The Kodama were back. Their little white heads, like pebbles with legs, popped from the new-growth trees and rattled their strange, wooden clatter. They did not fear him. But when he reached the sacred spring—once a boiling pit of demon ichor, now a clear pool reflecting the moon—San was there alone.

“I told him you said that.”

There, silhouetted against the bruised horizon, stood San. Her wolf ears twitched, catching the whisper of his heartbeat from half a league away. Moro, her great white wolf mother, lay beside her, one eye open—a sliver of molten gold.

She had her back to him. Her wolf-hide cloak was gone, replaced by a simple tunic of woven nettle-fiber, but her face was still striped with the red clay of her clan.

The Kodama clattered in delight. The nightingale sang again. And Ashitaka, the last prince of the Emishi, smiled and followed the sound of her footsteps into the breathing dark.

“The boy from the Emishi village came today,” he said. “Kaya’s little brother. He wants to learn to ride a red elk.”

“Permitted?”

“The wolves are moving deeper,” she said. “Beyond the third ridge. Where the iron never reached. Moro’s ghost walks there now. She says the land needs a guardian who remembers the old silence.”

San had not spoken to him in three days. Not since the head of the Forest Spirit had been returned, not since the land had begun its slow, painful crawl back from the brink of decay. The green was returning—new moss on blackened stones, timid shoots of bamboo pushing through ash—but something between them had turned to stone.

He was watching the ridge.