Nothing moved.

  The settlement was gone. Not destroyed—emptied. The huts still stood, some of them, their open doorways exhaling the last of the haze into the cooling night. The fire pit was scattered. The cord of dried nuts had snapped. The picture scratched into the mud wall—a lopsided circle with four lines—was still there, untouched. A person. A memory of a person.

  The slime rested at the center of it all. Enormous and still.

  The clouds had parted. Moonlight fell through the gap and lit the slime's surface, and the churning colors inside caught the silver light in slow, turning patterns. Blue and purple and black-green, and the amber, and the dark purple-blue with its captive gold, and the red-orange, and the red-purple, all of them rotating against each other like weather seen from a great height.

  In the moonlight, the effect was beautiful. The kind of beauty that turns the stomach.

  Something pressed against the surface from inside. A hand. Larger than the child-sized one that had appeared earlier. Slender. The fingers reached toward the moonlight and held there, trembling, and the glow from within the body lit them from behind. Then they curled. Slowly. And withdrew.

  The ring of dead flowers on the slime's surface caught the light. The blackened petals gleamed wetly. The cold blue glow held them in place, and for a moment, in the moonlight, they looked almost like a crown.

  The slime tilted the upper portion of its body upward. Toward the sky, if a thing without eyes could be said to look at a sky. The dead flowers pointed skyward, held high—the way a priest raises a chalice. The way a child holds up a drawing, waiting for someone to say it is beautiful.

  No one did.

  ***

  ...kind...

  A thought drifted through the dark. Not a sentence. Not quite a word. A shape—soft-edged, dissolving as soon as it formed—rising from somewhere deep below the churning colors and the black veins and the shapes that pressed and receded against the walls.

  ...to...

  The thought carried no name. No first person. No speaker. It was less a voice than a residue—the stain left behind after a voice has been worn away by years of use.

  ...kind to...

  The amber glow pulsed. Faintly. At the edge of the core, where it had been sinking for a long time, it flickered—and for an instant the fragments pulled together, found a shape, found a direction.

  Why won't anyone be kind to me...

  The word held. One heartbeat. Two.

  Then the amber dimmed. And the me dissolved back into the murk, the way a name written in water dissolves before the last letter is finished.

  What remained was the feeling. Enormous. Sourceless. A grief so old it had worn a groove in the body that carried it, the way a river wears a groove in stone—not by force, but by refusing, day after day after day, to stop.

  Fluid gathered on the surface of the body and began to fall. Drop by drop, pooling on the churned earth below. Tears, or leaking fluid from a body pushed past its limits, or the dissolving residue of lives just ended. There was no way to know. Maybe the distinction between those three things had stopped meaning anything a long time ago.

  ***

  The slime did not think in sentences. Not anymore.

  What moved through it now was closer to weather. Impressions that built and broke and re-formed without edges. Colors that meant things. Pressures that carried memories.

  The warm color—the one that flared when the goblin woman had stood in the doorway—was still echoing through the body. A resonance, fading slowly, like the vibration of a bell after the striker has been removed. The slime held onto it the way it held onto everything: tightly, and too long, and past the point where holding became keeping and keeping became trapping.

  It had felt her. Not her fear—though the fear had been there, white-hot and total. Beneath the fear. The other thing. The warmer thing.

  Not this one. Take everything else. Take me. But not this one.

  The slime had known that feeling.

  And from the deepest folds of its body, an image had surfaced—dragged up by the warmth like sediment stirred from the bottom of a still pond. A crack in a cave wall. Firelight on the other side. A human woman kneeling beside a small girl with a scraped knee, leaning close, breathing gently on the wound.

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  Blow on it, and it'll feel better.

  The same warmth. After everything. Across species, across the wreckage. Under the green skin and the pointed ears and the crude mud walls—the same color a human mother had once carried on a night long, long ago.

  And for a single heartbeat—one—the cold blue light at the slime's core had thawed. Not brighter. Not larger. But warmer. The blue of a clear spring. Of sunlight through shallow water. Of a small, translucent thing that had once fit in the palm of a boy's hand and glowed when it touched a wound, because closing wounds was the only thing it knew how to do.

  The amber had pulsed at the same instant. In sync, for once, with the blue.

  I didn't want this.

  This isn't what I wanted.

  Then the black veins surged. They raced inward from every edge of the body, converging on the core, and the warmth was gone. Snuffed. The blue froze again. The amber sank. Whatever fragile thing had reached for the surface was dragged back down, and the sound of it—the quiet, final sound of something small losing its grip on the last ledge—was swallowed by the dark.

  ***

  But the new heartbeats were warm.

  They pulsed inside the slime's body alongside the older ones—the goblin woman's, fast and frightened; the child's, faster still—and the cold blue light wrapped around them with the same steady precision it used on everything it kept. Not dissolving. Not digesting. Holding. Preserving. The way it preserved the flowers on its surface and the colors in its core and all the other things it had gathered across the years, the things that proved, by their presence inside the body, that they would never leave.

  The slime settled lower against the ground. The trembling that had run through it during the attack was fading now. Not stopping—it never fully stopped—but smoothing, the way a child's sobbing smooths after the worst of the crying is over, settling into a rhythm the body can sustain.

  The heartbeats inside felt like company.

  Not like captives. Not like victims. Like company. Like the sound of other lives sharing a space, the way a family shares a hearth. The child's heartbeat, quick and small, nestled near the core. The mother's, steady now, pressed close to it—even inside the body, even inside the cold blue light, the two of them had found each other. And that was—

  That was good.

  Wasn't it?

  The slime raised the dead flowers a little higher. The cold blue glow intensified around the blackened stems, holding them up, holding them together, keeping the petals from falling apart the way they wanted to. The flowers were ruined. Anyone could see that. But the light didn't let them be ruined. The light kept them exactly as they were—wilted and dark and broken, but together. Still a crown. Still proof that someone, once, had made something beautiful and placed it gently on the slime's body and called it pretty.

  The slime could not remember who.

  But it remembered the feeling. And the feeling was enough. It had to be enough, because the name had gone, and the face had gone, and the voice had gone, but the warmth of the gesture had sunk so deep into the core that even the black veins couldn't reach it. A small thing. A crown of flowers. The last artifact of a life in which the slime had been someone worth decorating.

  ...good...

  The thought surfaced again. Not a sentence. A shard.

  ...was supposed to be...

  The amber pulsed. Weak. Barely a glow.

  ...was supposed to be a good...

  The new heartbeats pulsed inside. Warm and close.

  They wouldn't leave. They couldn't leave. The blue light made sure of that. And as long as they were inside, as long as the warmth of their lives pressed against the walls and filled the spaces between the older colors, the slime was not alone. The slime had a family. The slime was keeping a family—safe, together, close, the way families were supposed to be.

  This was what it had always wanted.

  This was all it had ever wanted.

  ***

  But they would want to leave.

  The thought arrived without warning. Cold. Certain. Rising from the same place the grief lived, the groove worn into the body by years and years of the same lesson taught by different hands.

  They always wanted to leave.

  The first one had left. Had turned away, at the end, with something like confusion in his voice—as though even he didn't fully understand why. The second one had left. Had pushed the slime away with the same hands that had once held it close, and the sound she made as she went was the sound of a door being locked from the other side. The third one had left. Had done it gently, kindly, with a smile and a voice full of warmth, and somehow that was the worst one, because the knife had been wrapped in something soft.

  They always left.

  The warm ones left first. The kind ones left last. And the slime was alone again, every time, in the dark, in the silence, with the memory of warmth fading on its surface like handprints cooling on glass.

  Not again.

  The thought hardened. The black veins pulsed.

  Not again. Not this time. This family would stay. These heartbeats would keep beating inside the slime's body, held safe by the cold blue light, preserved, unable to fade, unable to cool, unable to walk out of the cave and leave the slime behind in the dark where nothing warm had ever lived.

  And if the world tried to take them—if the world sent heroes or armies or gods—

  The dead flowers pointed toward the sky. The cold blue light blazed.

  I'll kill every last one of them.

  The thought had a voice. For the first time since the attack began, it had a voice, and the voice was small, and raw, and it cracked at the edges the way a child's voice cracks when the crying has gone on too long.

  It was not a declaration of war. It was not a villain's oath.

  It was a promise made by something terrified, in the dark, to the things it was holding inside itself—a promise that this time, this time, no one would take them away.

  ***

  Then the present began to soften.

  The ruined clearing faded at its edges, growing distant, growing dim, as if seen through deepening water. The moonlight went dark. The dead flowers, the huts, the scattered fire pit, the picture on the wall—all of it sinking, dissolving, washing away like a reflection in a pool when the surface is disturbed.

  Something else rose to take its place. Older. Quieter.

  A ceiling of rough stone, low and damp. The sound of water dripping at perfectly even intervals. A thin line of light falling through a crack in the rock, catching dust motes that drifted without purpose through cold, still air.

  A cave.

  The first place it had ever known.

  The colors drained from the slime's body. The heartbeats went silent. The dark and the cold and the grief and the flowers and the moonlight—all of it, falling away, peeling back, until what was left was small. Translucent. Blue. Barely the size of a fist. Sitting alone on the cold stone floor of a cave where nothing warm had ever lived.

  Glowing faintly.

  Waiting.

  Ten years ago...