yawned beneath them, a dizzying drop into glowing underbrush.  

"If I’m so ignorant," he called, jogging to keep up, "maybe you should teach me." Mo’at didn’t break stride. "Sky people can not learn. They do not See." She sprang to another root without glancing back.  

Damin followed, surprised when his legs obeyed. "Whoooa—!" He caught his balance, then grinned despite himself. "Then teach me to… See."

Mo’at stopped so suddenly he nearly collided with her. "Nobody can teach!" She whirled, tail lashing. "Tse’a comes, or does not!" Then she was moving again, her gait effortless where his was still stumbling.  

The gorge opened beneath them, a vast, misty chasm where waterfalls ribboned silver in Polyphemus’ light. Vines thick as his thigh hung like rigging, alive with darting stingbats.  

"Slow down!" Damin panted. "Look, we just got off on the wrong—" His foot slipped and he glanced down. "Fuck." The drop was sheer, but Mo’at didn’t slow.  

"I’m Damin," he called, edging forward. "Damin Sul—" A vine caught his spear, yanking it sideways. The sudden spin sent him teetering over empty air. "Whoooaaa—SHIT!"  

Mo’at’s hand clamped his bicep like a vise, hauling him back. The spear tumbled end over end before vanishing into the river far below. "Fì’u ke lu txoa!" she snarled, shaking him. "Stupid!"

Damin swallowed. "I need your help."  

Mo’at shoved him toward the far side. "No, kehe, no, You go back."  

Then, movement. Damin looked up as a cluster of woodsprites spiraled down from the canopy. They glowed gently, their cilia brushing his cheeks like inquisitive fingers. More came, alighting on his shoulders, arms, even the tip of his twitching tail.  

Mo’at froze as her lips parted slightly. Damin held still, half-expecting pain, but the sprites’ touch was feather-light. "What are they?"  

Mo’at’s voice was hushed. "Atokirina’… Seeds of the Great Tree. Pure spirits, very pure."  

One landed on his palm, its glow throbbing in time with his pulse. Then— Whoosh. The sprites scattered like embers in a sudden wind, gone as quickly as they came.

Mo’at seized his wrist. "Come!" She dragged him forward, her grip iron.  

Damin barely had time to register her expression, somewhere between awe and terror, before she broke into a sprint, pulling him deeper into the glowing dark.

The moss exploded beneath Damin's feet like liquid emerald, each step sending concentric rings of bioluminescence pulsing outward. He laughed, couldn't help it, as the entire forest floor shimmered in his wake, fungal tendrils recoiling with electric blue sparks where Mo'at's toes brushed them.

Ahead, the waterfall pooled into a mirror so perfect it doubled the stars, their reflections shattered only when Damin's foot broke the surface tension with a silver splash.

"Wait— your name!" Damin panted, vaulting over a root that glowed like neon tubing. "You know mine, seems fair—"

Mo'at's braids whipped behind her as she disappeared around a curtain of hanging vines.

Damin ducked under—

WHOOSH-WHOOSH.

Something hard and woven cracked against his shins. The bola ropes cinched tight around his calves before he registered the pain. Momentum carried him forward—

"Gah—!"

He hit the underbrush back-first, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs in a ragged gasp. Above him, the vines swayed gently, their bioluminescent tips dripping luminescent sap like slow-motion fireworks.

The direhorses came out of nowhere.

Six-legged nightmares armored in segmented chitin, their hooves throwing up clods of glowing earth as they skidded to a halt around him. Damin rolled onto his side just in time to see the lead rider leap from their mount, a Na'vi male with three parallel scars raking his chest. The butt of his spear slammed into the dirt inches from Damin's nose.

The direhorse's antennae twitched violently as Ateyo yanked his neural queue free, but Damin barely had time to register the biological connection before rough hands seized his arms, hauling him upright.

"Easy—!" His protest died as a spear tip pricked his ribs. Around him, the hunters' queues swayed like serpents, still connected to their mounts. One stallion snorted, its compound eyes reflecting Damin's face a hundred times over as its rider guided it with nothing but thought.

Mo'at's tail lashed as she stepped between him and Ateyo's raised bow. "Ma Ateyo! Kempe si nga?! Poan lu ma spe’etu! (Ateyo, what are you doing?! He is my captive!)"  

Ateyo swung off his direhorse with fluid grace, and he was younger than Damin originally thought, mid-twenties maybe, but carried himself like seasoned warriors Damin had known, the kind who moved like they owned the ground beneath them.  

"Fayvrrtep fìtsenge lu kxanì!" (These demons are forbidden here!) Ateyo snarled, fingers tightening around his bowstring. The direhorse with him stamped, mirroring his agitation. "Oe ay tspang na kan sänumvi te aylahe!" (I will kill this one as a message to the others!)

He turned to bolt—  

— and froze.  

Na’vi hunters melted from the foliage, bows drawn, spears leveled. Their queues glowed where they connected to their mounts, leaving their hands free to aim. One wrong move, and he’d be a damn pincushion.  

Mo’at lunged between them, her braids whipping like live wires. "Aungia lolu! Tsahìkur txele lu!" (There has been a sign! This is a matter for the Tsahìk!)

Ateyo’s jaw clenched, frustration with her as much as the situation. His nostrils flared as he exhaled sharply through his nose, then he turned and remounted his direhorse with a growl. "Pot zamunge!" (Bring him!)

Hands seized Damin’s arms, hauling him forward. The hunters encircled him, spears at his back, as they shoved him down the trail. Ahead, Ateyo rode stiff-backed, his mount’s six legs moving in perfect synchrony.  

The forest thickened, then opened as Damin’s breath hitched.  

Hometree loomed like a living skyscraper, its trunk wider than any sequoia, roots the size of highways twisting into the earth. Bioluminescent veins were beneath its bark, casting the clearing in an ethereal glow. Rope bridges spanned the lower branches, swinging with the weight of Na’vi scrambling to get a look at the newcomer.  

"Jesus," Damin muttered.

Chapter Text

Ateyo's direhorse reared as they passed beneath the first arching roots, its front hooves striking sparks from the bioluminescent fungi coating the pillars. His warning cry echoed upward— three sharp ululations that sent Na'vi scattering from rope bridges overhead, their shadows flickering across the cavernous interior like startled birds.

Damin's breath caught. 

The Commons yawned before him, a living amphitheater carved by centuries of roots and rainwater. Cookfires dotted the packed-earth floor, their smoke curling toward the distant canopy where sturmbeest-bladder lanterns bobbed like jellyfish in an inverted ocean.

Children clung to their mothers' legs, huge eyes reflecting the firelight as they stared at the alien stumbling between armed hunters. One toddler wailed, a sound that snapped through the murmuring crowd like a gunshot. 

Then he saw the skull.

Mounted on a towering totem, its empty sockets stared down at him with predatory stillness. Damin's throat tightened. Whatever this creature had been in life, its death had been ceremonial, the bone polished to a dull sheen, adorned with intricate carvings and woven garlands of luminous vines.

Tsengue emerged from the shadows beneath it, his thanator-claw mantle rattling. The Clan Leader's nostrils flared as he stopped just beyond spear-range, his gaze locking onto Damin's with unsettling intensity. 

"Fìswiräti, ngal pelun molunge fìtseng?" 

Mo'at stepped forward, her braids swaying. "Oel pot tspìmìyang, tsakrr za'u aungia ta Eywa." 

Damin didn't need a translator to recognize fury in Tsengue's answering snarl as the Clan Leader jabbed a claw-tipped finger at him. "Poltxe oe, san zene kea uniltìranyu, ke ziva'u fìtseng!" 

A murmur rippled through the crowd. 

Mo'at straightened. "Father—" 

Damin blinked. "Father?"

"— many atokirina came to this alien." 

Tsengue's tail lashed once, violently, before stilling. Damin swallowed. "Uh. Good to meet you, sir." He extended his hand. 

The reaction was instantaneous, hunters tackled him from three directions, their shouts overlapping as speartips pricked his ribs. Damin hit the dirt hard, his vision swimming with firelight and furious faces. 

"STEP BACK!"

Every head turned and there she was. Oma stood on a spiraling root twenty feet above them, her silhouette backlit by drifting lanterns. Even at this distance, Damin could see the intricate beadwork of her mantle, the way it shimmered as she began her descent. 

Mo'at knelt instantly. "Mother is Tsahik," she murmured as Oma passed. "She interprets Eywa's will." Damin spat dirt. "Who the hell's Eywa?" 

Oma circled him slowly, her toes leaving prints in the soft earth. Her fingers, cold as metal, lifted his neural queue with a clinical touch. The crowd watched as she examined the limp appendage, her nostrils flaring at its scent. 

Then, without warning, she seized his jaw, forcing his mouth open to inspect his teeth. 

Damin gagged. "Lady, I bathe—"

Oma released him abruptly.

Oma's fingers hovered near Damin's lips, the thorn still glistening red between them. "What are you called?"

"Damin," he said, then corrected himself— "Damiano. Damin for short. Sully."

The thorn flashed. Pain bloomed across his chest as Oma struck with viper-quick precision. Damin hissed through his teeth, glancing down to see crimson welling in a thin line. Oma collected the blood on her fingertips, rubbing them together before touching the droplets to her tongue. Her nostrils flared.

"Pelun nga za'u fìtseng? Why come to Omatikaya?"

Damin swallowed. "To learn."

Oma's lips pressed into a thin line. "We have try to teach Sky People before. Hard to fill cup which is already full."

"My cup's empty," Damin said, forcing a smirk. "Just ask Doctor Augustine. I’m no scientist."

Oma tilted her head. "Tute lu nga peu? What are you?"

Damin hesitated. "Don’t know. Was a Marine— warrior. Of the Jarhead clan."

Ateyo barked a laugh, slapping his thigh. "Tsamsiyu pak! Pot tsun oe tspivang nìftue!" (A warrior! I could kill him easily!)

Tsengue’s voice cut through the jeers. "Kehe! Fìpo lu 'awvea, uniltìranyu-tsamsiyu, a tsole'a awngal." (No! This is the first warrior dreamwalker we have seen. We need to learn more about him.)

Damin glanced between them. "What’s going on? What are they saying?"

Oma turned to Mo’at. "Ma'ite, awngeyä fya'ori zene nga sänume sivi poru... fte tsivun pivlltxe sì tivìran na ayoeng." (Daughter. You will teach him our way, to speak and walk as we do.)

Mo’at’s tail lashed like a whip. "Oeru pelun? Ke lu muiä!" (Why me? That's not fair!)

Oma’s eyes hardened. "Fkol pole'un fì'ut!" (It is decided!)

Mo’at’s shoulders stiffened, her glare shifting to Damin like he’d orchestrated this. He held up his hands. "What’d I do?" 
Oma’s voice softened, barely. "My daughter teach you. Learn well, Daminsully." Her gaze flicked to the hunters. "We see if insanity can be cured."

Mo’at exhaled sharply through her nose before dipping her head. Oma turned away, her mantle swirling like a living thing.

Damin grinned. "So we good? You and me—"

Mo’at seized his arm, yanking him toward the nearest root-path. "Do not speak!"

Damin stumbled after her, the crowd parting like water before a ship’s prow.

The root-path spiraled upward, each step sending fresh aches through Damin's calves. He'd never appreciated gravity before… not until Mo'at forced him to climb Hometree barefoot.

His toes curled around knotted bark, the loincloth's rough fibers chafing his thighs with every movement. Below, the Commons dwindled into a tapestry of firelight and shadow, the scent of roasting meat and something pungently herbal rising with the smoke.

The second level spread before them like a living banquet hall. Na'vi sat in concentric circles around central cook pits, their tails flicking lazily as they passed woven-leaf platters hand to hand. Every head turned as Damin emerged from the root tunnel.

"Don't get up," he muttered, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist.

Mo'at strode forward without looking back, her braids swaying. She returned with an armful of broad leaves heaped with food, dropping them before him with a thud that sent juices sloshing over the edges. "You never told me your name," Damin said, poking at a lump of purple thingies.

"Mo'at te Pohatsua Oma'ite."

"Okay…"He dragged the syllables out. "Again. A whole lot slower."

She bared her teeth. "Mo'at. Mo. At." Damin grinned, recognising the trap. "Mo-at." He popped a thingy into his mouth— bitter, with an aftertaste like burnt honey. "That's nice, Mo-at."

Across the circle, Ateyo's smirk glinted in the firelight as he leaned toward Oma. "Fayhetuwong fmi Na'vina livam... Slä ke tsun." (These aliens try to look like people… but they can’t.)

Oma's nostrils flared as she studied Damin. "Oeru po snumìna latsam… Peyä menarisì nìhawng lu hì'i." (He seems dim to me… And his eyes are too small.)

Mo'at jabbed a claw at the food. "Take portions. Not all."

"Your mother likes me," Damin said, grabbing fruit. "I can tell."

Oma whispered something to Tsengue, her gaze never leaving Damin. The Clan Leader's tail lashed once before he nodded, fingers tightening around his carved eating knife.

Damin crunched into a white, segmented thing, juice burst across his tongue, briny and rich. "These rock. What are they?" Mo'at's ear twitched. "Teylu."

"Yeah?" He sucked meat from the carapace. "And that means?"

She watched him lick his fingers. "You call... beetle larvae."

Damin froze mid-chew. Across the circle, Ateyo's shoulders shook with laughter. The larvae crunched between Damin's molars like popcorn shells. He swallowed hard. "Tastes like chicken."

Mo'at's eyes narrowed. "What is... chicken?"

"Ah, nevermind…"

Damin blanched as Mo’at dumped another writhing handful of teylu onto his leaf. Her nostrils flared, challenge issued. Across the firepit, Ateyo’s smirk deepened.

Damin exhaled sharply through his nose, then grabbed a fistful and shoved it into his mouth. The larvae burst between his molars with a sound like wet twigs snapping.

"Mmf— damn fine teylu," he managed around the crunching. Wiping juice from his chin, he flashed Mo’at a grin. "Tastes like my grandma’s. Swear to God."

Ateyo’s tail lashed as he leaned toward Oma. "Oe plltxe poe tam tspang po." (I say she will kill him.)

Mo’at ignored him, studying Damin with narrowed eyes. "Your grandmother ate teylu?"

"Nah." Damin licked his fingers, savouring the briny aftertaste. "But she made grits that could strip paint. Same principle."

The hammock swayed gently with every shift of Damin's weight, its woven fibers creaking like old bones. Around him, the third level breathed, soft snores, the rustle of limbs against sleeping mats, the occasional murmur of a dreaming Na'vi. Bioluminescent insects drifted lazily through the air, their pulsing lights casting fleeting shadows across Mo’at’s face where she lay curled nearby.

She cracked one eye open, catching him staring. "Sleep, dreamwalker. Now." she hissed, tail flicking irritably.

Damin grinned, rolling onto his back. Above, the trunk’s inner ribs arched like cathedral rafters, veined with the same eerie glow as the forest floor.

Something about the rhythm of it, the slow glow of light, the synchronised rise and fall of distant chests, lulled him into a trance. His eyelids grew heavy—

Pain exploded across his cheek.

"Wake up, jarhead. Yeah, yeah, come back to, Marine."

Damin gasped while Irene’s face swam into focus, her cigarette dangling precariously from her lips as she loomed over him. Behind her, Vivaan adjusted neural readouts with frantic precision while Tristan hovered like an anxious nurse.

"Whuh—?" Damin slurred, his tongue thick in his mouth. The disconnect was violent, like being yanked from warm water into freezing air.

Irene snapped her fingers in front of his nose. "Welcome back to meatspace, Sleeping Beauty." She grabbed his chin, tilting his head to examine his pupils. "Christ, you were dug in like a tick. Vital signs spiked for eighteen minutes before we could pry you loose."

Damin swatted her hand away, blinking at the sterile white lights of the lab. His legs— his real legs— lay useless against the pod’s padding. The phantom sensation of bark beneath bare feet lingered stubbornly.

"Avatar’s safe?" Irene demanded, already reaching for her datapad.

Damin’s grin split his face. "Oh, you’re not gonna believe where I parked it."

Irene froze mid-scroll.

Tristan leaned in. "Please tell me you didn’t leave it in a—"

The commissary smelled like burnt coffee and synthetic eggs, the usual morning fug thickened by laughter as Irene stabbed her fork toward Damin. "— so Queen Bitch Oma )herself—" She mimed stabbing motion at her own chest, "— and this idiot grins while bleeding all over their holy ground."

Vivaan nearly spit out her orange juice. "You didn't?"

Damin leaned back, letting the cafeteria chair creak under his weight. "Eywa's version of a handshake, apparently. Maybe. I think."

He rubbed the faint scab visible above his tank neckline, the avatar's wound had transferred as a sort of psychosomatic bruise. "They like you better if you taste like iron? I guess?"

Across the table, Tristan's bacon snapped between his teeth with unnecessary violence. A lab tech clapped Damin's shoulder hard enough to slosh his coffee. "Natural charmer, huh?" 

Damin shrugged. "Not something you can teach."

Irene exhaled a smoke ring toward the ceiling tiles. "For reasons surpassing human understanding, the Omatikaya have chosen you." She ground her cigarette into her tray. "God help us all."

Quaritch's boots echoed across the ops center's steel flooring as she pivoted from the panoramic forest display. Her grin showed too many teeth. "Jarhead clan?" 

Damin rocked on his heels, hands jammed in pockets. "Worked better than 'dumbass scientists.'"

Quaritch barked a laugh, slapping the holotable hard enough to make the topographical shimmer. "That's how you seize the goddamn initiative! Wish I had ten more like you."

Marcus Selfridge didn't look up from his tablet. "Look, Sully—" He tapped the screen, sending a crimson overlay slithering across the map. A village icon directly over the deepest unobtanium signature. "Their mud huts are squatting on eighteen billion dollars' worth of paydirt." 

Damin's stomach dropped. "… Augustine know about this?"

Selfridge's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Oh, she knows. Next shuttle's got her name on it if she cockblocks." 

Quaritch's gauntleted finger traced the projected road, a crimson slash cutting through cyan foliage straight to Hometree's doorstep. "Three months till the dozers roll," she said softly. "Your job's to find the carrot." 

Damin swallowed. "And if there isn't one?"

Selfridge finally looked up, his reflection warped in the mineral density readouts. "Shareholders prefer relocation over... messy alternatives." He shrugged. "But not by much."

Quaritch's grin returned, feral in the hologlow. "Motherfucking guess who's handing out carrots, Sully."

Damin's "I'm on it" tasted like bile. The walk back to the lab felt longer than the hike through Pandora's undergrowth, he'd just been handed a deadline for betrayal.

Chapter Text

"Tsengue," Damin said without hesitation as Irene slapped another still image in front of him, this one showed the Olo'eyktan mid-hunt, his ceremonial knife glinting against Pandora's sun.

Another photo.

"Oma." He tapped the Tsahik's stern face, recognising the distinctive beadwork of her mantle even in the grainy surveillance shot. Irene grunted approval, flipping to the next.

"Ateyo." The warrior's smirk was unmistakable. "Asshole."

Tristan snorted coffee through his nose as Damin rolled into the link room, the rest trailing behind. "At least you're paying attention to something besides Mo'at's—"

"Tail?" Damin grinned, leveraging himself from wheelchair to link couch with practiced ease. "It's very... expressive." Irene slammed the control panel harder than necessary. "Focus, children. Eywa?"

Damin waved a hand. "Yeah, yeah, Great Mother, circle of life, all that Disney shit." He winced as the neural jacks hissed into place. "Who's got a date with the chief's daughter?"

"Not you," Irene snapped, "If you keep acting like a horny recruit." Her fingers flew across the interface. "Mo'at was my best student. Her and Nguzär."

Damin stilled. "… I… didn’t meet a sister."

"Because she's dead." Irene's cigarette bobbed as she spoke. Ah, fuck, now Damin felt like an absolute asshole. Vivaan interrupted them with a sharp tone, the link was ready. Irene lowered the biosensor array over Damin's chest with more gentleness than usual. "Don't do anything unusually stupid today." The clamshell hissed shut before he could ask about the sister.

Damin blinked awake to dappled sunlight filtering through Hometree’s cathedral-like canopy. His Avatar’s chest rose and fell, alive, breathing, real.

The village smelled of smoked fish and crushed herbs, the sound of loud laughter and the rhythmic thunk of pestles against stone everywhere. Damin walked past a group of girls weaving baskets, their fingers dancing through reeds while singing.

They paused mid-song as he passed, yellow eyes tracking him with unabashed curiosity before bursting into giggles and resuming their work. A toddler clutching a half-gnawed fruit scrambled between his legs, nearly tripping him.

"Whoa there, speed racer—" Damin caught the kid by the scruff before he face-planted into the dirt. The child blinked up at him, unafraid, then promptly bit his thumb.

"Little shit—!" Damin hissed, shaking out his hand as the boy scampered off, cackling. Across the clearing, a young mother grinding seeds into flour watched the exchange with amusement, her infant nursing contentedly at her breast.

Damin was about to retort when a high-pitched shriek cut through the chatter. A girl no taller than his knee charged at him, skidded to a halt inches from his legs, and stared up at him. Her nose wrinkled. "Uniltìrantokx skxwang," she said, before spinning on her heel and bolting back to her friends, her peals of laughter scattering like dropped beads.

"What the hell does skxwang mean?" Damin muttered, rubbing his bruised thumb. The answer came in the thunder of approaching hooves. Mo'at cantered into the Commons on a direhorse the colour of storm clouds, its six legs churning up clods of earth.

She led a second mount— an ancient mare with swaybacked posture and milky eyes that regarded Damin with the resigned disdain of a schoolteacher facing a particularly dim student.

The mare snorted as Damin approached, her antennae twitching. "Oh no. No way." He backpedaled as Mo'at stepped closer. "I'm a city boy, princess. Closest I've been to horseback is the carousel at—"

Mo'at's tail lashed. "You will ride, or you will walk. Choose."

The riverbank smelled of wet stone and something vaguely fishy. Damin's fingers slipped on the surcingle for the third time as the mare sidestepped impatiently. "Hold still, you stubborn—" The direhorse responded by nearly headbutting him into the shallows.

Mo'at's patience snapped. She seized his queue and yanked it downward with enough force to make his eyes water. "Bend, dreamwalker!"

The neural tendrils brushed each other, and suddenly the world tilted. Damin gasped as the mare's consciousness crashed into his own, her heartbeat thundered in his temples, her breath burned in his lungs, her ancient joints ached in his knees. The sensation of having four extra legs nearly made him vomit.

"Tsaheylu," Mo'at murmured, her fingertips resting lightly on the space between man and beast. "She remembers the songs of her grandmothers. Listen."

The mare's memories flickered through him, galloping through glades, the weight of generations of riders, the sharp taste of river apples.

Then came his own reflection through her eyes, clumsy, five-fingered, reeking of sweat and metal. The old horse's disdain was definitely clear.

"Forward," Damin croake, and the mare launched into a gallop before he'd fully formed the thought. The world dissolved into a blur of jolting agony. His tailbone hit the riverbank first, then his shoulders, then his dignity. Mud splattered across his face as the mare trotted back to Mo'at, swishing her tail like a victor.

Ateyo's laughter cut through the ringing in Damin's ears. The warrior leaned against his own mount's flank, idly plucking riverweed from its coat. "Skxwang rides like a newborn," he sneered, and honestly the insult hurt harder than the fall.

"Again." Mo’at said.

Damin wiped river mud from his face with the back of his hand, watching Ateyo's retreating form. "I knew that guy spoke English," he muttered.

The old mare snorted as Mo'at led her back, her hooves squelching in the wet earth. Ateyo wheeled his mount around, leaning down to speak Na'vi. "Fìketuwongìl ke nayume ke'ut. Nì'ul kame tskxe. Poru tìng nari." (This alien will learn nothing. A rock Sees more.)

Mo'at's ears flattened slightly as she exhaled through her nose, a sound Damin was beginning to recognise as her version of a sigh.

Before he could ask for translation, Ateyo and two other hunters kicked their mounts into a thunderous gallop, disappearing into the emerald shadows between the trees in seconds.

"Again." Mo’at repeated.

The holotable flickered as Damin rotated the 3D scan of Hometree, its inner chambers glowing amber against the dark ops center. "Outer columns first, load-bearing," he tapped the projection, sending ripples through the molecular structure.

"Then a secondary ring here, and an inner ring there." His finger traced upward where the architecture twisted. "Core structure's helical, lets them ascend without stairs."

Colonel Quaritch leaned in, her scarred cheek illuminated by the hologram while Selfridge's tablet pinged with mineral overlays. "Beautiful… Just beautiful." His smile didn't reach his eyes. "I’m gonna need scans of this, Marine. Accurate scans." Quaritch interrupted, fully focused on the hologram.

"Roger that, Colonel." Behind them, Dr. Vivaan Patel's silhouette vanished from the stairwell like smoke.

The bio-lab reeked of steriliser and Irene's sixth cigarette of the hour. She slammed a field spectrometer into its case hard enough to make Tristan flinch. "Like hell I'm letting those pencil-pushers dictate research parameters."

Tristan held up a vial of glowing lichen. "But the Hallelujah Mountains—"

"Are exactly where we're going." Irene snapped the latches on her case. "Mobile link's already prepped at Site 26. We'll be running full-spectrum analysis before Quaritch finishes her morning coffee."

Damin froze mid-packing, a datapad hovering over his duffel. "Wait… floating mountains?"

Tristan's grin could've powered the comms array. "Only the most spectacular geologic anomaly on Pandora!" He thrust the vial under Damin's nose, making the bioluminescent flecks swirl.

"Super high unobtanium quantity— boom, entire mountain ranges hovering at eight thousand meters, or roughly." His free hand mimed an explosion. "Like God's own magnetic levitation."

Irene exhaled smoke through her nostrils. "Translation: we're studying unobtanium deposits where the RDA can't stick their grubby little hands in our data." She nodded at Damin's half-packed gear. "Move it, jarhead. Wheels up in twenty."

Ramona's helicopter blades were already spinning up fifty meters away, kicking up dust devils across the tarmac. Tristan tossed him a rebreather. "Ever ridden to a mountain?"

"Er, not sober." Damin admitted.

The Samson's rotors got louder as Ramona banked hard around a rock spire, centrifugal force pressing Damin against the harness as his stomach lurched into his throat.

Through the rain-streaked canopy, the flux vortex danced across the instruments, needles twitching like scorpion tails while Ramona's fingers danced over the cyclic with micro-adjustments that made the aircraft shudder less like machinery and more like something alive.

"Feel that?" Ramona murmured, guiding Tristan's hand atop hers as the stick vibrated between them. Her thumb brushed his wrist, whether by accident or design, Damin couldn't tell, but Tristan's blush was visible even from the jumpseat. "Small inputs," she said.

Irene leaned forward between the seatbacks, her rebreather fogging with each excited exhale. "Look!" She pointed through the swirling mist where bands of iridescent mineral deposits spiraled up the floating monoliths ahead.

Then the clouds parted.

"Oh. My. God." Tristan whispered.

Damin's knuckles whitened on the harness straps. Half-mile-wide islands of rock drifted like god's abandoned chess pieces, their undersides bearded with vines that swayed in the updrafts.

Waterfalls cascaded from floating cliffs only to dissipate midair, their mist catching Pandora's light in prismatic halos. The Samson banked around a drifting boulder the size of Hell's Gate itself, its surface a miniature jungle teeming with neon-colored flora.

Ramona's laughter crackled through the headset. "Sully, you should see your face!"

"Feels like we're flying through a Dali painting," Damin admitted, pressing closer to the canopy as a school of stingbats erupted from a mossy overhang. 

Irene tapped his shoulder, pointing downward where the forest canopy parted around a jagged promontory. "Site 26." Two repurposed cargo modules crouched between seismic sensors, their solar panels glinting.

Ramona flared the collective, killing momentum just as the landing skids kissed gravel. The second the rotors whined down, Tristan was unbuckling, his boots hitting dirt before the turbine fully spun out.

"Holy shit," he breathed, craning his neck at the nearest floating mountain. A ribbon waterfall poured from its underside, dissolving into mist halfway down. "That's... that's not physically possible."

"Tell that to Pandora." Irene tossed him an air sampler.

The airlock hissed as they cycled in, Tristan's knuckles white on Damin's wheelchair handles. Ramona kicked the exterior door shut with her boot heel while inside, Irene stood silhouetted against the generator's sudden roar, her cigarette bobbing between her teeth as she flipped switches, lights stuttered on, equipment hummed to life.

Damin's eyes adjusted to reveal a cramped bunkroom-slash-lab, four unmade beds shoved between crates of gear. Through the open hatchway, four link units glowed in the adjacent module like upright coffins.

"Home sweet home," Ramona muttered, shaking rainwater from her braids.

Irene didn't look up from the console. "Spellman, prep Sully's link. Chacón, check the perimeter sensors."

Tristan's knuckles whitened on the wheelchair handles. "You're really doing this."

"Orders," Irene said, cigarette bobbing as she spoke. The generator's hum deepened when she flipped a switch, flooding the module with sterile light that made the photos taped above her workstation glow.

Damin's breath caught at the photos, and he knew he shouldn’t be looking at them.

A younger Irene stood in front of the school, arms draped around two laughing girls, Mo’at at twelve, all elbows and braids, and an older teen who could've been her reflection. Same golden eyes, same defiant tilt to the chin. The older girl was hugging Irene—

"Nguzär," Irene said without looking up while tapping ash into a petri dish. "Top of her class. Fluent in English, French, and Na'vi sign." The photo fluttered as she shoved past Damin toward the link bay. "Take unit two. Least glitchy."

Tristan's chair screeched as he stood too fast. "I prepped the calibration sequences—"

"And you'll operate Sully's link." Irene said while walking down a corridor. Tristan's glare could've melted steel. Damin rolled his wheelchair forward, deliberately slow. "You got a fucking problem, Spellman?"

"Three years. Three years of intensive linguistic training, xenobiology, neural interfacing protocols—" He jabbed a finger at Damin's chest. "You fall off the goddamn turnip truck and suddenly you're cultural ambassador?"

Ramona coughed into her fist. Irene reappeared, wiping fluid off her hands with a rag. "Not our choice, Tristan."

"Yeah?" Tristan's voice cracked. "Well I didn't come out here to wash dishes while you're on some interspecies booty call." He stormed past the link units toward… somewhere.

"He can't go far," Irene muttered, tossing the greasy rag onto a spectrometer. The rain outside had intensified, hammering against the module's corrugated roof like gunfire. She jerked her chin at Damin's designated link pod. "Let's connect you."

The chair's wheels squeaked as Ramona pushed Damin forward. "Kid's got a point," she murmured, low enough that only Damin could hear. "You ever even seen a Na'vi before your brother's funeral?"

Damin's fingers tightened on the armrests. Before he could retort, Irene slapped a sensor array against his chest hard enough to leave a mark. "Vitals first."

— Avatar Link —

Damin's palms burned from gripping the fibrous bark as he hauled himself up the last few meters, lungs screaming. The central shaft of Hometree yawned beneath him, a vertiginous drop where Na'vi children scampered across bridges far below like colourful ants.

Ahead, Mo'at moved with effortless grace, her bare feet finding purchase where Damin saw only smooth wood, her braids whipping as she vanished through an opening in the trunk.

"Wait— goddamn—" He scrambled after her, emerging onto a broad limb dappled with golden light. Pandora's expanse unfurled before him, other Great Trees punctuated the emerald canopy like titanic mushrooms, their bioluminescent undersides glowing faintly in the twilight.

Mo'at didn't stop, striding toward a structure that made Damin's stomach lurch. A vast web of woven fibers stretched between branches, quivering with unseen movement. Dark shapes shifted within its strands, their outlines blurred by the flickering shadows while Mo’at made a series of trills and clicks.

"Holy shit," Damin breathed as one shape detached itself, unfurling leathery wings with a sound like sails cracking in a storm. The mountain banshee landed before them with ground-shaking force, taller than Mo'at at the shoulder, its crest flaring as it snapped at the air.

Mo'at's hand shot out, clamping over Damin's eyes. "Do not look in her eye." Her palm smelled of crushed herbs.

The banshee's breath hit his face, hot and rancid, like old blood. He heard the wet tear of meat, a guttural swallow. When Mo'at removed her hand, the creature was licking its jaws, a strand of viscera dangling from its serrated teeth.

"Skxawng," Mo'at muttered, feeding it another strip from her belt pouch. The banshee snatched it midair with a sound like a whip crack.

Damin swallowed hard. "I take it these aren't pets." Damin caught the gleam of intelligence in its yellow eyes—not just predator-cunning, but something deeper, calculating.

Mo'at's fingers brushed her queue, hesitating. "Fì'u oeyä tìyawn..." (This is my love...) The words sounded a little like a prayer, he’d suppose. Then she connected the two.

The banshee shivered as Mo'at's queue connected, its wings stretching wide enough to cast Damin in shadow. But it didn't buck or rear, just tilted its head with an almost thoughtful curiosity, nostrils flaring as it scented the air between them. 

"Ikran is not direhorse," Mo'at said, her fingers buried in the creature's crest feathers. The banshee made a sound like rocks grinding together deep in its throat. "Once tsaheylu is made..."

She swung onto its back in one fluid motion, the movement so practiced her bare thighs didn't even tense. "Ikran flies with only one hunter. Whole life." Damin swallowed hard. The creature's eyes locked onto him with unsettling focus, which made him flinch.

Mo’at’s fingers lingered on her ikran’s crest as the creature hissed, its breath hot against Damin’s face. "To be taronyu," she said, her voice going over the banshee’s low growl, "You do not take. You are taken." The ikran’s slit pupils dilated, tracking Damin’s slightest movement like targeting scopes.

Damin wiped sweat from his brow. "So when do I—"

"When you are ready," she snapped.

The banshee's wings exploded outward with a thunderous crack— Damin barely ducked in time as the creature dropped like a stone off the branch. Wind whipped his braid straight back as the ikran plunged downward, then banked hard enough to make its rider's thigh muscles ripple.

Mo'at's triumphant cry echoed across the canopy as they pulled into a vertical climb. Damin's stomach lurched watching them arc overhead, the ikran's shadow dappling his face during the swooping flyby.

"Showoff," he muttered, wiping bark dust from his palms. His own borrowed bow dug into his shoulder, Mo'at's "training gift" after three days of watching him fumble.

The banshee's wings exploded outward with a heeyaaahh! from Mo’at that sent Damin stumbling backward. He barely ducked as the creature plummeted off the branch, its shadow swallowing him whole before vanishing into the swirling mist below.

Damin switched on the camera with a grimy thumb, its red light blinking like a fresh wound while he rubbed his tailbone.

"Do I have to do this? I need some rack." Behind him, Irene's microscope slide clicked against the stage. "No, now, when it's fresh."

"Yeah, yeah." Damin scrubbed bark dust from his eyelids. "The days are blurring together. Language is a bitch, but it's like field-stripping a weapon. Repetition."

Mo'at knelt opposite him, her fingers tapping rapid-fire against her face. "Seyri," Damin repeated as she touched her lips. Her nostrils flared when he butchered the next sequence, "Ontu. Mikyun. Fuck— nari?"

"Naaariii."

"Nari—"

Smack! Straight to the forehead.

Mo'at's fingers dug into Damin's shoulder like talons, wrenching his elbow higher. She barked something in Na’vi, smacking his forearm when the arrowhead wobbled. "Not here—" Another sharp jab between his ribs corrected his stance. Damin's muscles burned holding the position, the longbow's curve trembling under his unfamiliar grip.

Mo'at thinks I'm some kind of dumbass. She’s not wrong, I’ve always been thick in the skull.

The arrow buried itself in the moss three feet left of the target.

Damin gasped awake in the clamshell link unit, his human fingers scrabbling at the restraints before his vision cleared enough to see Ramona's discarded jacket draped over the adjacent console. The module was empty except for—

A tangle of limbs froze mid-motion on Tristan's narrow bed, Ramona's dark braids spilled over the edge, and he gaped over her shoulder like a deer in headlights. "Uh." Damin blinked sweat from his eyes. "Didn't… realise we were doing conjugal visits now?"

Ramona recovered first, flipping him off with one hand while yanking the blanket over their heads with the other. Tristan's muffled "oh my god" was almost as red as his face.

Tristan’s attitude has improved lately.

Damin pressed his palms flat against the warped plastic of the SHACK's kitchen table, watching Tristan's fingers stab at the Na'vi phrasebook like it had personally offended him. "Ireiyo," Damin attempted, his tongue stumbling over the vowels.

Tristan groaned, tossing his head back in frustration. "Irrrreiyo. You've gotta roll the R, r-r-r-roll it." He demonstrated with a ridiculous purring sound that made Ramona snort into her coffee from the doorway. "Like a cat with a hairball."

"Ireiyo," Damin repeated, feeling the vibration in his throat this time.

"Warmer," Tristan conceded, then ruined it by adding, "Still sounds like a human stepping on a frog." He flipped the page with unnecessary force. "Ngá is 'you,' but ngenga is honorific—"

Damin sucked in air through his teeth. "Man, fuck you."

It’s good he’s back on board, but he thinks I’m a dumbass too.

Damin's bare feet slapped against the gnarled roots of Hometree, each impact sending jolts up his shins that faded quicker than they had yesterday. Progress, he thought, watching his calloused soles flex against the bark's rough grain. 

My feet are getting tougher. I can run farther every day.

Chapter Text

The root beneath Damin's feet was wider than a city sidewalk, ridged with bark patterns that dug into his soles as he sprinted after Mo’at’s flickering silhouette. Thirty meters below, viperwolves circled like shadows, he didn’t look down.

Mo’at vaulted onto a branch overhead without breaking stride, her toes curling around the wood like talons. Damin leaped after her, and for one sickening second, his fingers grazed empty air before catching rough bark.

His shoulder wrenched as he swung forward, legs flailing until his foot found purchase. "Skxawng!" Mo’at hissed from somewhere above. He didn’t need Na’vi to understand: Keep up or become lunch.

Damin trusted his muscles to remember what his mind couldn’t, the way his Avatar’s body coiled differently, the way his tail instinctively counterbalanced. He pushed off again, following Mo’at’s scent trail of crushed leaves and iron-tanged sweat.

She moved like water through the branches, arms outstretched, her queue whipping behind her like a rudder. When she suddenly launched herself into open air, Damin’s stomach dropped.

The leaf tore free with a wet rip— Damin's insides practically flipped as gravity grabbed him, then his fingers hooked another frond mid-plummet, its spongy fibers bending under his weight until the whole world tilted sideways.

He caught flashes of Mo'at's braids whipping below, her silhouette slicing through green darkness like an arrow. His next leaf-bounce sent him spinning, sky and roots blurring in a nauseating carousel until his boot soles smacked bare earth with a force that shot pain up his shins.

Mo'at stood frozen three paces ahead, her chest heaving, pupils blown wide. Her nostrils flared as she scanned him head to toe, no blood, no broken bones.

"You followed." Her voice was full of disbelief while Damin wiped sweat from his upper lip. "Yeah, well… Turns out I'm a fast learner when death's the alternative." The words came out breathless, giddy.

The generator's hum was the only sound in the dimly lit module, its rhythmic pulse syncing with Damin's headache as he stared at the photos taped above Irene's workstation.

The first showed a younger Irene, her hair streaked with grey even then, flanked by two Na'vi girls against the peeling blue walls of the derelict schoolhouse. The taller one had her arm slung around Irene's shoulders with possessive ease, golden eyes crinkled in laughter.

Nguzär.

Damin's finger hovered over the second photo before he touched it, the laminate cool under his calloused fingertip. Same trio, but Nguzär's braids were half-unraveled, her smile sharp as she brandished a handmade bow. Behind them, the school's bullet-riddled blackboard still bore half-erased English equations.

The Commons smelled of roasted tubers and woodsmoke, sounds of the chatter of children and the rhythmic thump of pestles grinding grain. Tristan stood frozen near the central firepit as Oma approached.

Damin watched from the periphery, gnawing on a strip of something he couldn’t really pronounce the name of, but he was trying.

I sweet-talked Oma into giving Tristan and Irene a hall pass. Now Irene even makes me coffee before link every morning.

The thought warmed him more than the fire.

Tristan's greeting bow was too deep, his pronunciation painfully precise. "Oel ngati kameie, Tsahìk Oma’ite." (I See you, Tsahìk Oma’ite.)

Oma's lips twitched. She touched his shoulder, a benediction or a mercy, Damin couldn't tell, before turning toward the shrieking knot of children mobbing Irene.

The scientist knelt in the dirt, her arms full of giggling toddlers, speaking in Na’vi as she teased them about stolen beads.

One girl tugged her braid insistently. Irene laughed, producing a wrapped sweet from her pocket, her eyes sparkling in the firelight.

Irene's fingers stilled mid-air where she'd been adjusting a toddler's beaded necklace. The sudden hush spreading through the Commons was more jarring than any alarm, conversations cutting off mid-sentence, children freezing mid-chase. When she looked up, Mo'at stood three paces away, her silhouette backlit by firelight.

Dirt crunched under Irene's sandals as she straightened slowly, her cigarette forgotten between her fingers. She made the formal gesture with her free hand, palm outward, fingers spread just enough to show she carried no weapons. "Oel ngati kameie, Mo’at Oma’ite." (I See you, Mo’at Oma’ite.)

Mo'at's nostrils flared at the scent of tobacco. She returned the greeting with precise economy of motion, her eyes never leaving Irene's face. "Oel ngati kameie, Irene Augustine."

Damin's knee sank into the mud beside Mo'at's, his breath fogging the humid air as she traced a single claw along the edge of a trampled fern.

She murmured ineligible, her nostrils flaring as she tilted her head toward the canopy. "Two hours past dawn." She plucked a broken thorn from the soil and held it up. "Hammerhead spoor. Fresh."

Damin leaned closer, inhaling the metallic tang of disturbed earth layered with something muskier underneath. His Avatar body registered scents differently, more textures than odors, like tasting the forest's breath.

I'm learning to read the trails.

He watched Mo'at's ears twitch at the unfamiliar syllables.

The tracks at the water-hole, the tiniest scents and sounds.

Mo'at flicked her braids back with a jerk of her chin, gesturing toward a gap in the foliage ahead. Through the screen of leaves, a herd of sturmbeests lumbered through the shallows, their armoured flanks throwing up curtains of spray.

One bull shook its crest, sending droplets arcing like liquid silver in the sunlight, between the adults, half-grown calves trotted safely within the fortress of their parents’ legs.

"When you hear nothing, you will hear everything. When you see nothing, you will See everything."

Sometimes I have no fucking idea what she’s talking about…

Damin's fingers tightened around his bow when a distant trumpet made the ground vibrate.

The entire herd froze as one, muscles coiled beneath thick hide, then came the explosion of purple wings as a flock of tetrapterons burst from the reeds in a chaotic spiral.

Mo'at's hand clamped around his wrist before he could nock an arrow. "Not hunt," she breathed against his ear. "See."

It’s been a month and I’m still not allowed to make a kill. She says the forest hasn’t given permission.

Mo'at's hand clamped over Damin's mouth before he could exhale. Her fingers smelled of crushed herbs and something metallic, blood, he realised, from the carcass she'd been skinning moments before their abrupt crouch into the ferns.

Through the gap she indicated, a viperwolf emerged from the undergrowth, her flank streaked with mud and something darker. The cubs tumbled over each other in their haste, tiny fangs glinting as they nipped at her legs.

"Watch," Mo'at breathed against his ear, her words barely above a rustle of leaves.

The mother viperwolf dropped her prize, a still-twitching hexapede fawn, and began methodically licking the cubs' faces clean. One particularly bold pup got a warning growl when it tried to sneak a bite prematurely.

Damin's human face filled the grainy lens, his reflection swimming in the cracked display. A week's worth of stubble shadowed his jawline, accentuating the hollows under his cheekbones. He rubbed his temple where the neural interface left persistent migraines.

"There's a metric ton of this spiritual crap," he muttered, adjusting the camera angle to exclude the IV bag dangling behind him. "Today's lesson? Apparently murder's sacred if you sing a lullaby first…"

The lens caught Irene's silhouette in the background, her shoulders hunched over a microscope. She didn't look up when she said, "It's not about killing, it’s about reciprocity."

Damin flipped her off with his free hand. "Excuse me— this is my goddamn video log."

The night swallowed their footfalls whole. Damin's pupils dilated until the forest glowed around him, bioluminescent tendrils dripping from vines like liquid constellations, fungal blooms exhaling cobalt mist with each step.

Mo'at moved ahead like shadow given form, her silhouette flickering between shafts of moonlight. When she crouched, he mirrored her instantly, the dugout canoe's prow whispering to a halt against bank moss.

Below them, the pool breathed. Pastel anemones pulsed along its floor, their tendrils weaving slow patterns that cast shifting light across Damin's bowstring.

A silhouette glided through the glow, broad-finned and slow, its scales catching cyan and violet as it passed each bloom. Mo'at's fingertip brushed his elbow.

He loosed.

The arrow's fletching blurred neon as it pierced water without splash. The fish spasmed once, its dying flare illuminating the entire pool in a final burst of gold before darkness reclaimed them.

Damin hauled his catch up dripping, its blood painting his forearm in fading streaks. Mo'at's approving hum vibrated against his shoulder blades.

"Better," she admitted, her breath warm where it stirred the hairs at his nape. Damin resisted the urge to crane his neck.

The dugout barely rocked as she pivoted them toward the next pool. Bioluminescence cascaded from every overhang here, fungal garlands dripped sapphire spores, while clusters of six-eyed insects clustered on branches like living chandeliers.

Damin's pupils had dilated until the night forest resolved into layers of shimmering depth, each movement leaving afterimages like comet trails.

Mo'at's fingers settled high on his drawing arm during their next approach, her thumbs pressing into the groove between muscle and bone. "Not here—" Her correction lacked its usual violence, fingertips lingering just long enough to make his next exhale hitch.

Her palms skimmed his forearm with unexpected lightness, more guide than correction. The warmth lingered after she withdrew, a phantom imprint that scattered his focus like wind through dry leaves. Their eyes met in the green dark; Mo’at recoiled as if burned.

She turned first, gesturing toward a clearing where luminescent spores hung suspended like drowned stars.

Chest-high ferns rippled ahead, their fronds trembling with unseen movement. Mo’at’s hand hovered— slow— before parting the vegetation with infinite care. There, perched on a swaying frond: a grotesque stick-lizard, its knobby spine arched like a question mark.

Damin froze mid-step as the creature’s head swiveled toward him.

SNAP.

The spine unfurled in a whipping circle, bioluminescent membranes exploding outward like a silk parachute detonating. What had been an ugly twig now floated before them, a living frisbee wider than Damin’s outstretched arms.

The fan lizard banked sideways, catching an updraft with impossible grace. Membrane rippling, it skimmed just overhead, close enough for Damin to feel the displaced air stir his braids, before vanishing into the canopy with a sound like shaken foil.

Mo'at plunged among the ferns with a sharp cry, not a warrior's shout, but something wild and uncontained.

The undergrowth erupted in an explosion of colour as dozens of fan lizards burst from hiding, their spined bodies unfurling into shimmering discs that caught the sunlight in kaleidoscopic flashes.

Damin stumbled back as the air filled with whirling membranes, each lizard banking on impossible trajectories that sent them spiraling around Mo'at like living confetti.

Her laughter rang through the clearing, bright and unfettered. She hopped between the fluttering creatures, her braids flying as she twisted to avoid collisions, her movements fluid as the lizards themselves.

For the first time, her usual controlled grace gave way to something altogether more joyous, a child's abandon as she reached out to brush her fingertips against a passing membrane, sending the creature into a playful spin.

"They remember me!" she called over the rustling whirlwind, her golden eyes crinkling at the corners. One particularly bold lizard swooped close, its bioluminescent edges flaring pink in recognition before it flitted away.

Mo'at spun after it, her feet light on the moss, her arms outstretched like wings. The sight stole Damin's breath, this was no Tskarem, no stern teacher, but a woman utterly alive, her joy as radiant as the creatures swirling around her.

Damin found himself grinning like an idiot. A fan lizard collided harmlessly with his chest, its spines tickling through his shirt before it righted itself with an indignant flutter.

He reached out on instinct, mimicking Mo'at's gesture, and gasped when another glided straight into his palm.

Damin's eyelids peeled apart with the sickly adhesion of dried glue. Blackness, not the rich, breathing dark of Pandora's nights— this was a suffocating void, airless and sterile. His fingers scrabbled against smooth surfaces until they found the seam. The lid hissed upward, flooding his vision with migraine-bright fluorescence.

Wrong. Everything's wrong.

His human hands looked alien, pale, stubby five fingers without the elegant elongation of his Na'vi body. The sterile air stank of antiseptic and stale sweat instead of crushed leaves and musk. When he tried to sit up, IV lines tugged at his forearm like parasitic vines.

Everything is backwards now. Like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.

The bowstring hummed against Damin's fingertips, a vibration that traveled up his arm and settled somewhere behind his sternum.

His breath stilled, not the panicked freeze of prey, but the stop of a predator measuring the kill. The hexapede's ear twitched, its six-legged silhouette backlit by a shaft of golden light cutting through the canopy.

Release.

The arrow struck just behind the shoulder, a perfect lung shot. The creature staggered three steps before collapsing, its laboured breaths stirring the moss beneath its muzzle. Damin approached slowly, his knife already drawn. He knelt beside the dying animal, one hand resting on its heaving flank as he murmured the words Mo'at had drilled into him.

"Oel Ngati Kameie, ulte irayo. Nga tirea kä fa Eywa, nga tokx'ì'awn uo ne hapxì fa leNa’vi." (I See you Brother, and thank you. Your spirit goes with Eywa, your body stays behind to become part of the People.) The blade flashed once. A clean end.

Blood warmed his palms as he worked, careful not to waste a single tendon. "Oel ngati kameie," he whispered again, peeling back the hide with movements that were no longer clumsy.

Mo'at's shadow fell across his work. She said nothing, just watched as he separated muscle from bone with the precision she'd beaten into him over weeks of failed attempts.

When Damin finally lifted his head, her ears were tilted forward in that particular angle he'd learned meant approval.

"A clean kill," she said simply. Her claw traced the incision line where his blade had followed natural seams between muscle groups. "Not cut. Reveal."

Damin wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a streak of crimson across his brow. The blood smelled different today, not just iron and fear, but something earthy. Alive. He realised he was grinning.

Mo'at flicked her tail toward the carcass. "Carry."

The hexapede's hide stretched tight across Damin's shoulders as he hoisted it, warmth seeping through his skin where its blood hadn't yet cooled. His footsteps fell silent on the moss, not the careful quiet of a hunter stalking, but the natural rhythm of someone who belonged. Ahead, Mo'at's ears twitched at a sound he couldn't hear.

The link chamber hissed open with the sound of a dying animal. Damin's fingers twitched against the restraints, pale, skeletal things that looked like they belonged to a cadaver, not a living man. His lips cracked when he tried to speak, tasting copper.

"Easy, marine," Tristan muttered, catching Damin's elbow as he listed sideways. Damin's bare feet hit the floor with none of the surefooted grace his Avatar possessed, just a shuddering impact that traveled up his atrophied calves.

Irene materialised on his other side, thrusting a foil-wrapped rectangle into his hands. The smell hit him first: synthetic cheese, lab-grown soy, the greasy reek of preservatives. His stomach rolled. "Eat," she ordered. "You're wasting away like a fucking junkie."

Damin peeled back the foil with trembling fingers. The burrito's surface gleamed under the harsh fluorescents, perfectly uniform like something extruded from a machine. He took a bit, and it tasted of nothing.

"I made a kill today," he said through a mouthful of paste. "We ate it. I know where that meal came from."

Irene's knuckles whitened around her coffee mug. "Other body," she snapped. "You need to—"

"— take care of this one, yeah yeah." Damin tossed the half-eaten burrito onto the console where it left a grease smear. The motion sent black spots dancing across his vision.

Tristan's grip tightened. "Jesus, you're shaking like—"

"I'm fine." His reflection in the darkened monitor showed sunken cheeks, the hollows beneath his eyes purple as fresh bruises. He grabbed Irene's cigarette from her lips, crushing it against the bulkhead. "When you ditch this shit," he rasped, "Then you can lecture me."

Irene's coffee sloshed as she yanked her arm back. "I'm telling you as your boss—"

"— and someone who might even consider being a friend someday," Damin parroted in a singsong voice that made Tristan wince. He rubbed his sternum where the link unit's restraints had left angry red welts. "Save it."

The microwave beeped. Irene ignored it, stepping into Damin's space until her breath hit his face, coffee and nicotine and something acidic. "You look like death reheated."

Damin grabbed the new burrito with a grimace. The foil burned his fingertips as he peeled it back, revealing processed yellow sludge oozing from a doughy tube. "And yet still better than this." He took a bite purely to watch Irene's eye twitch.

Irene exhaled hard through her nose and turned toward the coffee maker. "Tomorrow we leave for Iknimaya."

Tristan choked on his own spit. "The rite of passage? With the—" His hands flapped near his ears in a poor imitation of ikran wings. "Yeah." Damin licked cheese powder off his thumb. "Gonna go ride a banshee. Or die trying."

Chapter Text

The mountain trail smelled of bruised sage and hot stone, the direhorses' iron-shod hooves striking sparks from flint outcroppings. Damin's mount— a surly gelding with a scarred muzzle— snorted when he nudged its ribs, but kept pace with Ateyo's lead. Below them, the canyon exhaled mist that swirled around the horses' fetlocks like grasping fingers.

Iknimaya translates roughly as stairway to heaven. It's the test every young hunter has to pass.

Ateyo's raised fist brought the column to a halt. Up-slope, an impossible geometry of vines and stone twisted skyward— great serpentine roots had ensnared floating boulders midair, weaving them into a spiraling ladder that vanished into the clouds.

The ground trembled with a sound like distant artillery. Damin craned his neck as a floating mountain drifted ponderously overhead, its underbelly scraping against the mesa with a groan that set his teeth on edge.

Rock fragments rained down as teenage hunters dismounted with practiced ease. Ateyo inspected each youth's gear with military precision before turning to Damin. The warrior's smirk showed too many teeth. "Skxawng still breathes?"

"We doin' this?" Damin shouldered past him toward the base of the living stairway.

Ateyo's laughter chased him up the first gnarled root. Handholds became a rhythm— twist, pull, leap— until his palms bled sticky sap. The hunters swarmed past like blue spiders, their mocking calls bouncing off the stone.

When Damin glanced down, the ground yawned eight hundred feet below through gaps in the roots. His next grip came away in his hand as the entire structure shuddered. Above, the floating mountain's shadow swallowed the sun.

Damin spat out a mouthful of mineral-tasting spray from the waterfall mist. His fingers found purchase on a slick outcropping just as his foot slipped. For one dizzying second, he swung by one arm, boots scrabbling against air before finding a knob of rock. Ateyo's silhouette peered down from twenty meters up, shaking his head. "Txi! Faster, dreamwalker!"

The vines hummed under his touch, thrumming with some deep vibration that traveled up his bones. Chunks of unobtanium broke loose as he climbed, drifting upward in defiance of everything Damin knew about gravity.

One brushed his cheek, warm, almost living, before spiraling into the void. The higher they climbed, the more the beanstalk swayed, its great trunk groaning like a ship's mast in a storm.

Damin's fingers closed around a passing vine thick as his thigh. It jerked him skyward with terrifying force, his ribs slamming against its rough bark. He locked his legs around it, gasping as the world tilted.

A hunter's triumphant cry echoed from above as the vine carried him past the last branches into open air. The island's underbelly loomed, a fractal nightmare of roots and stone, close enough to taste the iron tang of its magnetic field.

His feet hit moss-slick rock. The vine recoiled like a snapped cable, whipping back into the void. Before him stretched a narrow causeway of braided vines, swaying between floating boulders. Ateyo stood midway across, arms spread in challenge. Damin swallowed hard, one misstep meant a kilometre’s freefall into mist.

"Dreamwalker!" Ateyo's laughter carried over the banshees' distant shrieks. He danced backward across the vines with impossible grace, tail flicking for balance. Damin stepped onto the first strand. It dipped alarmingly beneath his weight. Somewhere below, waterfalls dissolved midair into silver veils that never reached the ground.

Mo’at's banshee shrieked overhead, its shadow passing between shafts of sunlight. Damin didn't look up. He focused on each trembling step, muscles remembering hunting lessons, distribute weight, breathe with the sway.

Halfway across, wind punched through the gap. The vines twisted violently. Damin's tail lashed for balance as his arms pinwheeled—

— Ateyo’s hand clamped around his wrist, yanking him onto solid rock. The warrior's smirk didn't reach his eyes. "Still breathing, skxawng?"

The grotto exhaled dampness that beaded on Damin's skin. Water roared past the ledge in a curtain so thick it seemed solid. Through the mist, hundreds of banshees clung to the cliff face like living stalactites, their folded wings twitching.

Mo'at stood at the precipice, hooding her mount with quick fingers. She turned, droplets glittering in her braids.

"Choose well."

Ateyo's smirk twisted into something darker as he shoved Damin forward, the hunters parting like reeds before a river current. "Daminsully will go first!" Two adolescents fingered their knives with white-knuckled grips, their tails flicking in poorly concealed terror.

Mo'at intercepted Ateyo's next shove with a sidestep that put herself between them, her shoulder brushing Damin's arm as she guided him toward the precipice.

"Now you choose your ikran," she murmured, so close her breath stirred the hairs below his ear. "This you must feel—" Her claw tapped his sternum, "— inside. If he also chooses you, move quick, like I showed."

Damin flexed the weighted strap coiled in his palm. "How will I know if he chooses me?" Mo'at's pupils dilated until her eyes swallowed the light. "He will try to kill you."

"Outstanding..." Damin's chuckle died when her fingers laced through his, brief, scorching, then she was gone, leaving his palm burning.

The ledge exhaled cold mist around his ankles. Below, banshees stirred like living stalactites, their wings rustling like parchment. A juvenile screeched and launched skyward in a panic of violet membranes. Another yawned deliberately, needle-teeth glistening.

The largest male unfurled wings that blotted out the sun, his crest flaring crimson. Damin met that gaze, golden, slit-pupiled, intelligent, and uncoiled his bolo with a snap that sent pebbles skittering. "Let's dance, motherfucker."

The banshee moved.

Damin barely registered the blur of indigo scales before the creature was airborne, talons raking empty air where his throat had been. He pivoted on the ball of his foot, swinging the weighted strap in a tight arc— too slow. Razor claws grazed his ribs as the banshee banked with unnatural agility.

The second lunge came low, the banshee's hindquarters bunching before it launched like a coiled spring. Damin feinted left, then twisted right, feeling the snap of jaws behind his ear, hot breath, the stench of rancid meat, before his bolo found its mark. The weighted cords wrapped the creature's neck mid-strike, jerking its trajectory sideways.

They hit the ground together in a tangle of limbs and wings.  
Damin's back slammed into rock, the impact driving the air from his lungs. The banshee thrashed above him, its hooked beak snapping inches from his face, spraying saliva that burned like acid.

He barely got an arm up in time to block a talon aimed at his gut, the claws scoring deep furrows down his forearm. Blood pattered onto the stone between them, steaming in the cold air.

With a snarl, Damin yanked the bolo taut, leveraging his hips to flip their positions. The banshee shrieked as its wings tangled beneath them, muscles straining against the restraint.

The creature twisted violently, throwing Damin sideways into the rockface. His ribs screamed on impact, but he clung to the bolo like a lifeline, wrapping the thong twice more around its snapping jaws.

The muffled screech that followed vibrated through his bones as the banshee whipped its head sideways— BAM!— the bony crest smashed into Damin's temple, painting his vision white. He tasted blood, copper-sharp, as the world tilted dangerously.

Mo'at's sharp inhale cut through the ringing in his ears.

"Skxawng!" Ateyo's mocking call bounced off the cliffs. "Does the mighty dreamwalker need—" His taunt died as Damin's bolo snapped loose with a wet crack. The banshee reared, wings flaring wide enough to cast them both in shadow, its crest flaring crimson with fury. Damin didn't hesitate, he lunged straight into the strike.

Talons raked his thigh, shredding fabric and flesh in ribbons, but he twisted midair and slammed both arms around the creature's thrashing skull. The impact sent them tumbling across the ledge in a spray of blood and pebbles.  

Damin's biceps burned as he clamped down, the banshee's beak snapping centimeters from his nose. Hot, rancid breath blasted his face as he jammed a knee into its ribcage, pinning the creature beneath him.

Its whipping antenna lashed his cheek, once, twice, before he trapped the fleshy appendage under his armpit in a vice grip. The world narrowed to golden irises dilating as he grabbed his own queue with his free hand and rammed it against the banshee's exposed neural whip.  

The tsaheylu hit like a lightning strike. Damin's vision whited out as synapses fired in tandem, screeching windrush of flight, the metallic tang of high-altitude blood, the visceral joy of plummeting toward prey, then sudden, deafening silence.

The banshee went rigid beneath him, panting through flared nostrils, its pupil swelling into a black well deep enough to drown in. Damin found his own breath syncing with the creature's labored gasps, their shared pulse thundering where skin met sinew.  

"That's right," Damin growled through clenched teeth. The banshee's eyelid flickered in acknowledgment. Slowly, so slowly, he loosened his grip. The creature didn't move. Damin shifted his weight, testing, and felt the banshee's muscles tense but not strike.

Blood dripped from his torn leg as he swung his other leg over its back in one motion. The banshee's spine arched in protest, wings twitching, but it held. "You’re mine."

Mo’at appeared beside him in a blur of movement, her fingers closing around his wrist where it gripped the banshee’s main. "First flight seals the bond," she hissed, breath hot against his ear. "You cannot wait!" Before he could respond, she slapped the creature’s flank, hard.

The banshee screamed and launched.

Damin barely had time to grip the hank of its main before they plummeted. The cliff face blurred past, too fast, his stomach lurched into his throat as the banshee tucked its wings and rolled. Damin yelled, "Heeeyyyaaaah!"  The banshee’s wings snapped open, catching air with bone-jarring force. For a second, they hovered midair, suspended between gravity and momentum— then dropped again.

Wind roared in his ears as they spiraled. The banshee shrieked, twisting violently, nearly flinging him loose. Damin’s thighs burned from clinging, his fingers numb where they tangled in its mane. "Shut the hell up!" he bellowed over its wails. The creature went silent mid-scream.

"Level out!" Damin commanded through clenched teeth. The banshee obeyed instantly, wings spreading wide. The sudden deceleration punched the breath from Damin’s lungs. He cocked his head, bank left, and the creature banked smoothly, responding to the thought before it fully formed.

Mo’at’s banshee appeared beside them in a flash of violet, its rider’s braids whipping like pennants. She didn’t speak, just tilted her chin downward, follow, and dove. Damin nudged his mount after her, feeling its hesitation in the uneven wingbeats. Where Mo’at’s banshee cut through the air like a blade, his wobbled, dipping dangerously with each stroke.

"Easy, boy," Damin murmured, pressing his knees tighter. The banshee’s muscles trembled beneath him, still taut with rebellion, but its flight steadied, just enough. They dropped lower, skimming the treetops, and for the first time, Damin felt the creature move with him rather than against him.

Mo’at’s banshee flashed ahead, banking sharply around the flank of Mons Veritatis.

Damin followed without hesitation, leaning into the turn, his pulse roaring louder than the wind. The mountain loomed, sheer cliffs streaked with waterfalls that shattered into mist before hitting the ground.

They plunged through the spray, icy droplets stinging his cheeks, his lips peeling back in a wild grin as the banshee tucked its wings and spiraled between hanging vines thicker than his torso.

Ahead, Mo’at arced into a steep dive, her silhouette cutting through ribbons of cloud like a blade. Damin urged his mount after her, feeling the banshee’s hesitation flicker and dissolve into exhilaration. They punched through the vapor, the sudden sunlight blinding, then—

"Tsaheylu," Damin breathed, the word ripped away by the wind.

The connection burned hotter now, not just control, but something deeper. The banshee’s instincts bled into his own, the tremor of its wingtips adjusting to updrafts, the minute tilt of its crest gauging wind shear.

Daminjinked left on a whim, and the creature obeyed before the thought fully formed. He whooped, reckless, fearless, as they plummeted toward the next canyon.

Mo’at dove alongside him, her braids streaming like banners. Her laughter rang clear above the wind, sharp and bright. Damin mirrored her dive, tucking himself flush against the banshee’s spine, the ground rushing up to meet them, closer, closer—

At the last second, he yanked back, and the creature flared its wings with a snap that sent a shockwave through his bones. They leveled out inches above a crystal-clear river, the banshee’s talons skimming the surface, sending up twin plumes of spray.

Mo’at pulled alongside, her eyes alight. "You see now," she called, not a question. Damin didn’t answer. He just grinned, banked hard, and dove again.

Mo’at’s banshee matched his reckless descent, their wings nearly brushing as they sliced through ribbons of mist. The cliffs rushed past in a blur of moss-streaked stone and glittering waterfalls, their spray stinging Damin’s cheeks like needles.

He leaned into the banshee’s spine, urging it faster, closer, until the rockface became a kaleidoscope of rushing green and silver.

At the last second, he jerked the metaphorical reins left, and the creature banked so sharply its wingtip scraped the cliffside, sending sparks skittering across wet stone.

Mo’at’s answering whoop echoed off the canyon walls. She rolled upside down in midair, her braids whipping like pennants as she arced over him. Damin followed without hesitation, tucking himself flush against the banshee’s back as they inverted.

The world flipped, sky below, river above, and for one breathless second, he hung suspended, weightless, before gravity reclaimed them.

They punched through a curtain of cloud, emerging into sudden, blinding sunlight. Damin squinted against the glare, his pulse roaring louder than the wind.

Below, the jungle sprawled in endless waves of bioluminescent blue and emerald, threaded with silver rivers that twisted like serpents toward the horizon. Mo’at’s silhouette cut through the light ahead of him, banking around a floating boulder with effortless grace.

Damin jinked left, then right, dodging hanging vines thicker than his thighs. The banshee responded to every shift of his weight now, its movements fluid as his own limbs.

He laughed, a raw, loud sound, as they plummeted toward another waterfall, tucking tight at the last moment to skim beneath the cascade. The water sheeted over them, icy and exhilarating.

Mo'at circled above, waiting. As Damin pulled up beside her, she gestured sharply downward, not just a dive, but an inverted corkscrew.

Without hesitation, he leaned forward, pressing his chest against the banshee's spine, and rolled them into the maneuver. The world spun violently, vertigo clawing at his gut, but he held fast. When they righted themselves, Mo'at's ears were tilted forward in that particular angle that meant approval.

"Good," she called over the wind. Her hands sketched quick shapes, before talking again. "Now, follow close."

She didn't wait for acknowledgment, just rolled her mount sideways into a steep spiral. Damin mirrored her instantly, feeling the banshee's muscles tense and release beneath him in perfect sync. 

The cliff face rushed past in a blur of moss and stone. Damin's vision tunneled, his entire world narrowing to Mo'at's silhouette ahead and the thrum of the banshee's wings around him.

He adjusted his grip, not clinging now, but guiding, palms light on the creature's neck, knees pressing subtle commands. They banked hard around an outcropping, so close his trailing foot brushed rock.

I may not be much of a horse guy. But I was born to do this.

Cloud vapor whipped through Damin's fingers like shredded silk as they plunged through a thermal, the banshee's wings tucked tight for maximum velocity.

Above them, Mo'at's silhouette wove between floating rock formations, her laughter scattering like wind chimes. Damin leaned into the dive, his pulse syncing with the banshee's wingbeats, three powerful strokes, then a coast, the rhythm as natural as breathing.

"Try harder, dreamwalker!" Mo'at's challenge carried down through the mist. She rolled sideways, vanishing behind a curtain of iridescent fog. 

Damin didn't hesitate. He urged the banshee into a corkscrew spin, the world dissolving into streaks of blue and white. They burst through the fog's underside to find empty sky.

His nostrils flared, there, a flicker of movement reflected in a passing raindrop. He yanked right just as Mo'at dropped from above like a living comet, her fingertips brushing his braids as she flashed past.

"Cheater!" Damin barked, but his grin split his face as he kicked the banshee into pursuit. The creature responded with a shriek, folding one wing to snap-roll over an outcrop. Mo'at's shadow danced across the canyon wall ahead, twisting between stalactites. 

Chapter Text

By nightfall, Damin's thighs burned as if branded, his fingers stiff. The grotto's thermal springs steamed in the firelight, their mineral tang mingling with the scent of roasting hexapede.

His mount, no, his ikran now, hunched nearby, its head darting forward when Damin lifted a charred haunch from the flames. 

"Easy," he murmured, pulling the meat back as the creature's serrated beak snapped shut on empty air. Its crest flared crimson in protest, but Damin just chuckled and scratched the sensitive spot behind its jawline, exactly where he'd felt the itch through tsaheylu earlier.

The ikran shuddered, pupils dilating. "That's it. Slow." He offered the meat again, palm flat. The beast hesitated, then took the morsel with surprising delicacy, its tongue flicking against Damin's calluses.

Ateyo's knife hit wood with a thunk across the firepit. "Teaching tricks like a circus animal," he sneered to the wide-eyed hunters flanking him. His tail lashed the damp earth. "Next he'll have it begging on hind legs."

Damin kept his eyes on the ikran, fingers working methodically along its neural whip where the skin still puckered from their bonding.

"Better than teaching your boys to piss themselves mid-flight." One of the adolescents choked on his meal, smacking his chest and coughing.

Mo'at materialised from the shadows, her silhouette backlit by bioluminescent fungi.

She said nothing, just watched as Damin's ikran butted its head against his shoulder, demanding more attention. Ateyo’s ears flattened, his nose scrunched and he scoffed.

Mo’at’s fingers hovered over Damin’s forearm, warm breath ghosting his skin. "You learn fast," she murmured. The words held no praise, only observation. She straightened abruptly, her tail flicking dismissal. "Tomorrow, we fly west."

The next morning dawned crisp and golden, with mist curling like smoke between the Hallelujah Mountains. Damin's ikran shrieked when he approached, its crest flaring recognition before it crouched to let him mount. Mo'at was already airborne, her banshee carving spirals into the cloud layer.

They flew abreast, wings nearly touching as thermals buoyed them westward. The jungle gave way to fractured badlands where the earth itself seemed to breathe, geysers erupted without warning, spitting plumes of neon vapor that curled like living things.

Damin’s ikran banked sharply to avoid one, its wingtip slicing through the steam with a hiss.

Then Mo’at pointed.

The land dropped away into a caldera so vast its far rim blurred into haze. Arches of magnetic rock spanned the chasm, their striated bands glowing faintly under Pandora’s sun, stone rainbows frozen mid-curve.

At the caldera’s heart stood a single tree, its gnarled trunk wider than Hometree’s central pillars, its weeping branches trailing luminescent tendrils.

Damin’s ikran shuddered beneath him, its wingbeats faltering. He pressed his palm flat against its neck and felt the creature’s fear through their tsaheylu, not of predators, but reverence.

The Tree of Souls’ roots plunged deep into the planet’s flesh, its canopy breathing out clouds of floating seeds that caught the light like dying stars.

Mo’at banked sharply, her fingers flicking signals. Hunt stance. Damin nocked an arrow without thought, scanning the mist-wrapped valleys below. His ikran’s crest twitched, left, just as a giant shadow moved between the ferns. Damin drew breath—

The sun vanished.

Mo’at’s warning shout barely registered before wind screamed past his ears. Damin jerked his head up. The leonopteryx filled the sky, its striped wings blotting out the sun, hooked talons outstretched.

His ikran folded midair, rolling them into a freefall before the massive claws could connect. They plummeted through a hail of severed leaves, the leonopteryx’s shriek vibrating in Damin’s ribs.

Forest rushed up to meet them. Damin wrenched sideways, barely avoiding a gnarled branch, but the leonopteryx banked with terrifying grace, shredding foliage as it pursued.

He smelled its breath, hot iron and rotting meat, before his ikran twisted through a gap no wider than his shoulders. Behind them, the predator’s wings snapped open with a thunderclap, sending shattered wood flying as it aborted the chase.

Damin didn’t slow until his ikran burst above the canopy, sides heaving. Mo’at materialised beside him, her expression unreadable. Below, the leonopteryx circled the Tree of Souls once before vanishing into the clouds, its cry echoing between the mountains.

Damin realised his hands were shaking, but it wasn’t from fear and instead exhilaration.

Mo’at’s tail flicked toward the distant speck. "Toruk," she said, as if naming a god. Then, with the barest tilt of her ears: "Tomorrow, we return."

Damin’s ikran bucked beneath him, still trembling from the near-death encounter. Its crest flared crimson in agitation, wings beating unevenly against the updrafts.

He stroked its neck, feeling the creature’s pulse hammer through their tsaheylu, wild, unsteady, alive. When he glanced at Mo’at, her golden eyes were wide, pupils blown black with adrenaline.

Their gazes locked. For a second, neither breathed, then Mo’at’s lips twitched and a snort escaped Damin’s nose. Her shoulders shook once, twice, before she threw her head back and laughed, a full-bodied sound that echoed off the canyon walls. Damin followed, his own laughter raw and disbelieving, until tears streaked his cheeks.

The holographic projection flickered as Irene rotated the 3D model with a flick of her wrist, casting jagged blue shadows across the cramped lab walls.

Damin leaned forward, his chair creaking under the sudden shift of weight, until his nose nearly touched the floating image of the Tree of Souls.

The arched roots formed a cathedral of living wood, their luminescent tendrils swaying in a breeze that didn't exist in the stale recirculated air of Hell's Gate.

"Vitraya Ramunong," Irene murmured, zooming in on the central trunk. "Their most sacred place." Her finger hovered over the projection controls. "We've never gotten closer than two klicks. The Na'vi—"

"— shoot first and don't bother asking questions," Ramona finished, popping a peanut into her mouth. She mimed a gun with her fingers. "One step past the roots? Blam. No trial, no negotiations."

Damin studied the hologram's glow reflecting in Irene's glasses, the scientist's jaw working like she was chewing glass. "There's something happening in there," she muttered.

"Biologically… I'd kill for samples. But… outsiders are strictly forbidden."

The pressure window fogged with Damin's exhale as he watched Irene and Tristan move like ghosts through the quarantine zone. Their biosuits shimmered under UV sterilization lights, masks turning every breath into visible plumes of condensation.

Beyond them, rows of specimen tanks glowed with bioluminescence, their eerie brightness casting long shadows across Tristan's clipboard as he recorded data points.

Ramona leaned against the console beside Damin, her boot tapping an irregular rhythm against the deck plating. "Thirty seconds," she murmured without looking up from her nails, the memory chip slot blinking green under Damin's hovering fingers.

Grace's archives unfolded across the screen, high-resolution scans of the Tree of Souls, spectral analyses of its root systems, time-lapse images of seed dispersal patterns that shouldn't exist.

Damin's throat tightened. Each file was timestamped from before the school massacre, back when Grace still had Na'vi collaborators.

He dragged the most damning folder onto the chip: Vitraya Ramunong - Neural Uptake (Classified).

Ramona's boot stopped tapping. "They're coming back."

Damin's fingers hovered over the chip, its blue glow painting his knuckles. The hologram of the Tree of Souls still glowed between them, tendrils swaying in digital memory.

He could almost smell the loam of its roots, hear Mo'at's voice whispering Eywa sees you.

"If you don't give Quaritch something," Ramona murmured, flicking her eyes toward the airlock's hissing hydraulics, "She’a gonna shut us down… permanently, and you know it." Her fingers brushed his wrist, warm, calloused, urgent.

The chip came free with a click that echoed louder than gunfire in Damin's skull. He pressed it into Ramona's palm, their hands clasped briefly over the image of sacred roots.

She palmed it smoothly into her flight-suit's thigh pocket just as the quarantine seal burst with a pressurised whoosh.

The airlock hissed open with a rush of sterilised air that smelled like burned plastic and antiseptic. Irene pulled off her respirator with fingers that trembled slightly, leaving red marks across the bridge of her nose.

Behind her, Tristan's biosuit crinkled as he peeled off his gloves, his dark circles looking even more pronounced under the lab's harsh lighting.

"Hey, guys," Damin said, leaning back in his chair until it creaked ominously. His boots were propped on the console, right next to a half-empty coffee cup that had probably been there since last week.

The firelight painted the totem skull in flickering blues and purples, its hollow eye sockets swallowing the glow whole.

Damin reached up without thinking, fingers brushing the ancient crest, still sharp after generations, a texture that prickled his skin. "Your ancestor rode this?"

Mo'at's tail swished in the shadows, staring at him. "My grandfather's father was Toruk Makto." She said it like stating the sun rose in the east, but her fingers suddenly and impatiently closed around Damin's wris. "He who rides Last Shadow, five times since the First Songs."

"Five."

Damin flexed his hand against hers, feeling callouses from bowstrings and knife hilts. "… That's a long damn time between riders."

The fire popped, sending embers swirling up toward Hometree's canopy, Mo'at not releasing his hand. "Toruk Makto united all the clans against the true enemy in a time of ultimate sorrow and despair."

Her grip tightened, not painfully, but like she was anchoring him to the moment. "You understand? Not by strength alone, by being chosen. All Na’vi know the story."

The skull totem's hollow eyes drank the firelight as Damin's fingers traced the jagged crest, something ancient and predatory humming beneath his fingertips. Then—

— the world tipped sideways into rushing wind and thundering hooves.

The riverbed exploded with motion below them, a living avalanche of sturmbeest surging forward in a tidal wave of muscle and dust.

Damin's ikran screamed alongside the herd's panicked bellows, their combined voices shredding the air as they banked low enough to taste the kicked-up dirt.

Ahead, a lone hunter on a direhorse materialised from the dust cloud like a spectre, his mount's six legs pistoning at full gallop. The Na'vi warrior drew back a spear longer than his body and the weapon left his hand with a sound like ripping canvas.

The sturmbeest's armoured hide caught the sunlight like hammered bronze as it stumbled mid-charge, forelegs buckling from an unseen wound.

Momentum carried its massive bulk forward, flipping once, twice, before it crashed into the riverbed with a sound like splitting timber.

Dust plumed in its wake, swirling around the twitching limbs as Damin rolled his ikran into a tight bank, wings tucked for maximum velocity.

"Now!" Mo'at's voice sliced through the windrush.

Damin nocked an arrow without looking, the fletching brushing his cheekbone as he drew with the ikran's scream harmonising with the bowstring's twang.

The shot struck true, plunging deep into the neural plexus between armored shoulders where the hide thinned.

The beast convulsed once, its death bellow reverberating off the canyon walls, before collapsing sideways in a final shudder. Its skid carved a furrow through the silt, coming to rest.

Mo'at's banshee swooped in from the sunblind side, her braids whipping like pennants as she flared her wings inches above the kill.

She landed light-footed atop the sturmbeest's heaving flank, arms raised in triumph, her grin all teeth and primal joy. "Clean strike!"

Ateyo's ikran banked in a tight arc around the fallen sturmbeest, wings slicing through the rising dust.

The hunter leaned sideways in his saddle, fingers loose on the reins, his braids whipping like angry serpents. Damin watched him circle once, twice, then freeze mid-air as their eyes locked across the kill.  

Ateyo's fingers flicked upward in a sharp, unmistakable gesture, not the fluid grace of Na’vi signing, but instead it was a salute and Damin's breath caught before he grinned like a fucking idiot.

The link unit hissed open with a wet gasp, releasing Damin into darkness thicker than Hometree's deepest shadows.

His fingers scraped against smooth polymer as he shoved the lid upward, pale fluorescent light stabbed his retinas, turning the world into a bleached-out smear.

He lay there gasping, human lungs too small, skin clammy with transfer sweat.

Hard to believe it’s only been three months.

His reflection in the monitoring screen made him flinch. Gaunt cheeks, beard patchy where the follicles had given up, eyes sunken like a corpse left in Pandora's sun too long.

The video log flickered to life with a static pop. Damin filled half the frame, hunched forward until his forehead almost touched the lens.

Damin's knuckles whitened around the edge of the recording console, the lens catching the tremor in his fingers before he forced them still.

"Three months ago, I could recite my service number in my sleep." His laugh scratched against his throat like a rusted blade. "Now? I keep waking up reaching for a queue that isn't there."

"I can barely remember my old life, fuck… I’m just… not sure who I am anymore."

The golf ball soared in a perfect parabola, slicing through Pandora’s dense atmosphere with unnatural grace before plopping into the mud just past the "220" marker.

Marcus Selfridge exhaled through his nose, the exopack’s filters turning his sigh into a mechanical wheeze. "See? I keep hooking it."

He jabbed the driver toward his oxygen unit. "It’s the damn pack. The low gravity and high air density should cancel out, but—"

Damin stepped into his sightline, boots sinking into the artificial turf. "You called us back to report." His voice was raw, human vocal cords straining after months of disuse. "Do you actually want to hear it or not, smartass?"

Selfridge’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. "Go ahead, champ."

Irene shifted her weight, the data tablet in her hands casting a blue glow across her fatigues. "Damin’s made unprecedented progress, neural adaptability scores off the charts. What he’s achieved in three months would take most operators years." She hesitated, a rarity for her. "… But what we really need is more time."

The golf club twirled once in Selfridge’s grip before stilling. "That’s not what I was hoping to hear."

His gaze flicked toward the perimeter fence, where automated sentries tracked movement in the undergrowth. "Board’s getting antsy. Every day those tree-huggers stay put costs us—"

The first raindrops hit Marcus's exopack with sharp metallic pings. He glanced up just as the sky split open, turning the fairway into a quagmire of neon mud.

Without breaking stride, Selfridge reached into his golf bag and snapped open a black umbrella with military precision.

"Marcus," Irene's voice cut through the downpour, annoyed. "It's their ancestral home! They've lived there since before human civilisation invented the wheel!"

Her fingers dug into Damin's shoulder, whether to steady herself or mark territory, he couldn't tell. "You can spare them a few more weeks, at least!"

Selfridge adjusted his cufflinks under the umbrella's shelter. "This thing is inevitable." The rain sheeted off the nylon in perfect rivulets, not a drop touching his 'perfect' hair.

"What does it matter if it happens today or next month?" His smile didn't reach his eyes as he turned toward the admin dome. "I'm sorry, Dr. Augustine…"

"You're out of time."

The umbrella vanished behind Selfridge's broad shoulders like a retreating storm cloud, leaving Damin and Irene standing in the downpour.

Rain sheeted down Damin's wheelchair handles, pooled in the hollows of his wasted thighs… useless fucking legs that couldn't even carry him three steps to plant his fist in Marcus' smarmy jaw.

"… Fuck." Irene muttered.

The armour bay's fluorescent lights buzzed like angry insects overhead, casting stark shadows across Quaritch's face as she straddled the chair backward.

Her boot heels scraped concrete when she leaned forward, studying Damin's sunken cheeks, how his human skin clung to bone after months wasting in a wheelchair.

"You're not gettin' lost in the woods, are you son?" Her rough voice reminded him of gravel and gun oil.

He focused on the rust streaking the bulkhead behind Quaritch's shoulder, rather than meet her eyes that frankly reminded him of staring the Devil in the face.

"Your last report was two weeks ago..." Quaritch tapped her knuckles against the tabletop, each impact precise as a gunshot. "Starting to doubt your resolve."

Her thumb brushed the holster at her hip. "From what I see, kid, it's time to terminate this mission."

Damin's head snapped up, adrenaline flooding his atrophied limbs. "No. I— I can do this."

Quaritch's knuckles rapped the holotable, the sound echoing like a judge's gavel. The Tree of Souls rotated between them, its roots glowing toxic blue in the tactical display. "You handed me their Achilles' heel on a silver platter, kid."

Her thumb brushed the demolition charge schematic blooming beside the sacred tree's image.

"When the shooting starts— and it will start— we'll have them by the balls before they even hear the safeties click off."

"That intel was for cultural research only—"

"Save it." Quaritch's laugh was a dry cough, her fingers digging into Damin's shoulder like talons finding purchase. "You think I don't know about their little dream hunt?"

She leaned in, her breath smelling of stimgum and gunpowder. "That's exactly why you're getting these."

Her free hand slapped a medical file against his chest, surgical schematics for neural-integrated prosthetic legs, the same tech that let Recoms run through firefights like marathon runners.

"Tomorrow's probably your last day in that chair. Then you walk back to Hometree on your own two feet and tell them whatever fairy tale gets them moving."

"Just like I promised, didn’t I?"

Damin slammed the ceramic mug down hard enough to crack the chipped glaze, coffee sloshing over his trembling fingers, the bitter dregs tasting like battery acid and regret.

Across the shack’s flickering fluorescents, Irene’s cigarette cherry flared like a warning beacon as she sucked in a drag sharp enough to hollow her cheeks.

"Damnit, Damin. I can't allow this!" Smoke curled from her nostrils as she stabbed the cigarette toward the makeshift medkit on the counter.

The antivenom vials rattled against scalpels, her glasses catching the overhead light when she leaned in. "You're not strong enough yet!"

Damin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, tasting copper where his split lip had reopened. "It’s the last door."

He shouldered past her, sending a stack of field reports sliding off the counter and papers scattered like dead leaves across the stained linoleum.

"I’m going through it! Help me or get the fuck out of the way."

Irene moved faster than her fourty years should allow. Her calloused fingers locked around his bicep with surprising strength, yanking him back mid-stride.

"Will you listen to me?!" Her shout rattled the rusted vent covers. Up close, he could see the burst capillaries in her eyes, smell the juniper-scented antiseptic clinging to her lab coat.

"Sometimes seasoned hunters don’t come back from these vision quests! The venom doesn’t just show you Eywa, it drowns you in her!"

"Continued exposure to the psychoactive alkaloid in the worm venom—"

Irene's voice cracked as she chased Damin's wheelchair down the corridor, her boots skidding on the polished flooring. "We have no goddamn idea what that cocktail will do in an Avatar's hybrid brain!" 

Damin didn't glance back. His fingers burned as they dug into the push rims, the rubberised treads squealing against his momentum when he took the corner too fast.

The emergency lights painted the hallway in intermittent streaks of red, like arterial blood smeared across glass. 

A sheet of lightning flared outside the panoramic windows, illuminating the jungle in stark negative, black trees against white fire.

The thunderclap shook the building half a second later, rattling the framed x-rays of Na'vi skeletal structures along the walls.

"Calibrating," Tristan murmured, fingers skimming across the console's backlit interface. The neural array hummed to life overhead, casting jagged blue reflections across Damin's sweat-slicked face. "Thirty seconds."

Irene's hands landed on Damin's shoulders with unexpected weight, her thumbs pressing into the knotted muscles flanking his cervical spine.

"No matter what you prove out there," she said, voice low and rough as volcanic glass, "You are still in here." She shook him once, hard enough to make his teeth click together. "Right here."

Damin's fingers twitched against the wheelchair's pushrims, tendons standing stark under ink-stained skin. "I have to go all the way. Become one of—"

"Goddammit, Damin!" Irene's shout ricocheted off the steel bulkheads. Tristan's head jerked up, clipboard clattering to the floor. "You can never be one of them!" Her nails bit through his fatigues.

"Our life out there takes millions in machinery to sustain." The link pod exhaled sterile coolant across their ankles. "You visit—" Her voice cracked. "— and you leave."

Damin's knuckles whitened around the wheelchair's pushrims, tendons standing stark under skin gone pale from disuse.

With a grunt, he leveraged his upper body forward, arms trembling as he dragged himself toward the open link unit.

His legs trailed behind him, dead weight against the padded floor. She didn't move to help, just watched as he hauled himself into the pod one agonising inch at a time, sweat beading along his hairline.

The link's interior lights painted his face in sterile blue as he rolled onto his back, breathing hard.

His thighs caught on the edge, forcing him to wrench them inside with both hands, a grotesque parody of movement.

The effort left him panting, staring up at the curved ceiling where condensation dripped like jungle rain.

"You can never truly be with her." Irene's voice cracked like thin ice over a river, the words tumbling over Damin like a collapsed building. He stopped mid-motion, one hand still braced against the pod's edge, fingers nearly denting.

A single tear fell from his left eye, making a translucent trail down his cheek. "You know why I'm here?"

"Because Quaritch sent me."

Tristan's head snapped up from the console. "What?"

Damin's fingers curled against the pod's padding. "That's right, to embed with the Omatikaya, to find out how to fucking screw them out of their home."

The words tasted like bile. "By deceit or by force, she didn't care. And if it turned out to be force..."

"Then how best to do it."

Tristan's face drained of color, his hands hovering over the controls like he'd forgotten their function with the emergency lights painting his shock in streaks of red.

But Irene just exhaled smoke through her nose, watching Damin with the eerie calm of a woman who'd seen too many men break. "And what about now, Damin?"

"I’m not that type of man, but… If I tell Quaritch the truth," he said, voice ragged, "She yanks me out, she’ll— she’ll pull my plug before I can blink." His throat worked as he swallowed. "I never see Mo'at again." 

"And if I tell Mo'at?" Damin barked a laugh that sounded more like a choke. "Clan throws me out on my ass— if I'm lucky. More likely, they cut my heart out and show it to me while I'm still breathing!"

"They won't understand what you've done," Tristan whispered, fingers hovering over the link controls like he was afraid they'd burn him. His voice cracked. "They can't."

Damin's laugh was a dry rasp. "The Na'vi don't even have a word for 'lie'— they had to learn it from us." His fingers trembled against the pod's edge, knuckles whitening as he clenched them into fists.

When he blinked, Irene saw the wet shine in his eyes before he turned his face away.

She reached out without thinking, her thumb brushing the moisture from his cheekbone. His skin was fever-hot under her touch. "I know," she said quietly. "I taught it to them."

Damin's breath hitched. Outside, the storm lashed against the compound windows, rain streaking the reinforced glass like tears. "I gotta go," he murmured, voice thick. "They're waiting for me."

Tristan called out: "Link's ready."

Damin reached for the lid, fingers brushing the release mechanism when Irene's hand shot out, slamming it back down, her palm hit the plexiglass hard enough to make the entire pod shake.

"Damin." Her voice was raw. "You can't carry this burden much longer."

A tired smile tugged at Damin's lips as the neural gel began rising around his hips, glowing faintly blue. "It's okay." The words came out thick, like his tongue was already half-asleep. The Tsahìk says an alien mind probably can't survive the Dream Hunt anyway,"

Irene's palm flattened against the pod's plexiglass lid with a sound like a tomb sealing.

Through the condensation-streaked surface, Damin's face blurred into an underwater ghost, mouth slack, eyelids fluttering with REM movement already.

His vitals moved across the overhead monitor in rhythmic green spikes, neural activity syncing with his avatar body somewhere out in Pandora's toxic night. 

"Prep my link," Irene said, stripping off her lab coat in one sharp motion, the fabric hitting the floor.

Chapter Text

The Leonopteryx skull totem loomed overhead, its hollow sockets drinking the firelight as Damin tilted his head back. Tsengue's shadow fell across him first, the Olo'eyktan's hands broad enough to span Damin's entire ribcage when they pressed against his chest.

"Oel lu set ‘itan Omatikaya." Tsengue's voice rolled through the gathering, his thumbs brushing the skin over Damin's heart. "Oel lu hapxì Na’vi."

Irene's avatar stood half-hidden behind Mo'at, her golden eyes glittering wetter than any Na'vi's ever could.

She mouthed something at him, kid or damnit, before wiping hastily at her face. Beside her, Tristan's Avatar body swayed unevenly, his grip white-knuckled on a support vine as if terrified the very air might reject him.

Then the tide of hands came.

The Leonopteryx skull loomed like a silent judge, its hollow sockets swallowing the bioluminescent glow from the gathered clan.

Damin stood frozen beneath its gaze, the carved bones suddenly alive with shifting shadows that made the predator seem to breathe.

Hands descended like falling leaves, warm, calloused, hesitant, reverent, until Damin stood beneath a living canopy of touch.

Mo’at’s palm pressed flat between his shoulder blades, Tsengue’s fingers splayed over his sternum, even Ateyo’s grudging grip anchored his right hip.

The waterfall's roar swallowed Damin's gasp as he plunged after Mo'atx his body slicing through the surface tension into liquid silence.

Cold punched his lungs, then faded as Pandora's bioluminescence bloomed beneath them like a nebula unfolding.

Their descent slowed, suspended in the amniotic glow of jellyfish-anemones pulsing electric blue. Mo'at twisted mid-sink, her braids fanning like ink in water, one hand outstretched.

Damin reached. Their fingertips brushed, hesitated, then tangled together as a school of orange and blue buoyfish spiralled around them in a living vortex.

The current carried them sideways over a garden of luminous ferns that swayed as if breathing.

Mo'at's laughter escaped in silver bubbles; Damin watched them rise toward the fractured moonlight above, their ascent mirroring his own dizzying sense of weightlessness.

The pool spat them out gasping onto moss-slick rocks. Mo'at surged upright, shaking water from her ears, droplets scattering prismatic in Polyphemus' light.

Before Damin could catch his breath, she was running again, bare feet silent on glowing lichen that rippled outward in concentric rings with every footfall.

He chased her into the willow grove. The trees arched overhead like cathedral ribs, their trailing tendrils shimmering with bioluminescent sap that dripped onto Damin's shoulders as he ducked through.

Each droplet burned cold against his skin before dissolving into mist. Mo'at spun to face him, her chest heaving, fingers splayed to catch the willow's questing filaments.

They coiled around her wrists like living jewelry, responding to her touch by brightening.

The tendrils coiled around Damin's wrists like liquid memory, their bioluminescence glowing against his skin in rhythmic waves.

He gasped as the first whisper brushed his consciousness— not sound but vibration, resonating through bone and blood before coalescing into meaning.

A hundred voices threaded through his mind, some chanting in unison, others speaking in layered echoes that made his skull ache.

"This is a place where prayers are heard with the ancestors and sometimes answered," Mo'at murmured, watching the way his fingers trembled beneath the willow's touch.

Her tail flicked once, betraying amusement when he jerked at a particularly loud voice— Nguzär's?— laughing sharp and bright behind his left ear. 

Damin exhaled shakily. "It's like... hearing through your body, I suppose?"

Mo'at's fingers traced the bark's deep grooves, catching bioluminescent sap that dripped between them like liquid stars. "We call this the Tree of Voices."

The words vibrated through Damin's ribs before reaching his ears.

Woodsprites spiraled down from the canopy, their fractal wings brushing his cheeks with electric tingles before settling along Mo'at's outstretched arms.

One landed on Damin's collarbone, with him shaking off the urge to swat it.

Her pupils dilated in the dappled light, swallowing the gold of her irises until her gaze became a tunnel of blackness Damin felt himself tipping forward into.

Mo'at inhaled sharply through flared nostrils, and stepped back just as his breath hitched. "You are Omatikaya now." She snapped a twig from an overhead branch with unnecessary force, the sound so loud it would’ve made a nearby hexapede startle.

"The wood from Hometree will make your bow." The splintered end grazed his palm when she thrust it toward him, leaving a bead of blood that three woodsprites immediately swarmed.

"And..." Mo'at's tail lashed once behind her, disturbing a cluster of glowing fungi.

"You may choose a woman." Her shoulders tensed under the beading on her top, clicking together like dice thrown in haste.

A laugh bubbled up Damin's throat, but he quickly shoved it down. Now wasn’t the time nor the place for that, especially when he was so close to winning her over. Now he just needed to reel her in.

"We have many fine women." She kept her gaze fixed on the whorls of bark, as if studying its grain could distract from the heat creeping up her neck. "Mepuya is the best singer—"

"I don’t want Mepuya."

Her tail snapped sideways, scattering a cluster of woodsprites. "Then Sey’a—" The name cracked mid-syllable (does Sey’a have two syllables? Fuck it it does now) when Damin’s fingers pressed against her lips.

"Already chosen," he murmured, watching her nostrils flare at the proximity. "… But this woman must also choose me."

"… She already has."

Mo'at's fingers slid between his like roots seeking fertile soil, hesitant at first, then curling tight when his grip answered. Their palms pressed together.

Damin leaned in until her breath warmed his lips, their foreheads touching as she tilted her face sideways.

The scent of her, rainwater and crushed leaves, flooded his senses as their cheeks brushed, her skin astonishingly soft where it grazed his Avatar flesh.

When their mouths met, it wasn't like human kissing. Mo'at's lips parted just enough to exhale sharply through her nose, her canines briefly catching his lower lip before she sucked it gently between hers.

Damin shuddered as her tongue flicked against his, once, twice, testing the unfamiliar shape of his teeth before withdrawing with a pleased hum that vibrated through his jawbone.

"Kissing," Mo'at murmured against his mouth, her tailtip flicking against his thigh, "Is very good." Her hands slid up his arms, fingers tracing the raised veins at his inner elbows. "But we have something better."

She guided him down, the moss’ bioluminescence brightening where their knees pressed into the spongy surface.

Damin's queue was already lifting of its own accord, the tendrils twitching toward hers like plants seeking sunlight.

Mo'at made a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp when their neural whips finally brushed, a fleeting contact that sent electric warmth going down Damin's spine.

Damin felt the connection like liquid fire down his spine, not pain, but the searing intimacy of his nervous system laid bare against hers.

Mo'at's fingers tightened haeshly around his as their neural tendrils twitched in unison, each undulation sending phantom sensations flowing through muscle memory neither body had ever possessed separately.

He nearly gasped when the first full sync hit, not just shared sensation but shared context.

Mo'at's memories flooded his synapses: the weight of her first hunting bow, the sting of Tsengue's disapproval when she'd challenged Ateyo's right to lead the hunt, all of her childhood and early years and so on and so forth.

Each recollection carried the visceral punch of lived experience, until Damin couldn't tell where his proprioception ended and hers began.

Their lips met again as the connection deepened, this time with none of the tentative exploration from before.

Mo'at's canines scraped his lower lip in a gesture that made his heart rate spike— not aggression but eager possession.

Damin groaned into the kiss when her queue tightened around his, the pressure translating directly into a wave of pleasure so intense his vision whited out at the edges.

They sank onto the moss together, their combined weight sending bioluminescent ripples radiating outward in concentric circles.

(A bit later cause I’m not fucking writing that that’s not what we’re here to read folks…)

Mo'at's ear twitched against Damin's chest, her head rising and falling with each breath he took. "We are mated now," she said abruptly, her voice muffled against his skin.

Damin's hand stilled. "We are?"

Mo’at blinked up at him with those impossible golden eyes, her pupils wide and dark as Pandora’s endless night. "Yes, it is our way."

She tilted her head, the beads in her hair clicking softly. "Oh." A flicker of amusement danced across her features. "I forgot to tell?"

Damin levered himself up on one elbow, making her meet his gaze. "Really, we are?"

Her fingers traced the swirling patterns on his chest, following the bright bioluminescent spots and stripes. "We are." 

Damin exhaled through his nose, half laugh, half surrender, then let his head drop back onto the moss. "It’s cool, I’m there."

Mo'at's arms slid around him, her palms warm against the small of his back as she pulled him closer. The scent of crushed ferns and rainwater still clung to her hair when Damin buried his face against her neck.

The darkness tasted of stale coolant and recycled air. Damin blinked at the curved ceiling inches from his nose, the link pod's interior pressing against him like a coffin. The disconnect was physical pain.

Polyphemus' first rays pierced the willow grove like golden spears, igniting the bioluminescent moss beneath them into emerald fire. Mo'at's breath stirred warm against Damin's collarbone, her tail curled possessively around his thigh.

Then the world fractured.

A sound like mountains splitting shook the glade. Mo'at's eyes snapped open, pupils contracting to slits as the willows trembled around them.

Distant cracks escalated into catastrophic splintering, the death wail of thousand-years-old trees.

Mo'at's fingers dug into Damin's shoulders hard enough to bruise. "Damin!"

Her shout cut through the grove's dying whispers as the bulldozer's shadow swallowed the willow's glow in increments, first the roots, then the trunk, climbing upward like floodwaters, the blade's hydraulic hiss drowning out woodsprites' panicked flight.

"Damin! Tìtxen si! Ma’Damin!" Mo'at's voice ripped through the grove like a blade, her hands shaking him violently, her voice shaky with unshed tears.

The ceramic mug hit the counter with a crack loud enough to startle Irene awake. Coffee sloshed over Damin’s fingers as he lunged for the link pod’s controls, his wheelchair screeching across the linoleum.

"Goddamnit, Damin— eat!" Irene slammed the pod’s lid shut with her hip, thrusting a plate of rubbery microwaved eggs under his nose. "I’d hate to have to force-feed a cripple."

Beyond the shack’s grimy windows, dawn painted the sky in RDA orange, the exact colour of dozer floodlights.

He shoveled eggs into his mouth with his fingers, barely chewing. "Mo’at’s—" A chunk of egg caught in his throat. "Not going anywhere," Irene finished, yanking the empty plate away as he gagged.

The link pod hissed open. Damin’s nostrils flared at the stench of unwashed lab coat and stale nicotine as Irene leaned in to adjust his neural array.

"When was the last time you took a shower, Jesus—" He batted her hands away, slamming the lid down himself, the world dissolving into blue static.

Polyphemus’ first light speared through the willow grove just as the ground beneath Avatar Damin shuddered.

Mo’at’s scream tore through the air before the sound registered, a metallic shriek of shearing roots, the death rattle of millennia-old wood.

Her hands scrabbled against his shoulders, nails biting through his skin as she tried to drag him. "Tìtxen si!"

Damin leapt up as the dozer's floodlights carved through the willow grove like a scalpel through flesh. The machine's yellow bulk filled his vision, its blade a steel grin chewing through roots thicker than his thighs.

Damin's bare feet pounded against the torn earth, kicking up clods of glowing moss that stuck to his shins like embers.

The bulldozer's floodlights painted his silhouette in stark relief, a lone figure throwing himself between the machine and the ancient willow.

His arms spread wide, fingers splayed like a net cast to stop the tide. "Heeeey! Stop!"

Inside the ops center's climate-controlled silence, the security monitor showed only grainy thermal imaging, a tall, painted figure gesticulating wildly before the dozer's blade, no audio transmitting the desperation cracking Damin's voice.

The tractor operator's thumb hovered over the kill switch, his neck craning toward the supervisor's station. "Yo, got one of them blue monkeys blocking my blade!"

Marcus Selfridge's polished loafers clicked across the floor as he leaned over the operator's shoulder.

The screen's greenish tint rendered Damin's ceremonial stripes abstract, his braids indistinguishable from the willow's thrashing tendrils.

"Christ, they're bold today..." Selfridge tapped the monitor with his putter.

The bulldozer's engine growled like a waking predator as its tracks chewed through sacred soil, spitting up clods of bioluminescent moss that stuck to Damin's calves like dying embers.

He could feel Mo'at's grip on his shoulder blades digging in, her nails drawing blood through his ceremonial paint, but all his focus narrowed to the operator's shadowed silhouette behind the reinforced glass.

"Sir?" The driver's voice crackled through the comms, tinny with static. His gloved fingers flexed around the joystick controls. "Orders?"

Marcus Selfridge's putter tapped an idle rhythm against his polished wingtip.

On-screen, Damin's striped chest heaved under the floodlights, his braids whipping like willow tendrils in the machine's exhaust. Selfridge sighed through his nose.

"Roll on. He'll move." His knuckles whitened around the club's grip. "These ‘people’ have to learn we don't stop."

Hydraulics hissed as the blade descended, chewing through sacred roots with the wet crunch of snapping bone.

 Damin's heels dug into the shredded moss, arms still spread wide, until the dozer's momentum sent him sprawling backward over exposed roots.

For one gut-churning second, his body vanished beneath the blade's curved steel maw.

Damin reappeared scrambling sideways, shoulder rolling over shattered bark before launching himself at the dozer's flank.

His fingers found purchase on exposed hydraulic lines, bare feet kicking against tread guards as he hauled himself up like some feral, blue-scaled spider, holding a rock in his left hand.

The operator's panicked breath fogged his visor. "What the—"

His gloved hand slapped at the joystick, floodlights swinging wildly to illuminate Damin's snarling face as he clambered onto the camera mast, the rock coming down in a two-handed overhead arc.

The rock came down with the hollow clang of metal meeting stone, once, twice, three times, four times, five times… Damin's muscles straining with each savage impact.

The camera lens shattered first, glass fragments skittering across the dozer's armoured hood like brittle rain. Next went the floodlight housing, its casing crumpling inward with a shower of sparks that licked at his forearms.

In the ops center, Marcus Selfridge jerked backward as their primary feed dissolved into pixelated chaos. The monitor fizzed with static, Damin's snarling face fracturing into digital snow before vanishing entirely.

"Shit—" The operator's gloves squeaked against the controls as he yanked back on the throttle. "I'm blind!" Hydraulics whined in protest as the blade jerked upward, its edge catching the last intact branch of the willow with a splintering crack.

The dozer shuddered to a halt beneath Damin's bare feet, its hydraulics hissing like a wounded beast.

But the forest's death rattle continued, a symphony of snapping branches and screaming metal as more machines advanced through the glade.

Through the haze of shredded foliage, Damin counted six bulldozers with plasma cutters mounted like tusks, their glowing blades carving through thousand-year-old trunks with the ease of a knife through flesh.

Mo'at's nails bit into Damin's forearm as a troop transport rumbled past, its treads churning bioluminescent moss into blackened paste.

The stench of scorched earth and diesel choked them as power-suited figures disembarked, their armoured boots crushing delicate fern gardens underfoot.

One trooper swung his rifle toward the stalled dozer, spraying bullets that pinged off its blade in a shower of sparks.

Damin yanked Mo'at sideways just as a round grazed his shoulder, leaving a searing line of pain as they tumbled into a thicket of shuddering fan-leaves.

The foliage swallowed them whole.

Pressed belly-down in the mud, Damin felt Mo'at's entire body shake against his side as a plasma cutter sheared through the great willow, their willow, its bioluminescent sap gushing like arterial spray.

The tree fell in slow motion, its canopy catching on neighboring branches with a sound like a dying man's last, rattling breath.

When it finally crashed to the earth, the impact sent tremors through the ground beneath them.

Mo'at made a sound Damin had never heard from anyone ever before: a high, keening wail stifled against her own palm.

Her golden eyes reflected the advancing floodlights, pupils shrunk to pinpricks as she watched troopers laugh while kicking apart a nest of panicked woodsprites.

One stamped on a cluster of glowing fungi, grinding it into the mud with his bootheel as casually as crushing a cigarette.

Damin pulled her against his chest, too hard at first, then loosening his grip when she stiffened. "They won't touch the Tree of Souls," he murmured into her hair. "They can't get through to the—"

Mo'at's wail crescendoed, sharp enough to make his eardrums throb. She twisted in his arms, fingers clawing at his shoulders, her breath coming in ragged bursts that smelled of crushed leaves and salt.

The sound wasn't anything human or Na’vi, a guttural, keening vibration that seemed to ripple through the very air, shaking droplets from the trembling ferns above them, her tears streaming down her face.

The playback froze mid-snarl— Damin's lips peeled back from sharpened canines, his braids whipping sideways like willow tendrils caught in a storm.

The resolution was crisp enough to count the flecks of hydraulic fluid spattered across his cheekbones, the wild dilation of his pupils swallowing golden irises whole.

"Enhance the fucking thing," Quaritch ordered, her knuckles whitening around the stylus she'd been tapping against her thigh.

The image shook, then resolved with unnatural clarity, Damin's left hand gripping the rock, his right forearm pressed against the camera housing.

"Son of a bitch," Selfridge breathed, leaning so close his breath fogged the monitor.

The stylus snapped between Quaritch's fingers. Plastic shards clattered across the tactical table as she pivoted toward the watch commander, her boots squeaking on polished linoleum. "Get me a pilot and prep my Dragon! Now!"

Chapter Text

Irene stood gripping a support vine while amongst her, over three dozen hunters stamped in tight concentric circles, their ochre-painted chests gleaming with sweat.

Tsengue's voice boomed across the gathering space, his bow catching the firelight as he raised it overhead. "Tsampongut Ateyoìl iveyk!" (Ateyo will lead the war party!)

The declaration sent a ripple through the warriors, their tails lashing in unison as Ateyo stepped forward, his scars glowing redder under the bioluminescent paints.

Irene shoved through the press of bodies, her golden eyes wide. "Ftang! Rutxe! Fìkem nì'ul kawng sìyi nì'aw!" (Stop! Please! This will only make it worse!)

Her Na'vi cracked under the strain of desperation, the syntax crumbling as Ateyo backhanded her aside without breaking stride.

"You do not speak here!" Spittle flew from his bared canines as the warriors' answering howls shook pollen from the ceiling vines.

Damin felt the shift before he saw it, the collective inhale of fifty hunters turning as one toward the disturbance. Mo'at's fingers dug into his forearm, her nostrils flaring at the scent.

Damin's throat clicked as he swallowed, the words ready but tasting like iron on his tongue.

He turned Mo'at's wrist over in his grip, tracing the veins beneath her skin with his thumb.

"Okay, listen—" The pressure of her fingers tightened around his. "There's something I have to tell you…" The torchlight painted her face in fractured gold, catching the question in her widened pupils.

"It's gonna be hard, I just need you to—"

The crowd rippled like water struck by stone. Ateyo's shadow fell across them before his footsteps registered, his chest heaving with exertion or rage, Damin couldn't tell.

His face whitened, while Ateyo's snarl cut through the murmurs,

"YOU!"

Ateyo's palms struck Damin's sternum with the force of a landslide.

The impact sent him sprawling backward over a basket of arrowheads, the scattered projectiles biting into his palms as he caught himself.

Irene muttered: "Oh, shit!", thinking about going over to him before stopping herself.

Ateyo's bellow shook the gathering space like thunder splitting rock, "You mated with this woman?!" Damin rose from the arrow-strewn ground, his palm outstretched toward Mo'at even as Ateyo's chest heaved inches from his face.

Mo'at moved without hesitation. Her fingers slid between Damin's like vines seeking sunlight, the rough pads of her palms pressing hard against his trembling grip.

Oma stepped forward, her ceremonial beads clicking like falling stones.

The torchlight carved hollows beneath her cheekbones as she studied Mo'at's interlaced fingers with Damin. "Is this true?" 

Mo'at lifted her chin. "Eo Eywa moe muntxa slolu." (We are mated before Eywa.)

"Lu hasey." (It is done.)

Ateyo whirled toward Tsengue before the last syllable faded, his scarred face contorting, his claws digging into his own forearms as if to physically restrain the tremor in his vocal cords. "Mo’at fkol pänutolìng oer!" (Mo’at was promised to me!)

"Fra’u leratängem!" (Everything is changing!) Ateyo's voice escalated into a guttural snarl as he kicked over a basket of arrow shafts, the scattering wood clattering like bones.

"Fra’ut fkol skera’a!" (Everything is being destroyed!)

Damin saw it happen in slow motion, the exact instant Ateyo's pain metastasised into rage.

The warrior's nostrils flared wide enough to show the inflamed pink interior as he spun toward the clan, one finger stabbing at Damin's chest.

"Fayhetuwongìri, tsat ‘ampi, tspìyang." (These aliens kill everything they touch.) The words dripped like venom, his yellowed canines gleaming under torchlight.

When he spat "Pxel tum," (Like poison.) the spittle struck Damin's cheek with startling warmth.

Oma moved between them, her beaded headdress casting jagged shadows as she turned not to Ateyo, but to her own daughter.

The Tsahìk's ceremonial knife trembled in her grip, not with hesitation, but with the effort of restraining herself from slashing Damin’s queue off herself.

"Mo’at!" The single name carried generations of disappointment. "If you choose this path—" Her free hand gestured at Damin's humanoid frame, the gesture encompassing all his alien inadequacies, "… you can never be Tsahìk."

Mo’at’s thumb brushed his knuckles, before she squared her shoulders and met her mother's gaze.

"I have chosen, Sa’nu."

Chapter Text

Ateyo's knife flashed like a sliver of broken moonlight. Damin saw the strike before it came, not with his eyes, but with the memory of Mo'at's grip tightening around his fingers moments earlier, a warning transmitted through touch.

He twisted sideways, the blade scoring air where his ribs had been, and drove his elbow upward in a sharp arc.

The impact cracked against Ateyo's nasal ridge with a wet crunch. Blood splattered the trampled earth between them, black as oil in the firelight.

The warrior staggered back, one hand clutching his face. His tail lashed twice, scattering droplets across the gathered hunters' legs.

Damin braced for the second attack, knees bent, palms open— only for Tsengue's massive hand to clamp around Ateyo's bicep like a vice.

The Olo'eyktan yanked Ateyo backward with such force his feet left the ground.

Ateyo hit the packed earth shoulder-first, his knife skittering into the firelight's edge where it lay vibrating like a plucked bowstring.

Tsengue didn't release his grip, if anything, his fingers tightened until Ateyo's tendon creaked under the pressure. "Kehe!"

Damin watched the tendons in Tsengue's forearm ripple as he hauled Ateyo upright. Blood sheeted down the warrior's face from his broken nose, black streaks carving through ceremonial paint.

The Samson's rotors roared like a caged beast as Ramona Chacón banked hard around a jagged outcrop, her knuckles whitening on the cyclic.

Sweat beaded along her hairline despite the cockpit's aggressive air conditioning, the droplets catching in the constellation of freckles scattered across her olive skin.

Colonel Victory Quaritch filled the left seat like a storm cloud, all wiry muscle and scar tissue packed into a flight suit two sizes too small.

Her cropped white hair gleamed under the instrument lights, the strands as stiff as the medals pinned to her chest. When she turned, the twin steel studs piercing either side of her mouth caught the light like flecks of mica in granite.

Ramona's throat clicked as she swallowed. "Loveshack, this is Samson One Six inbound hot to your pos," she recited, fingers dancing across the comm panel.

"I have Colonel Quaritch with me and—"

Quaritch's hand shot out, slamming the transmit switch down hard enough to crack the plastic housing. "Did I tell you to fucking announce us?!"

"… Sorry, Sir, it’s procedure."

The Samson's floodlights carved through Pandora's canopy like surgical incisions, igniting the foliage below in lurid green.

Tristan's dark amber eyes flickered between the silent comms console and the motionless link pods, his fingers hovering over the controls like a pianist hesitating before a dissonant chord.

The overhead lights caught the sweat beading along his hairline where the tight black braids met his forehead, each droplet magnifying the tension in his frown.

His knuckles, darker than the rest of his skin, marked with old scar tissue from fieldwork, pressed uselessly against the comm panel's cracked plastic.

"Samson One Six, respond!" The words scraped his throat raw. Static hissed back at him, punctuated by the wet click of him swallowing. 

Behind him, the link pods were silent with deceptive serenity.

Tristan's braids swung forward as he bent double, pressing his forehead against the console's edge, the metal cool against his skin despite the Pandoran heat creeping through the shack's tin walls.

Ramona's Samson hit the dirt hard enough to bounce, skids screeching.

Before the rotors even stopped spinning, Quaritch was out, boots slamming onto the tarmac with enough force to crack the pavement.

Six troopers followed like a pack of jackals, rifles shouldered, visors reflecting the sodium glare of floodlights.

Inside the Commons, the staves cracked like gunshots. Ateyo moved with the precision of a predator, each strike aimed at Damin's ribs, his throat, the vulnerable hollow behind his knee.

Damin countered with the raw desperation of a man fighting for his right to breathe— blocking, pivoting, landing a brutal elbow that sent Ateyo reeling.

The warrior staggered, before Damin's follow-up strike caught him across the temple. Ateyo went down hard, one knee hitting the packed earth with a thud that shook pollen from the vines overhead.

The shack's inner door exploded inward. Quaritch filled the doorway like a landslide, her scarred lips peeled back from steel-studded teeth.

Tristan lunged— "You can't just—" —and Quaritch backhanded him into the console without breaking stride.

Her fist came down on the emergency cutoff like a guillotine blade.

Irene's avatar collapsed mid-step, her golden eyes rolling white as neural feedback lanced through her system. Mo'at barely caught her before she face-planted into the ground, the avatar's dead weight dragging them both to their knees.

Damin's forearm met Ateyo's descending staff with a crack that echoed through the hollow, bone against hardwood, when his pupils suddenly dilated, gold swallowed by black.

The neural disconnect hit like a sandbag to the skull. K-RACK! Ateyo's follow-through strike caught his temple with the sickening thud of a melon splitting.

Damin crumpled mid-stride, his body folding bonelessly into the trampled ferns.

Ateyo's victory cry curdled the air before his brain registered the abnormality. He prodded Damin's ribs with his staff's butt-end, once, twice, no reflexive flinch.

The Avatar lay like gutted game, breath shallow, eyelids fluttering without focus. He'd struck warriors into unconsciousness before, but never seen a body abandon itself mid-fight.

Mo'at's wail tore through the murmuring crowd—

The link pod hissed open like a decompression chamber, steam curling from Damin's nostrils as he surged upright, veins standing stark against sweat-slicked skin. His chest heaved, as he swung his legs over the pod's edge.

"Are you out of your goddamn mind?!" The words tore from his throat raw as a fresh wound. His palms hit the floor tiles hard enough to crack one, wheelchair forgotten in the corner as he leveraged himself upright on trembling arms.

Quaritch's fist connected before the sentence finished echoing.

The impact snapped Damin's head sideways, his vision fracturing into white sparks. He tasted copper, felt the warm drip down his chin before registering the pain.

His knees buckled, hands caught him under the armpits, rough grip of armoured gloves biting into bare skin as troopers hauled him backward.

Ateyo's knife kissed Damin's throat with the intimacy of a lover, the curved edge parting skin just enough to draw a single black bead of blood that traced the blade's contour.

"This is a demon in a false body," Ateyo spat, his grip tightening in Damin's hair until scalp burned.

"It should not live." The Na'vi's pupils had dilated into perfect circles, swallowing the gold of his irises whole.

Damin saw the killing stroke begin, the subtle bunching of Ateyo's shoulder muscles, the way his thumb repositioned along the knife's hilt, before Mo'at's cry shattered the moment.

She struck Ateyo like a comet, her shoulder driving into his ribs with the full momentum of her sprint. The impact sent them both skidding through trampled ferns, her fingers raking four parallel furrows across his chest paint before they separated.

Ateyo rolled twice before springing upright, his tail lashing once to regain balance.

What he saw froze him mid-snarl: Mo'at straddling Damin's chest, her ceremonial knife held sideways in her teeth like some feral bride's bouquet, her ears flattened. Her braids swung forward to curtain Damin's face as she leaned low over him.

Ateyo straightened with a wet gasp, fingers probing his shattered nose. Black blood sheeted between his knuckles as he turned toward the assembled warriors, their painted faces frozen in torchlit shock.

His chest rose once, twice, then he spat a globule of viscous fluid that struck the trampled earth between Damin's sprawled legs. 

"Ma’kxeyey," he growled. (My mistake.)

Damin's tongue clicked against the roof of his mouth, dry, while his split lip reopened against his teeth.

The monitor's glow painted Quaritch's scars neon green where she leaned over his shoulder, the frozen image of his avatar self filling the screen: pupils blown wide, fist clenched around a blood-slicked rock mid-swing.

The stylus stabbed between his ribs, plastic cracking against bone. "Local pussy got you punch-drunk, marine?"

"You forget which fucking uniform you wear?"

The zip-ties left angry red furrows around Tristan's wrists where he'd struggled against them, the plastic edges frayed from his futile twisting.

He kept flexing his fingers as if testing their circulation, his dark eyes darting between Irene's ashen face and Quaritch's steel-toed boots tapping an impatient rhythm on the lab floor.

Irene's chipped nail polish scraped against her own restraints, her nostrils flaring at the stench of gun oil and sweat clinging to the troopers flanking them.

Quaritch's knuckles cracked as she flexed them, the sound making Tristan flinch visibly.

She leaned in until the cold metal of her lip studs brushed Damin's earlobe, her breath reeking of nicotine and something acrid beneath it. "You disappoint me, Corporal,"

"Did that blue cunt squeeze your brain out through your dick, or were you always this fucking stupid?"

Selfridge snorted from his perch on a supply crate, his polished loafers swinging like a child's. The overhead lights gleamed off his slicked-back hair as he twirled his putter.

"Gotta say, Sully—" The club's grip tapped Damin's bruised cheekbone, "— didn't peg you for the type to go native over some ugly alien woman."

Damin met Selfridge's gaze with a glare hot enough to melt steel.

His fingers curled on the arm rests of the wheelchair, tendons standing out like cables as he imagined wrapping them around Marcus' throat— for calling Mo'at ugly, for desecrating the grove, for existing.

The taste of copper flooded his mouth where he'd bitten through his own cheek.

Irene stepped between them, her lab coat sleeve brushing Damin's arm. "Marcus, listen—" Her voice cracked with urgency, "— there may still be time to—"

Quaritch's sidearm cleared its holster with a sound like a bone snapping. "Shut your fucking hole!" The barrel hovered inches from Irene's forehead, the colonel's trigger finger whitening.

Irene's laugh cut through the tension like a scalpel before sje leaned forward, until the cold metal kissed her skin. "Or what, Ranger Rick?"

Her pupils swallowed her irises whole. "You gonna shoot me?" Without breaking eye contact, she jerked her chin toward Selfridge. "You need to muzzle your dog."

Selfridge's polished loafers hit the floor with twin thuds as he slid off the supply crate, hands raised like a peacekeeper stepping between warring beasts.

"Can we just—" His voice cracked mid-sentence, the putter clattering to the floor when Quaritch's sidearm swung toward him instead. "Christ, Vic! Take it down a couple notches!"

Damin watched Irene's heart hammer in her exposed throat, the barrel's shadow bisecting her Adam's apple. His wheelchair creaked as he leaned forward, fingers digging into the armrests. "You say you want to keep your people alive?"

"Start by listening to her."

Quaritch's knuckle whitened on the trigger, then relaxed by millimeters. The barrel didn't waver, but her scarred eyebrow arched. Damin held that glacial stare as he tilted his chin toward Irene.

Irene exhaled through her nose. The red imprint of zip-ties circled her wrists like ceremonial markings as she raised her hands, fingers trembling, not from fear, but from the effort of restraint. "Those trees weren't just culturally significant, Marcus. They were neural hubs."

Selfridge snorted, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "Oh, here we go—"

"Actual synaptic connections." Irene's voice dropped to a whisper. The overhead fluorescents flickered across her face as she stepped closer, her shadow swallowing Selfridge's polished loafers. "Like the corpus callosum between hemispheres. You just lobotomised a sentient ecosystem!"

Selfridge's putter clattered against the floor. His throat worked twice before words emerged. "Bullshit! I can throw a stick in the air around here, and it’ll fall onto some stupid sacred fern!"

The lab's overhead fluorescents buzzed like angry insects, catching the sweat beading along her hairline where graying roots met chemically straightened hair.

"It's in the mycorrhizal networks." Her voice cracked mid-syllable, the clinical detachment fracturing under something raw. "The trees... they don't just communicate. They remember."

Selfridge's polished loafers squeaked as he pivoted, his designer socks flashing beneath cuffed slacks. "Jesus Christ, Irene—"

The putter swung wildly in his grip, its graphite shaft trembling like a divining rod over hellfire. "You expect me to believe these overgrown houseplants are sentient?"

She turned and looked to Damin, the whites of her eyes visible all around like a spooked horse. "I can't do this," she hissed through clenched teeth.

"How am I supposed to reduce twenty-three years of xenobotanical research into a soundbite for corporate illiterates?!"

Damin's wheelchair creaked as he leaned forward, his split lip reopening against his teeth. Blood welled copper-bright. "Tell him what you know in your heart,"

He murmured, so low only Irene could hear. His knuckles gleamed bone-white where they gripped the armrests. "Not the data, the truth."

Something shifted behind Irene's pupils, a crystallisation, like magma cooling into bedrock. She turned to Marcus, shoulders squaring beneath the stained lab coat

The overhead fluorescents carved hollows beneath her cheekbones, as she inhaled slowly through her nose.

"Alright, look—" Irene's fingers went dor her holopad, before remembering Quaritch had confiscated it. She exhaled, annoyed, through her nose, the sound ragged at the edges. "I don't have the answers yet! I'm just now starting to even frame the questions."

Marcus's polished loafers squeaked as he shifted weight, his golf putter tapping an arrhythmic beat against his thigh. The sodium lights overhead caught the sweat sheening his temples. "Christ's sake—"

"What we think we know—" Irene talked over him, her voice gaining texture as the words tumbled out, "— is there's electrochemical communication between root systems. Not just chemical signaling— actual voltage-gated ion channels firing across fungal synapses."

Her hands sketched shapes in the air, drawing invisible dendrites between them. "Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to its neighbors. And with ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora—"

Marcus's eyebrows climbed his forehead. "That's... a lot, I'm guessing."

Irene's fingers moved toward her missing holopad again, frustration etching lines between her brows. "That's more connections than the human brain."

She stepped forward until her shadow swallowed Marcus's polished loafers whole. "You get it? It's a network— a global network."

Her palms pressed together suddenly, fingers interlacing like synaptic branches. "And the Na'vi can access it— upload and download data— memories—at sites like the one you just bulldozed into mulch."

Marcus's putter clattered to the floor. His throat worked twice before words emerged. "What the hell have you people been smoking out there?!" The veins in his temples bulged under the sterile lighting. "They're just. Goddamn. Trees!"

A muscle jumped in Irene's jaw as she watched Quaritch tap the console, her steel-studded lips curving when the grainy footage filled the monitors.

Damin's self flickered across every screen in the lab, hollow-eyed, sweat-streaked, his hair ratty as he paced in his wheelchair before a recording device in the dead of night.

"Wake up, Marcus," Irene murmured, her voice cutting through the buzz of fluorescents. "The wealth of this world isn't in the ground."

She swept her arm toward the panoramic window where the obliterated willow grove still smoldered. "It's all around us. The Na'vi know that—"

Quaritch's laugh was a serrated thing. "We understand them just fine." Her knuckle whitened on the playback control. "Thanks to Damin here."

The footage lurched into motion— Damin clutching his head, his pupils blown wide as he spat, "They're not going to give up their home—"

His hands slashed downward like claws. "Not gonna make a deal. For what? Lite beer and shopping channels?" A hysterical laugh tore from his throat.

"There's nothing we have that they want. We're monsters to them. We're the fucking demons from space!"

The playback froze on Damin's contorted face mid-rant, his lips peeled back from bloody teeth like a cornered animal.

Quaritch tapped the console once— click— and the image pixelated into stillness, trapping his betrayal in digital amber.

Damin's throat clicked as he swallowed. He saw it in the Colonel's posture before she spoke, the way her scarred knuckles whitened around the desk's edge, the predatory roll of her shoulders as she straightened.

"Well, Corporal." Quaritch's steel-studded lips curved, her voice dropping into something almost tender. "Since a deal can't be made—"

Her boot heels cracked against the floor tiles as she circled him, the sound surgical in its precision. "— it gets real simple."

She stopped behind his wheelchair, her breath hot and nicotine-rough against his ear. "So thanks." Her chuckle vibrated through his sternum. "I'm getting all emotional!"

One gloved hand gripped his chin, wrenching his face toward hers. "Might just give you a big wet kiss..."

Irene's fingers went toward her holster, where her tranquilizer gun should've been, before remembering Quaritch's troopers had stripped it from her.

She exhaled through her nose, the sound ragged at the edges. "Marcus," she said, "We need to talk, like rational people."

Selfridge's polished loafers squeaked as he pivoted, the golf putter swinging absently at his side. "Well, I'd cherish that," he said, sarcasm dripping in his tone, the overhead fluorescents catching the sweat sheening his receding hairline.

His smile didn't reach his eyes. "But unfortunately—" The putter's graphite shaft tapped against his thigh like a countdown. "— you're out of here on the next shuttle."

Damin's wheelchair creaked as he stiffened.

"All of you." Selfridge's manicured hand flicked toward the trio, Irene's frayed lab coat, Tristan's bruised wrists, Damin's blood-crusted lips.

The sodium lights carved hollows beneath his cheekbones.

"Avatar Program's shut down, and that’s effective now."

Damin's fingers curled around his wheelchair's armrests, the cheap plastic flexing under his grip as if he could crush the reality of Selfridge's decree into something malleable.

Irene stood perfectly still, her breath shallow enough that the stained fabric of her lab coat barely stirred.

Tristan's shoulders hitched violently as the sob tore through him, a wet, ragged sound that seemed to scrape his throat raw on the way out.

He turned his face into the crook of his elbow, smearing snot across the frayed cuff of his jacket sleeve. The fluorescent lights overhead made the tear tracks on his cheeks glisten like snail trails as he sucked in a shuddering breath. 

"Fuck," he whispered, the word cracking mid-syllable. His fingers trembled against his eyelids, pressing hard enough to leave temporary crescent moons in the dark skin. 

Chapter Text

The lab smelled of stale coffee and crushed dreams. Vivaan Patel moved between workstations like a ghost, her dark fingers flickering over holopad archives as she wiped datasets with precision.

Behind her, two Sec-Ops troopers loomed, rifles slung low, helmets reflecting the sickly glow of deactivated monitors.

One nudged a specimen jar with his boot, some bioluminescent fungus preserved in gel, sending it rolling across the floor until it cracked against the baseboard.

Nobody bothered to pick it up.

Damin watched Irene's fingers tighten around a half-packed crate, her knuckles whitening against the cardboard. The muscles along her jawline jumped as she ground her teeth.

"They bulldozed that site on purpose," she muttered. "To trigger a response." Her voice dropped lower, barely audible over the clatter of equipment being tossed into lockers.

"They're fabricating this war to get what they want."

Tristan shook his head, his braids swaying with the motion, clutching a stack of field notebooks to his chest like armour. "No way. I can't—" His throat worked.

"Marcus wouldn't approve genocide over profit margins."

"Yup." Damin's wheelchair creaked as he leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees and the shadows under his eyes looked like bruises in the emergency lighting.

"That's how it's done. When people are sitting on shit you want, you make them your enemy." He lifted one hand, fingers curling into a fist. "Then you're justified in taking it."

The emergency lighting painted Vivaan's dark skin in sickly yellow as she wiped the last dataset from the holopad, her fingers moving like a coroner closing an autopsy.

The lab doors exploded inward via a boot, Ramona's boots skidding across the linoleum as she fought to stop her momentum.

Her helmet dangled from one gloved hand, the visor cracked from some unseen impact, and her flight suit bore fresh scorch marks along the right sleeve. "They're rolling gunships!"

Damin's wheelchair shrieked as he pivoted, the casters leaving black streaks on the floor. "When?!"

"NOW!" Ramona's glove squeaked against the doorframe as she caught her balance, her other hand pressing her earpiece tighter.

Static crackled through the open comm channel, the distorted chatter of troopers locking and loading, the whine of turbine engines cycling up.

"We're spooling up now! I gotta—" Her head jerked sideways as someone barked orders in her earpiece.

"My God," Irene whispered, pure terror in her eyes. She slammed her palms against the reinforced glass, watching the first wave of Scorpions lift off in formation, their turbines screaming, rotors slicing through the morning mist like cleavers.

Damin pumped his wheelchair forward with furious, uneven strokes, the casters screeching against the polished floor as he barreled toward the airfield doors. Irene sprinted after him, her lab coat flapping like the wings of a grounded bird.

Selfridge stood silhouetted against the dawn-lit tarmac, hands clasped behind his back like a general surveying his troops.

The floodlights carved his profile into sharp relief, the perfectly groomed stubble, the crisp collar of his dress shirt, the way his designer sunglasses caught the reflection of missile racks being loaded.

Selfridge's polished loafers scuffed the tarmac as he pivoted, his designer sunglasses reflecting the frenzied scramble of troopers arming Scorpion gunships.

"You're not listening," Irene snarled, grabbing his elbow hard enough to wrinkle the crisp linen sleeve. Her chipped nails digging into his forearm as she jerked him around.

"Those aren't insurgents in that tree— they're families!" Her voice cracked like thin ice over dark water. "Mothers nursing infants, elders who've never held a weapon!"

Damin's wheelchair brakes hissed as he skidded to a stop beside them, his knuckles bone-white where they gripped the armrests. Blood from his split lip dotted the khaki fabric of his pants like gruesome polka dots.

Selfridge exhaled through his nose, the sound exasperated, and adjusted his sunglasses with two fingers. "Christ, Irene," he said, flipping up his shades to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You act like we're bombing a preschool!"

His manicured hand swept toward the jungle horizon where Hometree's distant silhouette pierced the mist. "It's one tree, they got thousands! I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of fucking trees!"

Irene's fingers dug into Selfridge's forearm hard enough to wrinkle his designer sleeve, her chipped nail polish catching the morning light as she forced him to meet her gaze.

"Look, Marcus," she hissed, her voice low and urgent like the warning growl of a predator.

"You don't want this kind of blood on your hands, let me try to talk them out." Her thumb brushed the expensive fabric of his shirt.

"They trust me."

He hesitated, his sunglasses reflecting the distant silhouette of Hometree where it pierced the mist.

The muscles in his jaw worked twice before he spoke, his breath smelled of mint and expensive coffee. "Bullshit, you’re compromised."

His manicured hand swatted hers away dismissively. "You'd just warn them."

The Samson's floodlights carved jagged shadows across the link chamber floor as Selfridge tapped his putter against a bulkhead— tap-tap-tap— like a countdown clock no one else could hear.

His polished loafers squeaked on the antiseptic tiles as he pivoted toward the troopers. "Well? Move your asses!"

Two armoured figures jerked into motion, their rifle butts nudging Damin's wheelchair forward with a violence that made the casters shriek.

Irene flinched but said nothing, her fingers twitching at her sides as if physically restraining herself from intervention.

"You've got sixty minutes," Selfridge announced, examining his manicured cuticles. "Unless you want your blue girlfriend turned into kindling when the axe comes down."

The putter's grip jabbed toward the link pods. "Clock starts now, and I’ll be timing you."

Damin's knuckles whitened against the wheelchair's armrests as he leveraged himself up, his paralysed leg buckling momentarily before he caught himself on the pod's edge.

He didn't glance at the troopers, didn't acknowledge Selfridge, his entire focus tunneled on the biometric scanner as he slapped his palm against it.

The machine beeped, the upper clamshell hissed open, and the sterile smell of coolant washed over him.

Damin's bare feet dug into the woven reed mats as he stood before Tsengue and Oma, the entire clan's eyes pressing against his skin like physical weight, so close to crushing him. Mo'at stood slightly behind him, staring at Damin.

Ateyo's scarred knuckles flexed around his spear shaft near the front, his tail lashing once, the venom in his glare could have melted steel. Damin inhaled through his nose, catching the sour tang of his own fear.

"Tsengue," Damin began, then swallowed when his voice cracked. The words felt too large for his mouth. "I have something to say, to everyone."

The Olo’eyktan's ear twitched, tilting his head. "Speak, Daminsully."

Damin's throat clicked as he swallowed, tasting blood fornno reason.

The assembled Na'vi watched him with eyes like knife points in torchlight, some narrowed in suspicion, others widened with dawning horror. He spread his hands, palms up. "A great evil is upon us."

Like wind through grass, murmurs rippled through the clan, distressed. "The Sky People are coming to destroy Hometree."

Damin's voice didn't waver now. He felt Mo'at's presence behind him like a second spine, straightening his own. "They will be here soon."

"You have to leave," The firelight carved hollows beneath his cheekbones, making his Avatar face look eerie in the flickering glow. "Or you will die."

Tsahìk Oma stepped forward, her ceremonial beads clicking. "You are certain of this?" Her yellow eyes burned into him, searching for deception in the way his fingers trembled at his sides.

Damin's throat worked. "They sent me to learn your ways." His gaze swept across the assembled clan, lingering on Ateyo's curled lip before finding Mo'at's widening pupils.

"So one day I could bring this message... and you would believe it."

Mo'at recoiled as if struck. Her tail lashed once, violently, before stilling. "What are you saying?" She muttered.

"You knew this would happen…?"

Damin's gaze dropped to the floor, his jaw working silently for a near-minute before the word tore loose: "Yes." It sounded like glass breaking.

His fingers spasmed at his sides, clutching at empty air as if trying to grasp the right Na'vi words from the smoke-filled space between them.

"At first... it was just orders." The admission came out mangled, half in English before he wrestled it into the People's tongue.

He watched Mo'at's pupils shrink to pinpricks, her breath catching audibly.

Damin's hands rose between them, not in supplication, but in helpless demonstration, fingers splaying like the branches of the willow grove now reduced to cinders.

"But then—" His throat clicked around the enormity of it, the first time he'd tasted air so clean it burned his lungs.

"— everything changed." His voice dropped to a whisper, tears threatening to spill. "I fell in love—" His palm pressed against his own chest. "— with the forest, with the Omatikaya."

Damin looked at her, the torchlight catching the moisture gathering at his lash line. "— with you." His voice splintered on the truth. "And by then, oh… how could I tell you?"

Mo'at's breath came in shallow bursts, her nostrils flaring as if the air had turned to poison. When she spoke, her voice didn't sound like her own, cracked wide with something between rage and devastation. "I trusted you, Damin!"

"I only wanted to—" Damin reached for her, to pull her into a hug, but fingers grazed empty air as she recoiled.

"Liar!" Her tail lashed violently, upending a basket of medicinal herbs beside her. "YOU WILL NEVER BE ONE OF THE PEOPLE! Never!" 

Ateyo didn't hesitate. "Bind them!" His command sent six hunters surging forward, two seizing Damin by the shoulders, their grip crushing enough to bruise.

He didn't resist, letting his knees hit the grass with a dull thud.

Across the circle, Irene gasped as another hunter twisted her arms behind her back, the vine cords biting into her wrists before she could utter a protest.

The first shadow fell across Hometree's clearing like a living thing— a black stain spreading outward from the Dragon's underbelly as its turbine wash flattened the ferns.

Mo'at's braids whipped sideways as the downdraft hit, her pupils contracting to vertical slits against the airborne grit.

She didn't blink when the Scorpions' missile pods ratcheted into firing position with mechanical clicks that carried clearly over the rotor noise.

From her vantage in the Dragon's open bay door, Quaritch's gloved finger tapped the rangefinder display. The crosshairs trembled over Damin's exposed throat, where Ateyo's ceremonial dagger bit a thin crimson line into his skin.

"Oh, this is precious," she murmured, adjusting the headset mic with her other hand. "Ramona? Get me a nice, tight shot on the traitor's face when the blade goes in. HQ'll want that for the memorial slideshow."

Below, the hunting party's torches guttered in the artificial windstorm. Irene coughed against the vine cords sawing into her wrists, her Avatar body straining toward Damin as Ateyo's free hand yanked his head back by the hair.

The knife's edge kissed deeper, beading scarlet down his windpipe.

"Get out of here!" Damin's voice ripped through the chaos like a blade, raw and desperate. He thrashed against the hunters pinning him down, his eyes locked onto Mo'at's stunned face.

"Run to the forest— now! Please, I'm begging you!" The torchlight caught the whites of his eyes, wide with terror and tears.

Tsengue's ears flattened against his skull as he scowled at Damin. Then he whirled, seizing Ateyo by the forearm with enough force to make the younger hunter stagger.

"Take the ikran!" the Olo’eyktan bellowed over the rising turbine scream. "Attack from above!"

Ateyo didn't hesitate. He barked orders to six hunters, their braids whipping in the rotor wash as they sprinted up Hometree's gnarled roots toward the ikran rookery above.

Arrows already nocked, their war cries vanished into the mechanical growl of Scorpion gunships circling like vultures.

In the Dragon's cockpit, Quaritch drummed her fingers against the cyclic stick, her reflection smirking in the armoured glass as arrows tinked harmlessly against the hull.

"Alright," she sighed, rolling her neck until the vertebrae popped. "Let's get this done." Her gloved hand flicked a switch. "Gunner? Forty-millimeter gas rounds, right in the front door."

"Roger that." The gunner's voice crackled through the headset as he toggled the weapon system. "CS forties,  going hot."

Quaritch's eyes locked onto Damin's distant figure through the targeting display. For half a second, her jaw tightened, then relaxed into something colder than steel.

"Fire."

The Dragon's stub-wings shuddered as the rocket launchers unleashed hell. Twin whumps of compressed air preceded the barrage— six canisters arcing perfectly through Hometree's arched entrance.

The impacts came fast: K-WHOOM! K-WHOOM! K-WHOOM! Concussive bursts tore through the great hollow, each explosion vomiting thick plumes of yellowish gas that rolled outward like living fog.

Tsengue was first to inhale, his massive chest heaving as the gas hit his lungs, then his knees buckled like felled timber.

The Olo’eyktan crashed face-first into the trampled earth, fingers clawing at his throat as his braids tangled in the dirt. Behind him, warriors collapsed mid-stride, their war cries dissolving into wet, hacking coughs.

A mother staggered sideways, her infant slipping from her arms as she retched violently, the child’s wails swallowed by the gas-choked air.

Tsengue's roar cut through the choking gas like a blade, his vocal cords shredding on the command— "Everybody outside! Forest— NOW!"

The words dissolved into hacking coughs as warriors and elders alike surged toward the exits, clawing through yellow plumes that clung to their skin like living poison.

Children wailed against their mothers' shoulders, tiny fists beating at the air as if they could punch holes in the suffocating cloud.

Damin's eyes burned as if packed with hot sand, his vision blurring into smears of torchlight and silhouettes.

The vine bindings sawed deeper into his wrists with every jerk, slick now with blood and sweat. Somewhere to his left, Irene gagged violently, her avatar's body convulsing against its restraints.

Then— KA-WHOOM! The incendiary round hit Hometree's central support like a meteor strike, the shockwave rippling outward in slow motion before the fireball erupted upward with terrifying speed.

Damin's pupils contracted to pinpricks as the flames roared through the base, turning the great hollow into a chimney of screaming heat.

Straglers stumbled from the inferno, their skin blackened where embers clung, dragging wounded kin whose braids smoldered.

High above, Ateyo and his hunters spidered up the trunk's inner ribs, leaping from spoke to spoke like panicked insects, the fireball licking at their heels with tongues of orange and blue.

The rotorwash fanned the flames outward in Damin's direction, the heat blistering his exposed skin even from twenty yards away.

Then— movement in the smoke. Tsahìk Oma materialised like a wraith, her ceremonial knife flashing downward in one decisive motion. Damin gasped as the vines fell away, his arms dropping limp and bloodless to his sides.

He met her gaze— those teary yellow eyes weren't just filled with horror, but with something that made his chest constrict. Recognition. Faith… "If you are one of us," Oma rasped, pressing the knife's hilt into his numb fingers, "help us!"

Damin didn't hesitate. He spun toward Irene, slicing her bonds with two quick strokes just as another incendiary round KA-WHOOMED into the upper branches.

"We've gotta move!" he shouted over the cacophony, grabbing her elbow. "He's gonna blow the columns!"

Irene's pupils dilated with dawning comprehension—Quaritch wasn't just torching Hometree. She was systematically collapsing its structural supports.

They sprinted toward the tree line as the third incendiary hit, the concussion knocking Damin forward onto his hands and knees.

Behind them, the central column groaned like a dying beast before shearing off mid-trunk, taking half the canopy with it in a rain of flaming debris.

The Dragon's shadow passed over them like a vulture's wing. Inside the cockpit, Quaritch tapped her headset with a gloved finger. "Ramona, sweetheart? Light 'em up."

Ateyo's hunting party leapt from the disintegrating trunk just as the fourth rocket struck, the explosion hurling one warrior sideways into the branches like a broken doll.

The rest landed hard, rolling to their feet with arrows already nocked— only for Quaritch's gunners to either kill them or stun them.

Quaritch's gloved finger tapped the cyclic stick like a drumroll, her reflection grinning in the Dragon's armored glass as the missile lock tone warbled.

"That's how you scatter the fucking blue roaches," she murmured, watching Na'vi figures scatter beneath the gunship's shadow like startled insects.

"Okay, switch missiles." Her thumb stroked the weapons selector. "Give me H-E's at the base of the west columns."

"Copy, switching missiles," echoed three pilots through the headset static, their Scorpions banking in perfect formation.

Ramona's knuckles whitened around the Samson's control yoke. Through her cracked visor, she watched a child no taller than her boot scramble over roots, its tiny hands slick with mud where it had fallen. The missile arming light blinked green on her console.

"Screw it," she breathed, and ripped her finger off the fire-control.

The Samson lurched sideways as she wrenched the stick, peeling away from the formation so violently that loose cargo straps whipped against the bulkhead.

Quaritch's knuckles whitened around the cyclic stick as Hometree's silhouette filled the Dragon's windscreen, its vast canopy shuddering under missile impacts, the reflection of flames dancing across her aviator sunglasses like a living thing.

She exhaled through her nose, the sound almost reverent. "Bring it down," she murmured, then barked into her headset: "Light the fucking candles!"

Six missiles streaked from the Dragon's underbelly in perfect synchrony, their contrails stitching white seams across the dawn sky.

The high-explosive payloads struck Hometree's western columns in rapid succession— KA-WHAM! KA-WHAM! KA-WHAM!— each detonation vaporising centuries-old wood fibers into splintered confetti.

The shockwaves rippled upward through the trunk, fracturing load-bearing ribs with seismic cracks that echoed like gunshots across the valley.

Damin's knees hit the mud as the first column disintegrated, his hands flying up instinctively as debris rained around them.

Through splayed fingers, he watched the impossible unfold: Hometree's entire western face collapsing inward, the massive pillars shearing apart like rotten teeth.

The air itself seemed to tremble as the great tree groaned, a sound so deep it vibrated in his molars, before tilting with eerie grace.

"Oh, Eywa," He whispered, watching the world tilt.

Hometree didn't fall— it descended, the way a mountain might sigh into the sea.

The roots tore free first, snapping like knotted sinew, showering clods of red earth into the air. The trunk listed sideways, slow as a dying titan, the groan of its ancient wood vibrating up through Damin's bare feet.

Around him, warriors froze mid-flight, arrows slipping from slack fingers. A child's wail cut through the noise, high, thin, the sound a creature makes when it understands, for the first time, that safety is an illusion.

Ateyo's ikran screamed as he wrenched its head sideways, the banshee's wingtips skimming charred branches as Hometree's shadow swallowed the sky.

Below him, the trunk groaned, not the sound of breaking wood, but the deep, shuddering moan of something alive realising it was already dead.

His knuckles whitened around the reins as the first roots tore loose, flinging clods of earth skyward like slow-motion meteors.

The hunters scattered like startled birds, their banshees banking hard left as the trunk's shadow yawned wider across the canopy.

Ateyo didn't blink when the first branches began snapping— millennia-hundred-year-old limbs shearing like greensticks, spraying sap that glittered like tears in the firelight.

His mount's claws (do Ikrans have claws? Fuck it they do now!) raked empty air as they dove beneath a collapsing scaffold of vines, the downdraft from Hometree's descent slamming them sideways into a thicket of ferns.

It hit the forest floor like a meteor.

The impact traveled up Ateyo's spine before the sound reached his ears, a thunderclap that flattened ferns in concentric rings, sending up a wall of pulverised bark and dirt that rolled outward like a tsunami.

His ikran's wings flared instinctively, talons gouging furrows in the mud as the shockwave hit.

Behind him, a hunter wasn't fast enough; the debris cloud swallowed her mount whole, the banshee's shriek cutting off abruptly as a flying branch speared through its chest.

Quaritch leaned back in the Dragon's cockpit, one boot propped lazily against the instrument panel as she surveyed the carnage through her tinted visor.

Below, the inferno painted her reflection in flickering orange across the glass— lips quirking at the edges as the incendiary rounds thumped into Hometree's corpse, sending gouts of flame licking thirty feet into the air.

"Nice work, people." Quaritch's voice crackled over the comms, flat as a body hitting pavement.

She didn't even glance at the burning wreckage below as her fingers danced across the weapons console. "Alright, light it up. I wanna be home in time for dinner, you hear?"

Six incendiary rounds screamed from the Dragon's underbelly, streaking crimson across the dawn sky before k-thooming into Hometree's corpse.

Fire geysered upward in liquid pillars, merging into a rolling inferno that painted Quaritch's cockpit orange.

The gunships banked in formation, rotorwash whipping the flames into a stormfront that advanced through the jungle like a living thing— trees blackening and curling like paper in its path.

Damin staggered through the smoke-choked chaos, bare feet slipping on ember-streaked mud. "Mo'at!" His voice shredded raw against the roar of flames. Sparks swirled around him like malignant fireflies, stinging his skin wherever they landed.

To his left, Irene hunched over a cluster of soot-streaked children, her avatar's body forming a living barrier between them and the advancing firestorm. One tiny girl clung to her braid, wailing as Irene half-dragged, half-carried them, calling for her mother.

Chapter Text

Mo'at stumbled through the burning wreckage at the edge of the inferno, her bare feet kicking aside smoldering branches that crumbled to ash at the slightest touch.

The heat pressed against her skin like a physical weight, each breath searing her lungs with smoke and the sickly-sweet stench of burning sap. Through the swirling haze, she saw—

Tsengue. Her father.

A jagged shard of wood the length of her forearm protruded from his abdomen like some grotesque ceremonial spear, the splintered edges blackened where fire had licked at them.

Blood pooled beneath him, steaming where it met the scorched earth. His chest rose and fell in shallow, wet hitches, his fingers twitching weakly at the shaft embedded in his flesh.

His ears flickered weakly as she fell to her knees beside him, her hands hovering over the wound without touching. His yellow eyes, clouded with pain, focused on her face. Recognition flickered in them like the dying embers around them.

"Ma’Mo’at," he rasped, his voice thick with blood. One trembling hand lifted, fingers brushing the singed ends of her braid. His touch was feather-light, already cooling.

"Take my bow." The words bubbled wet in his throat as he pressed the polished wood into her palms. "Protect the People."

Mo’at’s fingers closed around the weapon just as Tsengue’s chest stilled. His exhale carried the scent of scorched earth and something sweet, like crushed leaves after rain.

She collapsed forward over him, her forehead pressing against his still-warm sternum.

The first sob tore loose from somewhere beneath her ribs, raw and guttural, the sound a wounded animal might make when the spear finds its mark.

Damin emerged from the smoke like a ghost, his silhouette wavering in the heat haze. He sank to his knees beside her, one hand hovering above her shuddering shoulders. "I’m—" His voice cracked. "I’m so sorry, Mo’at…"

Her head snapped up, tears carving clean streaks through the ash on her cheeks. She shoved him with both hands, the force sending him sprawling backward into the ember-strewn dirt. "Get away from me!"

The scream shredded her throat. Sparks whirled around her like enraged fireflies as she surged upright, Tsengue’s bow clutched to her chest. "Go away! Never come back!"

Damin’s mouth opened, closed. The firelight caught the wetness gathering along his lower lash line, and he didn’t wipe it away.

Mo’at staggered backward until her knees hit Tsengue’s cooling body. She folded over him like a broken sapling, her braids pooling across his chest.

The sounds she made weren’t words— just jagged, gasping noises that hitched higher with each breath.

Damin stood. Turned. Walked into the burning forest.  

His feet moved mechanically, one after the other, each step pressing embers into the soft flesh of his soles. He didn’t feel it.

Didn’t feel anything except the weight of Tsengue’s dead stare branded into his retinas, the echo of Mo’at’s scream still vibrating in his skull.

The air shimmered with heat, warping the trees into grotesque silhouettes that swayed like mourners at a funeral he’d orchestrated.

The monitor flickered with pixelated carnage— Hometree’s corpse belching smoke into a blood-orange sky. Marcus Selfridge sipped his coffee, pinky extended, as screams crackled through the feed. "Christ," he muttered, swiping a crumb from his lapel. "Pull the plug."

Vivaan’s hands froze mid-keypress. "Sir, we can’t just—"

"Trooper." Selfridge didn’t raise his voice. The soldier’s boots squeaked on laminate as he crossed to the master breaker, its red handle gleaming under emergency lights. A child’s wail peaked on-screen as the metal clunked downward.

Darkness.

The severed neural link hit Damin like a guillotine blade— one moment standing, the next collapsing facedown into the mud, his body folding like a marionette with its strings slashed.

His cheek pressed against cooling earth where the rain had begun to fall, mixing with ash into gray slurry that seeped into his nostrils. Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, children wailed.

Thirty yards northeast, Irene's avatar shuddered mid-stride before collapsing into a tangle of limbs, her braid splaying across a smoldering root.

The two children clinging to her, no older than five, scrambled backward as her body went slack, their tear-streaked faces twisting in fresh terror when she didn't respond to their tugging.

The girl with singed braids screamed into the smoke, shaking Irene's shoulder with tiny hands blackened by soot.

Tsahìk Oma materialised through the haze, moving with the eerie precision of a stormbird and snatching both children by their waistbands and hauling them clear as a flaming branch crashed where Irene's head had been.

The little boy kicked wildly, reaching back toward the motionless avatar. "Kehe!" he sobbed, fingers stretching for Irene's limp hand. "She saved us!"

Oma's nostrils flared at the stench of burning flesh. She hesitated, golden eyes darting between the advancing fireline and the Avatar’s unnatural stillness.

Then she barked a command to the warriors behind her: "Take her!" Before shoving the children into their arms and turning back alone.

The link pod hissed open like a coffin lid. Damin's human body arched off the gel-padded surface with a wet gasp, his neural interface cable whipping loose.

Four sets of hands seized him before his retinas could adjust to the fluorescent glare, black-gloved fingers digging into his biceps hard enough to leave bruises as they hauled him upright.

"Easy, hero," spat Ewan Wainfleet's voice somewhere above his left ear. The plastic zip-tie bit into Damin's wrists, before he registered the click of the restraint tightening. "Colonel wants words."

Damin blinked against the starbursts in his vision. The troopers' faces swam in and out of focus, visor reflections distorting their features into faceless black masks.

Behind them, Irene's pod spat its seal with a hydraulic wheeze. Her avatar body had gone slack mid-stride, but her human form shook now, fingers scrabbling at the release clamps like a drowning woman reaching for surface.

Wainfleet didn't turn. "Cuff the scientist too!"

The smoke rose in thick, black pillars against the violet dusk, swallowing what remained of Hometree’s silhouette.

Mo’at stood rigid atop the moss-crowned ridge, her fingers clenched around Tsengue’s bow until the polished wood groaned.

Behind her, the refugees huddled in stunned silence— children pressing their faces into their mothers’ thighs, warriors gripping spears with white-knuckled hands.

The travois ropes creaked as hunters dragged Irene’s limp avatar up the slope, her blue limbs swaying like a drowned thing hauled from deep water.

Oma’s hand found Mo’at’s shoulder. "The Sky People will pay for this," she murmured, her voice raw with smoke.

Mo’at didn’t blink. The flames below reflected in her eyes, twin funeral pyres. "Not enough," she said, so softly the wind almost stole it.

The overhead light buzzed like a dying insect, flickering just enough to make shadows twitch along the cinderblock walls.

Damin leaned against the cold metal bench, fingertips tracing the grooves where countless detainees had scratched their names, or desperation, into the surface.

His knuckles stung under the antiseptic spray someone had half-heartedly applied before locking them in, the cuts from the zip-ties still weeping thin lines of red when he flexed his hands.

Across from him, Irene sat with her legs drawn up, forehead pressed against her knees. Her bare feet were somehow streaked with soot that no amount of prison shower spray could fully erase.

Every few minutes, her shoulders hitched in a silent shudder that wasn’t quite a sob.

"They never wanted us to succeed," Irene whispered, her voice cracking like thin ice over dark water.

Tristan nodded mutely beside her, fingers tracing the grooves in the interrogation table where generations of detainees had left their marks.

The overhead light flickered again, casting shadows that made his sunken cheeks look like skull hollows.

At the desk outside, the lone trooper looked up as boots echoed down the corridor. Ramona approached pushing a stainless steel trolley, its wheels squeaking like distressed rodents against the linoleum. The guard's fingers paused over his datapad. "Chow time already?"

"Personally?" Ramona grinned, patting the domed lid. "I think steak's too good for these traitors."

The guard's chair screeched as he stood. "They get steak? That's bullshit." He reached for the lid. "Let me see that—" The guard bent over the trolley, his fingers brushing the stainless-steel dome, just as Ramona's pistol kissed the soft hollow behind his ear.

"Oops," she murmured.

The guard froze. His breath hitched, one ragged inhalation where he smelled gun oil and impending violence. Then Ramona's boot slammed into the back of his knee, sending him crashing face-first onto the linoleum.

"All the way down, boy," she growled, pressing the muzzle harder until his cheek smeared against the floor.

Ramona's whistle cut through the corridor, a sharp note that made Vivaan's head snap up from the security terminal.

The doctor moved fast, her lab coat flaring as she pivoted on the ball of her foot and broke into a jog toward the sound.

Ramona had the first guard face-down on the linoleum, his wrists zip-tied behind his back with his own restraints before he could blink.

Vivaan didn't hesitate, she snatched the keycard clipped to his belt with practiced fingers and sprinted toward the cell door, her ponytail whipping behind her. The magnetic lock chirped green under the swipe, the door grinding open just as bootsteps rounded the corner.

"Shit—" Vivaan barely had time to register the second trooper's startled face before Ramona moved like liquid violence.

Her elbow snapped backward into his windpipe with a wet crunch, followed by a knee driving upward into his ribs hard enough to lift him off his feet.

He crumpled with a wheeze, but the first guard was already stirring, shaking his head like a dazed bull.

Vivaan didn't think— she just grabbed the nearest heavy object, a stainless steel coffee urn still steaming from some forgotten breakroom, and swung it like a battering ram.

The impact connected with the guard's temple with a resonant CLANG that vibrated up her arms. He dropped like a sack of grain, out cold before he hit the floor.

Vivaan stared at the dented coffee urn in her hands, then at the unconscious trooper sprawled at her feet. A slow, incredulous grin spread across her face. "That was... unexpectedly satisfying."

Ramona winked as she zip-tied the second guard's wrists behind his back with practiced efficiency. "Stick with me, doc. I'll make a rebel out of you yet."

She turned just as Tristan barreled out of the cell, and planted a firm kiss right on his lips mid-stride.

Tristan stumbled but didn't break momentum, his answering grin wild as he snatched up the fallen trooper's rifle. "Baby," he breathed, racking the charging handle with a sharp clack, "you rock."

Damin emerged more slowly, his movements stiff from hours in restraints. He paused just long enough to scoop up the sidearm from the first guard's holster, checking the magazine with a practiced flick of his wrist before tucking it into his waistband. His knuckles were still bloody.

Damin exhaled through his nose, the rifle's polymer stock cold against his bruised cheekbone. "Thanks," he said to Vivaan and Ramona.

He chambered the first round with a metallic snick that echoed off the cinderblock walls, then wheeled to face his ragged assembly, Irene still shaking with adrenaline, Tristan grinning like a stupid man (let him have his moment Damin damn). "So what do you say?"

"Time for a revolution?"

Irene peeled her forehead off her knees, the motion leaving a smudge of soot on the detention bench. "I'm free," she said, and it wasn't about the handcuffs.

Ramona barked a laugh, tapping her fist against Damin's. The overhead light chose that moment to flicker out completely, plunging them into emergency-lit shadows.

Damin exhaled sharply through his nose, fingers tightening around the stolen rifle's grip. "Come on," he muttered, more to himself than anyone, before turning to Ramona with a jerk of his chin toward the corridor. "Get your ship fired up."

Ramona didn't hesitate. She grabbed Tristan by the vest collar and hauled him toward the airlock, her boots squeaking on the linoleum. "Move your ass, Spellman," she hissed, shoving him through the inner door hard enough to make him stumble. 

Damin turned to Vivaan. The doctor stood stiff-backed beside the unconscious guards, her hands curled into loose fists at her sides.

He gripped her wrist, not gently. "Stay here," he said, watching her eyes widen in the flickering fluorescence. "I need somebody on the inside I can trust."

Vivaan's throat moved as she swallowed. She nodded once, sharp and precise. Damin squeezed her hand tighter, felt the minute tremor in her fingers, before releasing her to scoop up the second guard's sidearm.

The Samson's turbines screamed to life with a metallic whine, shaking the deck plating beneath Tristan's boots as he slapped switches in rapid succession.

Ramona's fingers danced across the overhead panel, her other hand already twisting the throttle, when the floodlight hit them square through the windshield, bleaching their faces corpse-white.

"Shit." Ramona squinted into the glare just as the armoured silhouette resolved, rifle raised, visor flashing orange reflections.

"Engine shutdown! Now!" The trooper's amplified voice crackled through his helmet speakers. His AR-15's laser sight painted a trembling red dot between Ramona's eyebrows.

A shadow detached itself from the hangar's gloom, Damin’s pistol kissing the trooper's nape with a metallic click. "Take it nice and easy, troop," Damin murmured.

The trooper stiffened, turned and the muzzle hovering six inches from his left iris. "On the ground," Damin said, low and calm like reciting a grocery list. "Face down, and hands behind your damn head."

The trooper hesitated. "Do what he goddamn says!" Irene shouted, and the trooper folded like bad origami, knees hitting the deck plating hard enough to make Tristan wince sympathetically.

His helmet bounced against the ferrocrete as he stretched his arms behind his head, fingers interlaced.

Tristan leapt from the Samson's running board, landing with a slap of sneakers on grease-stained concrete.

He snatched the trooper's rifle first, standard issue RDA carbine, still warm from the guy's panicked grip, then the sidearm with its holster's quick-release.

The pistol's grip felt alien in his hands. Wrong, like holding a dead man's toothbrush.

Ramona didn't even glance down from her preflight checks. "Clock's ticking, Spellman!"

Irene's fingers dug into Damin's bicep as she hauled him upright to the Samson's jump seat, her other hand catching his elbow when his knees buckled

"Easy," she hissed through clenched teeth, half-dragging him toward the cargo bay while Ramona's boots pounded the flight deck overhead.

The Samson's turbines screamed like wounded animals as Irene shoved Damin backward onto a stack of munition crates.

His spine hit the metal with a hollow thud, his fingers scrambling for purchase on the webbed cargo netting as she pivoted to grab his abandoned chair.

The folding seat clattered against the deck plates when she flung it in, one leg bent at a drunken angle. Irene didn't waste time straightening it.

She leapt after the chair in one fluid motion, her braid whipping around her shoulders as she slapped the bay door control.

"Go!" Damin's voice ripped through the engine noise like a serrated blade. He lunged forward to grab a ceiling strap as the Samson lurched sideways, inertia slamming Irene against him hard enough to knock the wind from her lungs. "Go! Go! Go!"

The alarm klaxon split the night like a gunshot— three sharp blasts that sent Quaritch's coffee cup skittering across the ops console.

She was already moving before the red lights finished their first rotation, her boots eating up the reinforced walkway as the monitor showed the Samson lifting off in a storm of rotorwash. The pistol cleared her holster with a metallic whisper, her thumb flicking the safety off mid-stride.

"Seal the compound!" she barked over her shoulder, not bothering to check if anyone obeyed.

The emergency hatch groaned under her fist, its manual release lever resisting just long enough to make her snarl before it gave way with a hydraulic hiss.

Cold Pandoran night air slapped her face as she stepped onto the landing platform, her pupils contracting against the sudden floodlights.

The Samson was already twenty yards out, its navigation lights winking mockingly as it banked hard left.

Quaritch didn't hesitate— she planted her feet wide, brought the pistol up in both hands, and emptied the magazine in six controlled pairs.

The gunshots cracked like bones breaking, muzzle flashes painting her face in strobes of orange. Two hundred yards out, Ramona wrenched the stick sideways just as the tracers found them.

"Eat shit, lady!" she yelled, rolling the Samson so its armoured belly absorbed the impacts— whack-whack-whack— rounds cratering the composite plating like hailstones on tin.

Damin whooped as the ship cleared the perimeter lights, his fist punching the air so hard his shoulder popped. "Oh yeah, baby!"

Irene wasn't cheering. Her fingers touched something warm and slick beneath her ribs. "Aaah, crap..." She lifted her hand slowly, staring at the dark stain spreading across her shirt. "Not again..." 

Damin's grin died mid-breath. He grabbed her wrist, too tight, his fingers pressing, and peeled her hand away.

The bullet had torn through just below her diaphragm, the fabric around it already soaked burgundy.

"Hang on, Irene," he breathed, already shrugging out of his jacket to press against the wound. 

Chapter Text

Tristan's avatar balanced on the corrugated roof, his blue fingers gripping the AR-15's sling as the module shuddered beneath him.

Polyphemus cast jagged shadows across his face when he raised one thumb, the signal snapping Ramona's Samson into a gut-wrenching ascent.

The lift cable screamed like a tortured banshee as the module tore free from its foundations, ripping conduit pipes and neural feeds in a shower of sparks that rained down onto the trampled meadow grass fifty feet below.

Inside the Samson's cabin, every loose object became a projectile.

A first-aid kit exploded against the bulkhead, bandages unfurling like ghostly tendrils as Ramona banked hard to avoid a stalagmite outcrop.

Damin braced one knee against Irene's shuddering torso, his fingers tearing through the trauma bag's contents— IV bags, hemostatic gauze, a bent scalpel clattering to the deck.

"Hold still!" Damin barked, more to himself than Irene as he wadded clotting gel against the bullet wound. Her fingers scrabbled at his wrist, shock-bright eyes locking onto his. The gauze bloomed red before he'd even applied pressure.

"Well, at least they won't be able to track us up here," Ramona muttered, wrestling the controls as the Samson bucked through turbulent winds.

The navigation screens fizzed with static, compass needles spinning wildly. "Not this deep in the vortex…"

Damin crouched between the seats, fingers gripping Irene's wrist where her heart fluttered like a dying bird. "It's strongest at the Tree of Souls, right?"

Ramona didn't glance back, too focused. "That's right."

"Good." Damin's teeth flashed in a grimace that wasn't a smile. "'Cause that's where we're going."

He fumbled an ampule from the medkit, snapping the cap off with his thumb and the morphine hissed as he depressed the plunger into Irene's thigh.

"Copy." Ramona banked hard, throwing shadows across Irene's shock-pale face, wild ginger strands stuck to her forehead with sweat, dark green eyes glassy with pain, staring at nothing.

Blood had seeped through the makeshift bandages, staining her fair skin crimson from ribs to hipbone.

Irene curled tighter around the wound, her breath hitching. "It—" She swallowed, lips peeling back from gritted teeth. "Doesn't... matter..."

Damin grabbed her shoulders, fingers biting into flesh. "No!" The shout startled even himself. The Samson lurched, tossing his balance, but he held fast, even in the wheelchair. "The People can help you, I know it."

Her eyelids fluttered, a thick line of blood trickling onto her chin and bottom lip. "Stay with me, Augustine." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Please."

The Samson's floodlight carved a shaky path through the predawn mist, illuminating the first towering root tendrils that spilled over the caldera's rim like frozen waterfalls.

Damin leaned against the open bay door, his fingers white-knuckled around a ceiling strap as the ship descended in tight spirals.

Below, the Tree of Souls' central willow glowed with bioluminescence— slow, rhythmic, like a sleeping giant's heart.

"Jesus Christ," Tristan breathed as the full scope of the grotto revealed itself— hundreds of Na'vi clustered around the central dais, their upturned faces catching the first gold shafts of dawn.

Oma's chanting rose even through the engine noise— ("Wise ancestors who live within Eywa, guide us. Give us a sign!")— her arms raised toward the mother tree's canopy.

The Samson touched down with a crunch of flattened ferns, its landing skids gouging twin furrows into the moss.

Ramona killed the engines before the rotors had fully stopped, the sudden silence broken only by the metallic ticking of cooling turbines and Irene's ragged breathing.

The makeshift field dressing had soaked through, dark red splotches blooming across the gauze like grotesque flowers.

Damin's wheels hit the shack's deck plating hard as he rolled anxiously toward the link pod. The hinges screamed when he wrenched it open, looking around for somebody— anybody— to bring her over.

Tristan's boots hit the moss with a wet crunch, Irene's limp form cradled in his arms like broken glass. Her head lolled back, exposing the bloodless pallor of her throat, too pale, too still, Tristan staggering toward the open link pod.

Ramona's fingers tightened on Damin's wheelchair handles, not pushing.

"She's got minutes," she muttered through clenched teeth, watching Tristan lower Irene into the pod's gel padding. The blood had seeped through the bandages, pooling in the hollow of her collarbone.

The link pod's interior lights cast Irene's face in an eerie blue pallor, her breath shallow enough that condensation barely fogged the oxygen mask.

Ramona's fingers tightened on the pod's edge, her knuckles whitening as she shot Damin a glance that didn't need words— hurry.

Damin's palm brushed Irene's forehead— too cold, clammy with the wrong kind of sweat. Her eyelids didn't flutter at his touch. Something hollow opened up behind his ribs.

He pivoted his wheelchair toward his own link unit with a jerk of the rims, the motion sending a fresh spike of pain through his battered shoulders.

Ramona was already there, hands braced to lift him before he'd fully stopped rolling.

Her grip was all efficiency, no gentleness, sliding one arm under his knees, the other bracing his spine as she transferred him into the gel-lined ‘cradle’.

"Systems at ninety percent," Tristan called from the console, fingers flying across holographic displays. Damin watched the man's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed.

"Ateyo's declared himself Olo'eyktan, posted warriors at every sacred site." Tristan's eyes flicked up, pupils dilated in the dim light. "He's not letting any Sky People near the Tree."

Damin exhaled through his nose. The neural interface cable hovered above him, its tapered end glinting like a predator's fang. "I’ve gotta try," Damin muttered, more to himself than anyone.

The clamshell hissed shut over Damin's human body with a hydraulic sigh, plunging him into amniotic darkness.

For a few seconds, there was nothing, no breath, no sound, no self, just the neural interface cable coiling into his skull like a lover's fingers. Then—

Pain.

Damin's avatar gasped awake, his spine arching off the mud as if electrocuted.

His lungs burned with the first inhale, thick with smoke and something worse, something metallic and organic that coated his tongue like spoiled meat.

The sky hung low and grey, swollen with the promise of more rain to dilute the ashes clotting his eyelashes.

Around him, the ruins of Hometree stood like broken ribs against the horizon, their splintered edges still smoldering. No birds called, no insects chirped.

Damin's fingers flexed, sinking into the ash-full mud. He sat up slowly, his muscles protesting like rusted hinges.

Outcast, betrayer. Alien.

A single leaf, half-burned, drifted down and landed on his knee. He stared at it, the edges curled black, the veins still faintly glowing with dying bioluminescence. When he touched it, the leaf crumbled to ash between his fingers.

"Change the rules," Damin muttered, watching the ashes swirl away on a phantom breeze, his voice sounding alien in the wreckage. "To ever face them again… I’m gonna have to change the rules, aren’t I?" He rhetorically asked himself, then grumbling.

"Fun…"

Damin crested the ridge on shaking legs, his bare feet sinking into the ash-choked soil.

Below him, the valley stretched, a skeletal graveyard of charred branches and smoldering trunks.

Bioluminescence had died here; the only light came from embers still clinging to fallen giants like infected wounds.

His ikran's shadow passed over him before the screech came— that familiar, ear-splitting cry he'd know even in delirium.

The creature landed with a thud that kicked up spirals of gray powder, its wings folding tight like a soldier at attention.

One eye now gleamed milky-white, but the way it butted its crest against Damin's chest was the same as their first bonding.

Damin pressed his forehead to its muzzle.

Sometimes your whole life boils down to one insane move, you can’t help it, y’know?

"… C’mon, boy, time to fly."

The Toruk's wings stretched like storm clouds against the pale dawn sky, casting rippling shadows across the canyon below.

Damin clung to his ikran's spine, fingers buried in the leathery hide between its wings, feeling the creature's muscles coil tighter with each downward stroke.

The wind tore at his braids, whipping loose strands into his eyes— he blinked against the sting, watching the leonopteryx's immense silhouette bank lazily.

Now.

Damin kicked his ikran's flanks hard, once, twice, and the beast folded its wings with a snap, plummeting like a stone. The Toruk didn't flinch.

It kept gliding, oblivious, its immense shadow stretching across the canyon floor below.

The way I had it figured, Toruk is the baddest cat in the sky. Nothing attacks him. So why would he ever look up?

The shadow of Damin’s ikran was a fleeting smudge against the Toruk’s vast wingspan— a mosquito skimming the back of a bull, close enough to see individual scar ridges where older challengers had failed.

But that was just a theory.

Freefall punched the air from Damin’s lungs. Wind screamed past his ears, flattening his braids against his skull. The Toruk’s spine rushed up to meet them, a living mountain of flesh—

The clan’s song fractured mid-note when the shadow fell across them. Mo'at felt the vibration in her throat die that terrible, familiar cry ripping through the gathered Na'vi like a cleaver to meat.

She looked up just as Toruk's wings eclipsed the sun, the shadow didn’t just cross her face; it swallowed the entire gathering ground, plunging them into sudden twilight.

Toruk came from the sun like a falling god, its crimson and black wings backlit into molten gold.

The downdraft of its descent flattened the meadow grasses in concentric rings, sending Na'vi warriors staggering back with arms raised against the stinging debris.

Children screamed, not in terror, but in that high, wild way of creatures recognising something beyond their understanding.

The beast alighted with earth-shaking grace, folding wings that could have eclipsed a gunship, and there—

Damin.

Perched between the leonopteryx's cranial ridges, one hand buried in the neural whip of its antennae.

Blood streaked his chest where the bond had torn his skin, but his breathing matched Toruk's— slow to a point of predator-calm.

When the beast lowered its belly to the ground, he dismounted with the casual grace of a man stepping off a bus, pausing to stroke the leathery flank as Toruk rumbled approval.

Mo'at's fingers tightened around Tsengue's bow, she hadn't even realised she'd drawn it until the fletching bit into her palm. Across the clearing, Ateyo stood frozen mid-stride, his ceremonial knife dangling forgotten at his side.

Mo'at's arms rose slowly, then— "TORUK MAKTO!" Her voice ripped through the clearing like lightning, the cry spreading through the Omatikaya in a wave, whispers turning to shouts, fear evolving into— hope. Raw hope.

Damin walked through the parted crowd, bare feet pressing deep into the moss. He didn't glance at the warriors kneeling as he passed, or the children reaching to touch Toruk's shadow trailing behind him.

His gaze locked onto Mo'at standing rigid at the dais' base, her pupils blown so wide the yellow all but vanished.

"I See you," Mo'at whispered. Damin's throat worked. "I See you," he rasped, pressing his forehead to hers.

Her breath hitched, warm, damp against his skin, and when she pulled back, a tsunami of silver tracks glistened down her cheeks.

"You were afraid," Damin murmured, thumb brushing the tear that trembled at her jawline.

He looked at her like the only woman in the world, as tender as the way his fingers threaded through hers. Mo'at's breath hitched when he lifted their joined hands, sniffling. "Feel that? So was I."

"I— I was afraid, Damin, for my people… I’m not anymore."

Damin's fingers tightened around Mo'at's as they ascended the moss-slick steps of the dais, his bare feet leaving damp prints that shimmered briefly before fading.

Oma recoiled a half-step when he passed, her ceremonial headdress trembling, not in fear, but with the shock of seeing Toruk Makto stride through her sacred space like a storm given flesh.

Ateyo stood rigid near the altar stone, his nostrils flaring as Damin approached.

The warrior's knuckles whitened around his knife hilt, but his eyes betrayed him, pupils dilated like a cornered animal's, flickering between Damin's face and the leonopteryx's shadow stretching across the gathering ground.

"Ateyo te Rongloa, son of Ro’äve." Damin's voice carried effortlessly across the hushed crowd.

He spread his arms, palms upturned to show the fresh scars lacing his forearms. "I stand before you, ready to serve the People."

Then quieter, just for Ateyo's ears: "You are Olo’eyktan, you are the best warrior. I can't do this without you."

His gaze darted to where Toruk mantled its wings behind them, bioluminescent patterns flaring in challenge. "You... you rode him?"

"The People need you, brother."

Something crumpled in Ateyo's posture, his knife clattering to the floor as he grasped Damin's forearm. "I will fly with you," he rasped, forehead pressed to their joined hands.

Damin turned to Oma, the Tsahìk's ceremonial beads rattled as she retreated half a step, her orange eyes reflecting Toruk's main colour like twin eclipse halos.

"Tsahìk." Damin knelt abruptly, pressing his palms flat against the ground. "Irene Augustine is dying in the metal bird beyond the canyon." His throat worked around the unfamiliar plea. "I beg the help of the People— and Eywa's mercy."

The elder Tsahìk exhaled through flared nostrils, her gaze flickering to where Toruk mantled behind them, casting jagged shadows across the assembly. "Bring her, Daminsully."