Firestone Hot Springs tell me how anyone thinks under this condition

The fire fades ever so slightly, and he thinks it might be over. He hopes it is. But the teeth return in an instant, and the memory comes back to him in the same instant: honey eyes and earthen fur, blood in the murk, his life ripped away by the flash of fangs —

"I am Popobowa."

— and he is a child again, tucked against the too-still form of his father, surrounded by his family's grief and suffocating. Why weren't they helping? He is small and weak, he is scared and angry and so very alone. He is the boy lying broken and bloody in the muck, the boy chased from his home by the scathing lick of flames, the boy who could not find his father in any of the men who had failed him since, striking out from a shattered home without blood or bond to ground him.
He feels teeth digging deeper into his neck, but he does not see the dark woman. He sees @Aditya, tall and broad and golden as he's always been. Why now? He wonders dimly, grip on his assailant loosening and falling away. You're too late. You're always too late.

"So you see, River... the ones we love, they never really leave us."

But you did. They all did, and I am going to die alone.