ONE
ARWEN
Blood runs down my forearms. Warm. Slick. The branches don’t care that I’m already bleeding—they reach for me anyway, thorns catching skin, tearing fabric, demanding their own red tribute as I crash through the undergrowth.
Keep moving.
The Thornwood swallows the moonlight before it reaches the forest floor, leaving me blind in a maze of twisted roots and grasping vines. Every breath drags the Bloom’s spores into my lungs—that cloying sweetness coating my throat, my thoughts, making the wanting surge through my blood.
Turn back, something whispers. Surrender. Let them find you. Let it be over.
I slam my bleeding palm against a tree trunk. The pain cuts through the fog, sharp and clarifying. Real.
Nearly a decade. I’ve carried the map of these woods in my head for nearly a decade, memorizing patrol routes and escape paths while I knelt at Father Verantus’s feet and played the broken devotee. I didn’t survive all of that to fail now.
My lungs burn. My legs shake. Somewhere behind me—too close, never far enough—the Keepers are hunting.
The spores thicken as I push deeper into the forest. They hang in the air, visible even in the darkness, and every inhale makes my skin prickle with sensation. My torn clothing scrapes against wounds that should hurt but don’t—not the way they should. The Bloom transforms pain into something else. Something the cult taught me to need.
No.
I don’t need. I don’t want. I am empty, hollow, a vessel that holds nothing they can use against me.
The mantra steadies me. I adjust course, angling toward where the trees should thin. The mental map unfolds in my mind—the old oak with the lightning scar, the stream that runs east toward the trade road, the clearing where?—
Someone ran through here once. I lost him to this forest long before the cult took the rest of me. I don’t let myself follow that thought. Some wounds are more useful closed.
Focus.
The trees begin to space apart. Moonlight filters through gaps in the canopy, staining everything in shades of rust and dried blood. The Thornwood’s signature coloring—even at night, the forest bleeds.
I’m close. The clearing should be just ahead, and beyond it?—
I burst through the treeline and stop dead.
An orc stands in the moonlight.
Massive. Battle-scarred. Gray-green skin stretched over slabs of muscle, his armor stained dark with old blood. He’s cleaning his blade—an executioner’s sword, single-edged, longer than I am tall—with the methodical patience of someone who’s done this a thousand times before.
Bodies surround him. Three of them, torn apart with efficient brutality, their white robes soaked crimson.
Bloom Keepers.
The orc’s gaze snaps to me. I freeze—prey instinct, hammered into my bones by years of learning when to be still, when to be invisible, when to stop existing as anything the predators might notice.
He doesn’t attack. Doesn’t move at all. Just studies me with eyes that hold nothing—no curiosity, no threat, no mercy.
I should run. Every survival instinct I’ve honed over my years of captivity screams at me to bolt back into the trees, to take my chances with the Keepers still hunting rather than face whatever this is.
But the Keepers were hunting me. And he just eliminated them.
My legs won’t move anyway. The exhaustion has finally caught up—hours of running, bleeding, fighting the Bloom’s influence with every breath. I’m shaking so hard my teeth want to chatter.
“You’re from the monastery.”
Gravel and disinterest. No inflection. No emotion. Just observation, delivered with the flat certainty of someone stating fact.
“Escapee or scout?”
