Then he releases me and steps back.
“The ridge is that way.” His voice is rougher than before. “Wait for my signal before you attack. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“What will it look like?”
“Like the ground is trying to swallow the Consortium’s siege engine.” That almost-smile flickers across his face again. “Hard to miss.”
He turns and walks into the forest, the thornpaths closing behind him like water filling a void. Within seconds, he’s gone—swallowed by the trees as if he’d never been there at all.
I stand in the gap for a moment longer, my hand still warm where it pressed against his arm. Then I shake myself, check my weapons, and start moving toward the ridge.
The Consortium is waiting. The King is stirring. And somewhere beneath my feet, an orc who should have been my enemy is about to risk everything to save a forest that’s been his prison.
I really am terrible at this job.
The ridge overlooksa scene from a nightmare.
I crouch in the shadows of the treeline, surveying the Consortium’s position through gaps in the undergrowth. They’ve made camp in a natural clearing, the trees pushed back by fire and force to create a staging area for their assault. Tents dot the perimeter. Hunters move between them, checking weapons and armor. And at the center of it all, surrounded by a ring of guards, sits the Binding Breaker.
It’s bigger than I expected. The siege engine rises high into the air, a mass of blackened iron and glowing runes that hurt to look at directly. The runes pulse with a light that shifts between red and sickly green, and even from this distance, I can feel the wrongness of them. Magic designed to tear. To sever. To destroy.
More hunters than I can easily count. The guards around the siege engine carry weapons I don’t recognize—long rifles with glowing chambers that suggest fire magic or worse.
This is going to be ugly.
I settle into position and wait for the signal. The forest is quiet around me, but it’s a tense quiet—the silence of a predator holding its breath before a strike. The Briarbound Dead are absent here; the Consortium’s fires must have driven them back, or destroyed them entirely.
Time stretches. I count heartbeats. Watch the guards cycle through their rotations. Note the patterns, the gaps, the moments when attention wavers.
Then the ground begins to move.
It starts subtle—a tremor that could be mistaken for nothing. Then the earth beneath the siege engine splits, roots erupting through soil that should be too packed to penetrate. The guardsshout. Hunters scramble for weapons. And in the chaos, I see him.
Tharos rises from the ground like a creature out of legend, roots and soil falling from his massive frame, his hands already reaching for the Binding Breaker’s base. The runes on the machine flare bright—too bright, painful to look at—and then everything goes wrong at once.
Fire weapons discharge. Hunters close in from all sides. And the siege engine shrieks, its runes blazing with light that shifts from green to blinding white.
I don’t wait to see what happens next. I’m already moving, bursting from the treeline with blades drawn, aiming for the nearest cluster of hunters with murder in my heart.
Time to make some noise.
The first hunter dies before he knows I’m there—blade through the gap in his armor, twisting, withdrawing. The second manages to turn, to raise his weapon, before my other blade opens his throat. Blood sprays hot against my face, and then I’m moving again, dancing through the chaos, making myself impossible to ignore.
“Contact! Contact at the eastern perimeter!”
Good. Notice me. Focus on me. Don’t look at what’s happening beneath the siege engine.
More hunters converge on my position. I fall back into the forest, using the trees as cover, letting the undergrowth slow pursuers who don’t know how to move through it. A fire weapon discharges, and a tree trunk explodes inches from my head. I roll, come up running, circle back to strike from an unexpected angle.
More hunters fall. I lose count, because the world has narrowed to blades and blood and the desperate need to stay alive long enough for Tharos to finish his work.
The siege engine’s shriek reaches a crescendo. Light blazes through the forest, bright enough to cast shadows even in the depths of Briargrave’s canopy.
And then silence.
The Binding Breaker goes dark. The runes gutter and die. And from the Consortium’s camp, I hear a sound I never expected to hear in this forest.
Cheering.
