Thorns. Most of them died from thorns—puncture wounds through the chest, the throat, the skull. Some from strangulation, vines wrapped so tight around necks that the vertebrae are crushed. A few from a different death. Whatever hollowed them out from the inside left their bodies intact but their organs missing.
The forest doesn’t just kill. It feeds.
One of the bodies is wearing armor that looks familiar. Not the armor itself—the style. The reinforcement patterns. The way the leather is stitched at the shoulders.
Bounty hunter armor, Consortium-issue.
I crouch beside the corpse, ignoring the way my skin crawls. The hunter is—was—a woman. Young. Younger than me. Her face is gone, replaced by a mask of moss and fungus, but her gear is mostly intact. I find a pouch at her hip, work it open with careful fingers.
A contract scroll. Sealed with the Consortium’s mark.
I break the seal and read.
Target: Tharos Blackroot. Location: Briargrave Forest. Payment: Standard terms plus hazard bonus. Special instructions: Extract target alive if possible. Value increases with cooperation.
The date is six months old.
This hunter came here half a year ago, armed with the same information I have, hunting the same target. The forest made an example of her anyway.
I pocket the scroll and stand. My hands don’t tremble. My pulse stays even. I’ve looked at dead bodies before. I’ve made dead bodies before.
But a cold knot has formed in my chest. Fear, if I let it be.
I push it down. Keep moving.
THREE
XELA
The forest gets worse after the outer graves.
The path narrows until I’m scraping through gaps in the undergrowth, thorns tearing at my armor and leaving shallow cuts on every exposed inch of skin. The light fades again, dimmer than before, until I’m navigating by touch as much as sight. The constant creaking of wood sounds less like trees settling and more like breathing—slow, patient, hungry.
I find more bodies as I go. Not displayed, this time. Incorporated. Skeletons with their bones fused into tree trunks. Bodies half-swallowed by roots, only faces visible, frozen in expressions of agony. A hand reaching up from the earth, fingers still clutching the hilt of a broken sword.
The forest floor is a graveyard. I’m walking on the dead.
Hours pass. Maybe. Time has stopped meaning anything. My waterskin is half-empty, and I should stop to rest, but every clearing I find feels wrong. Watched. Hostile. The few places where the thorns retreat seem deliberate, like traps waiting to spring.
I keep moving.
The air grows thicker. Heavier. Scented with decay so strong I can taste it on my tongue. Somewhere ahead, a massive corpse is rotting.
I draw my blades before I see it.
The clearing is larger than the others. Maybe twenty paces across, ringed with trees that lean inward like spectators at a fight. The floor is bare earth, packed hard, stained dark with old blood. And at the center?—
Bodies. Fresh bodies. A hunting party, from the look of them—five men and women in mismatched armor, weapons still gripped in dead hands. They haven’t been posed. They’ve been left where they fell, sprawled across the blood-dark earth like offerings.
Offerings.
A shape moves in the trees—massive, silent.
I drop into a fighting stance, blades up, eyes scanning the treeline. The movement came from the left. No—the right. The sound is everywhere, a shifting and creaking and groaning that seems to come from the forest itself.
Then the ground erupts.
Roots burst from the earth in a wall of thorns and twisted wood, blocking the path behind me. More roots surge from the sides, from the front, boxing me in until I’m standing in a cage of living forest. The thorns are longer than my forearm. Sharper than any blade I’ve ever held.
