The forest near the road was nothing like the cave.

  Sound lived here. Insect wings thrummed in the undergrowth. Branches cracked under the weight of things Luca could not see. From somewhere beyond the treeline, far enough to be felt rather than heard, came the low vibration of wheels on packed earth. A cart, maybe. Or several. The road was close.

  Luca had been moving toward that vibration for days.

  Slowly, because a slime half the size of a human palm did not move quickly through root systems and leaf litter. Slowly, because the body remembered what the road led to: people, and what people did. And slowly because even the decision to move, the one he had made in the dark with the rabbit's warmth still fading from his surface, required a kind of energy that regenerated unevenly.

  Some hours the wanting was stronger. Some hours the fear. The body kept moving regardless, because the body had been told to move, and a slime's body was obedient to its core even when the core was cracked.

  The grey of his body had not changed. It would not change. The core still pulsed its blue light deep inside, too deep to reach the surface, and the grey held like armor he had not chosen but could not remove.

  ***

  Four shapes circled him now.

  They were small. Rat-like, but wrong. Too many teeth, and the teeth were the color of rust. Goblin-rats, or something close. Their bodies were low to the ground, tails dragging through the moss, and they moved in a pattern that was not hunting. This was territorial. Luca was in their space, and they wanted him gone.

  [Emotion Sense] read them automatically. Red-tinged hostility. Yellow-green territorial aggression. Simple colors, animal colors, nothing like the layered spectrums of human feeling. The bat in the cave had shown fear-white before being healed. The rabbit had shown warmth and then absence. These creatures showed only: you are here, and we don't want you here.

  One lunged. Its body struck Luca's surface and the impact rippled through him, distorting his shape for a moment before the membrane contracted back.

  It did not hurt much. But the second one was already moving, and the third, and [Absorb Lv.1] could not process anything this size, and [Heal] was not a weapon, and his body was too small and too slow to escape through the gaps between them.

  He was going to die here. Not from a single blow, but from accumulation. The same way moss wore down stone.

  The thought did not bring relief.

  That surprised him, in the distant way that surprises worked now. After everything, after the crack in the core and the grey that would not lift and the cave and the silence and the road and the memory of gold turning to ash, the small slime on the forest floor did not want to die. He had decided. In the dark, with the rabbit's fading warmth still mapped on his surface, he had decided: one more time. That decision was still here. Bruised and maybe foolish, but here.

  A goblin-rat reared back for another lunge.

  The sound came first.

  ***

  A tearing, like fabric ripped along its grain but sharper, colder, and the air split open. Something passed through the space where the goblin-rat's chest had been. Ice. A lance of it, translucent and edged, punching through the small body and into the earth beyond. Where it struck, frost spread in a circle, crystallizing the moss, turning the brown to white.

  The remaining three scattered. One hissed. Another tried to run and found its hind legs caught in the frost that was still expanding from the lance's point of entry. A second lance took it through the back. The third fled into the undergrowth. The fourth followed.

  Silence, except for the crackle of ice settling into earth.

  [Emotion Sense] registered the change before Luca's vision could process it. Where the goblin-rats had radiated simple animal hostility, the air now carried something entirely different. A presence approached through the trees, and its emotional signature preceded it like weather preceding a front.

  Water-blue. Grey-blue. And beneath both, threading through them like veins through marble, a color Luca had never encountered before.

  Wisteria.

  ***

  The woman who stepped through the gap in the treeline was tall. Not as tall as Kyle had been, but close. Light-colored hair that caught the afternoon sun in a way that made it look like it belonged to the frost rather than to the body it grew from. Eyes the same shade as the ice she wielded. Lean, angular, carrying her equipment with the economy of someone who traveled alone: light armor, a small pouch of potions, a guild receipt folded into the strap of her pack.

  Luca did not process any of this as beauty or its absence. He was a slime. Human faces were arrangements of heat and movement, not aesthetics.

  What he processed was the color.

  Water-blue was calm. Not warm, not cold. A lake with no current. Grey-blue sat beneath it, chronic and familiar, and Luca's core pulsed once in involuntary recognition because he knew that shade. It was the color of sustained loneliness. It looked like his own grey, translated into a different medium.

  And the wisteria. Neither warm nor cool. Not gold, not red, not the honest orange of firelight. Something between. Something he had no name for and no precedent to compare it to.

  Kyle's gold had been easy to read. Bright, immediate, like sunlight on a coin. And sunlight on a coin had turned to the grey of indifference over the span of months, and by the end the gold had been a lie, or had stopped being true, which might have been the same thing.

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  This color was not easy. It could not be read at first glance. And because it could not be read, it could not yet be judged, and because it could not be judged, the part of Luca that had learned to distrust readable warmth did not know what to do with it.

  The woman looked down. Her gaze found the grey shape on the forest floor among the melting frost and the dead goblin-rats. Her expression did not change. But [Emotion Sense] caught the wisteria intensify for half a second before the grey-blue surged up and drowned it back down.

  A feeling surfacing, then being pushed under. The same motion Luca's own body made when [Heal]'s pleasure tried to reach the surface and was pulled back to grey.

  She crouched.

  Not the way Kyle had crouched. Kyle had squatted and extended his hand, palm up, fingers spread, grinning. Hey, a slime. I'm taking you home. The gesture of someone who assumed the answer before asking the question. The gold of his emotion-color had been broad and uncomplicated that day, a wide warm band of enthusiasm that a newly named slime had mistaken for something permanent.

  This woman lowered herself to one knee and placed the back of her right hand against the ground. Not palm up. Not an invitation to climb on. The back of the hand, touching the dirt, bringing herself down to the level of a creature half the size of a palm. Her eyes were aimed in Luca's direction but not quite at him.

  Looking, but not staring. Present, but leaving a gap where refusal could fit without friction.

  "Come if you want."

  The voice was quiet. Controlled. Almost inaudible, as if she were talking to herself more than to him.

  "Leave if you don't."

  That was all.

  ***

  [Emotion Sense] continued its surveillance. The water-blue held steady. The grey-blue held steady. The wisteria flickered once more, a candle in a room with no draft, and was still.

  Luca did not move.

  Seconds passed. Forest sounds filtered back in: the insects, the distant road, a bird somewhere above. The frost from the ice lances was already beginning to melt in the afternoon warmth, and the moss around the dead goblin-rats darkened with meltwater.

  The woman's grey-blue deepened. Not anger. Something more resigned. The color of ah, right. The color of of course not. A familiar disappointment, well-practiced, already folding itself away before it could fully unfold.

  She straightened. Brushed the dirt from the back of her hand. Looked past Luca at nothing in particular.

  "...Take care of yourself, then."

  She turned. Began walking. Away from him, back toward the road, her boots pressing the moss flat in a trail that a slime could follow if a slime chose to.

  The pace was not fast. But she did not look back.

  ***

  Luca watched the wisteria recede.

  It moved between the trees, dimming with distance the way all colors dimmed when their source walked away. In a few more seconds it would pass beyond the range of [Emotion Sense], and then there would be only the forest, and the dead goblin-rats, and the grey, and the road somewhere ahead, and no particular reason to approach it.

  Something turned over inside the core.

  Not thought. Thought was too slow for what happened next. A-1: the sound of footsteps ascending the cave shaft, growing fainter, gone. He had not been able to follow then. A-2: the family by the stream, observed through leaves, close enough to see the child's breath but not close enough to feel it. He had not been able to reach then. A-3: the rabbit's warmth fading from his surface in the dark.

  One more time.

  That was what he had decided. In the cave, in the silence, in the long negotiation between fear and wanting, the wanting had won by a margin so thin it could have been error. But it had won.

  Now or later. This color or the next. And the next might be gold again, and gold he already knew the weight of. Or the next might be nothing. The forest, and the road, and the slow process of a cracked core dimming by fractions that no System notification would bother to record.

  The gold had been easy. The gold had ended in a sound like something chipping off the inside of a stone.

  This color was not easy. And that, somehow, was the thread the wanting pulled on.

  [Heal]'s light pulsed inside the core. Not toward a wound. Not toward a patient. The pulse moved through the slime's body the way intention moves through muscle, and the membrane contracted on one side and expanded on the other, and the grey shape began to crawl.

  Slowly. Because a slime half the size of a palm could not crawl fast.

  But forward. Toward the space between the trees where the wisteria was fading.

  He was not picked up. He was not carried. No hand descended to lift him from the ground and deposit him into a new life. The body moved under its own power, pushed by a light that still worked even though everything it had been used for had broken.

  ***

  Ahead, the woman's footsteps paused.

  She had heard something. Or felt it. The faintest vibration through the ground, the movement of a small body over moss and root and damp earth. Her boots were still. [Emotion Sense] caught a shift in her colors from this distance, just barely within range: the grey-blue stirring, and beneath it, the wisteria rising again, brighter this time, fighting the grey-blue that tried to push it under.

  Wanted him to come. But the grey-blue was already correcting, already dampening, and by the time it finished, the wisteria was merely a thread again, visible only because Luca was looking for it.

  The footsteps resumed. The pace, if anything, was slower than before. Marginally. The difference between a walk that left something behind and a walk that allowed something to keep up.

  Luca followed at a distance of roughly two meters. Close enough that [Emotion Sense] could maintain a continuous read. Far enough that a sudden movement would give him time to stop.

  The forest thinned ahead. Afternoon light came through the canopy in long columns that turned the meltwater on the moss into brief silver lines. One of the ice lances, still embedded in the ground where it had killed the first goblin-rat, caught the light and refracted it into something prismatic. A scatter of color that existed for a moment and then was gone as the angle changed.

  A new color in the world. Brief and accidental and already over.

  Ahead of him, the woman navigated around a stone in the path, and then, without looking back, adjusted her course slightly so that the trail she left avoided a gnarled root that a small creature might have trouble climbing over. It could have been coincidence. It could have been habit. [Emotion Sense] caught a flicker in the spectrum of her colors: a faint warmth, paler than the wisteria, softer. Something close to rose. It surfaced for less than a second before the water-blue closed over it.

  Luca did not analyze the rose. He filed it in the same place he filed the wisteria: a color I haven't seen before. Warm or cold, I don't know. Dangerous or safe, I don't know.

  The forest was thinning. The trees grew further apart. The road-sound, which had been a background hum for days, was becoming something with texture: hooves, wheels, the occasional voice carried in fragments that [Emotion Sense] could not quite resolve into color at this range. The human world was close.

  It smelled like dust and iron and the faint bitterness of forge smoke.

  The last time he had entered that world, someone had picked him up and given him a name and used him until his core cracked.

  This time no one was carrying him. The ground was rough under his body. The pace was slow.

  But the direction was his.

  The core's light, deep inside the grey where no one could see it, held its pulse for one beat longer than it had in the cave.

  Not brightness. Not trust. Not even hope, which was a word too large for what this was.

  Just: duration. The light lasting a fraction longer before it faded. The margin between giving up and not giving up, measured in tenths of a second, invisible to everyone but the system that tracked such things and assigned them no name.

  The slime followed the woman out of the forest. Grey and small and wounded, carrying a core that still pulsed blue, toward a color it could not yet name.

  That color. I hadn't seen it before.

  It frightened me. And I wanted to see it closer.

  Next time: Welcome to the lonely cabin.