“I’ll work on it.”
“Don’t.” Her fingers intertwine with mine. “I like you exactly as you are.”
We walk into the dawn. The burned forest falls behind us. The world opens up ahead—dangerous and uncertain and full of enemies who don’t yet know we’re coming.
But we walk into it side by side. Partners. Lovers. Two broken people who found each other in the middle of horror and decided that what they’d built was worth the risk.
Worth killing for.
Worth living for.
The monastery is gone. The Abbot is dead. The survivors are free.
And somewhere in the distance, powerful people are about to learn what happens when an executioner and a survivor decide to balance the scales.
This isn’t the end of the story.
It’s the beginning.
FIFTY-SEVEN
ARWEN
THREE MONTHS LATER
The monastery is gone.
I stand at the edge of what used to be the outer wall—nothing but rubble now, stones scattered across the charred earth like bones left behind by some massive predator. The fire did its work well. The towers have collapsed. The chapel is a crater. The Garden where the Abbot tended his horrible flowers is nothing but blackened soil where nothing will ever grow again.
Time and weather have claimed what the flames didn’t touch. Rain has washed away the ash, leaving the stones clean but fractured. Vines have begun creeping over the ruins—real vines, not the flowering horrors that used to decorate these walls. The Thornwood is healing around the destruction we left behind, new growth pushing up through the burnt remnants of the old.
The wild Bloom is dying. Without the Abbot’s cultivation, without the concentrated essence from the Garden, the parasitic fungus that saturated this forest is withering away. I can still smell it—that particular sweetness, fainter now than it has ever been, fading with each week that passes. Another few months and it will be gone entirely.
I should feel triumphant. Should feel victorious, standing here in the ruins of my prison, knowing that everything that hurt me has been reduced to rubble and memory.
Instead, I feel sad.
I walk through the ruins slowly, picking my way over fallen stones and collapsed timbers.
The east wing is completely destroyed—nothing left but a few sections of wall that jut up from the debris like broken teeth. The Confessional Cells where I spent so many nights have been buried beneath tons of stone. The Abbot’s sanctum, with its silk hangings and its hidden chambers, is nothing but a pile of scorched rubble.
I find the remains of my cell by memory more than sight.
There’s nothing recognizable about it now—just a section of floor that I know used to be mine because of its position relative to the courtyard fountain, which is somehow still standing. The grate I used to look through, counting stars and dreaming of escape, has been crushed flat by a fallen beam.
Years of my life, spent in a room barely large enough to lie down in. Years of conditioning and control and the slow erosion of everything I used to be.
And now it’s just... rubble.
I crouch beside the fallen grate. Run my fingers over the rusted iron. Try to feel something—triumph, closure, relief—and find only a hollow ache that I don’t know how to fill.
I thought I would feel different, coming back here.
I thought that seeing the destruction with my own eyes would make it real in a way that reports and rumors hadn’t. That standing in the Garden’s crater—a pit of blackened earth thirty feet across, the soil still faintly warm from fires that burned for weeks—would finally convince the part of me that still wakes up in cold sweats that it’s really over.
But the truth is messier than that.
The monastery is destroyed. The Abbot is dead. The cult that consumed my adolescence and most of my adulthood has been burned to the ground and scattered to the winds.
