Jack had never felt much.

It was in his nature to feel all things lightly. He had never known real fear, or real sorrow, or even real love, though he found pleasure in Lily's games and in the way her eyes sparkled when she looked at him. Creatures of the forest could not afford to feel deeply. Their rhythms were the rhythms of the seasons, where life and death and pleasure and pain all moved in a balance, and to dwell on any emotion was to throw off that balance.

But the battle had changed him.

In seeing the unicorn dead because of his folly, he had known shame, and a great sadness that threatened to break him. In seeing Lily clad in black and at the mercy of another he had known rage. And in facing Darkness he had known real fear, and then the thrill of triumph and absolution in the knowledge that he had brought something truly momentous to pass. He was no longer small, no longer subject to the whim of the seasons. He could move worlds.

Everything deepened, became more immediate. He held Lily tightly to him at night as though fearful that she might be spirited away, feeling a longing and a fierce possessiveness that was nothing like the gentle happiness he had known in their time in the forest. Now he had come to know love, and to know that love must always be coupled with pain, if only at the thought that all this could vanish from him in a moment.

He knew that she had changed as well. Where once she had laughed and teased she now kissed him fiercely. That first night it had been as though they were both desperate not to let go, as if only the complete closeness of their bodies could protect them against everything they had seen. She had frightened him with her fierceness, but he soon discovered that he possessed the same fierceness, that he wanted to consume her every bit as much as she wanted to be consumed. The fire had cooled only slightly in the weeks that followed.

He preferred not to dwell on what might have changed her. He had seen her in those robes, watched the way she so effortlessly beguiled and bewitched Darkness, but he told himself that it was brief, that he had saved her before the demon had had a chance to truly change her. She did not speak of it, and he did not ask. But when she raked his back with savage claws, when she sometimes seemed to growl at him as they wrestled, the seed of doubt blossomed in his mind.

And when the seed bloomed, something soft and cold crept into his dreams.