She doesn’t answer immediately. Just looks at me.
“I’m still figuring that out.”
The King stirs.
I feel it before I see it—a spike of hunger that tears through the binding like a blade through flesh. The Heartgrove shudders. The bones beneath us rattle and shift. And the King’s mass at the grove’s center begins to pulse with renewed urgency.
“Tharos?” Xela’s voice sharpens with alarm.
“It’s—” Pain lances through my skull, cutting off the words. The King is pushing, harder than before, using the emotional vulnerability we’ve been building like a doorway to force its way through. “It’s using this. Using us. The openness. The?—”
Another spike of agony. I feel the binding strain, feel cracks forming in defenses I’ve spent my entire existence maintaining. The King’s laughter echoes through my thoughts—not the seductive whisper from before, but a triumphant, hungry sound.
Seren called your name too. The voice reaches through the binding like a cold hand. At the end, in the fire. Did you know that? She understood what you’d done. She forgave you anyway. I kept that grief for you. I’ve been keeping it warm. Let go, warden, and I’ll let you feel it one last time.
“Don’t listen to it.” Xela’s grip closes on my shoulders. Strong, grounding. “Whatever it’s saying?—”
“It’s not saying. It’s doing.” My vision blurs. Doubles. I can feel the King pressing against my consciousness, trying to seize control the way it did in the ravine. “The binding—the binding is built on isolation. On the warden standing alone. When I let you in—when I started to care?—”
It pushes. I feel my control slipping, feel the warden’s will that’s held back the hunger for years beginning to crack under the assault. The King knows my weaknesses now—all of them. Seren, burning in the fire. The crew I led to their deaths. The countless people I’ve let the forest claim because it was easier than fighting every single time.
And Xela. The woman who looked at me and saw a man worth saving.
The King seizes that thread and pulls.
You want her. The voice is inside me now, spreading through my thoughts like poison. You want her in ways you haven’t wanted anything since before the binding. I can give you that. I can make her yours. All you have to do is let go.
“Tharos!” Her voice, distant. Panicked. “Your eyes—there’s darkness in your?—”
I feel myself losing. Feel the King’s presence flooding through the cracks in my defenses, seizing control of limbs that no longer answer to my commands. My body rises. Turns toward her. Looks at her with eyes that see her as prey instead of partner.
No. The word is desperate, internal, buried beneath the King’s overwhelming presence. I won’t let you?—
You already have. The King’s laughter echoes through me, around me, everywhere at once. And now she’ll learn what happens when someone gets too close to my warden. I am pushed somewhere I cannot reach the surface from. I cannot warn her. I cannot stop what comes next.
TWENTY-FIVE
XELA
The orc that faces me isn’t Tharos anymore.
Same body. Same scars. Same towering presence that’s filled my awareness since I first crossed into Briargrave. But the eyes are wrong—that burning intensity dimmed and replaced by cold hunger. The posture is wrong too, looser than Tharos’s controlled stillness, like a puppet whose strings have been cut and restrung by different hands.
Whatever is looking at me from behind those eyes is ancient. And it wants me dead.
“You should have run.” The voice is Tharos’s, but layered with other sounds. Rustling leaves. Grinding roots. Wood growing through bone. “Now you’ll stay. Forever.”
I’ve spent my whole life refusing to run.
Instead, I settle into a fighting stance, blades raised, feet finding purchase on the carpet of bones beneath us. The Heartgrove presses close around us—the King’s mass pulsing at the altar, the same faces I’d seen before, still screaming. Somewhere inside the creature wearing Tharos’s face, the man I’ve been fighting beside is still there. Still struggling.
I have to believe that. Have to hold onto it like a blade in my hand.
“I don’t know if you can hear me in there.” My voice comes out steady. Controlled. Not like someone facing down a monster in the heart of a nightmare forest. “But I’m not dying here. Not today. Not to you.”
The thing wearing Tharos laughs. It’s an awful sound—nothing human in it. Nothing orc, either. Just the grinding satisfaction of an ancient, patient evil that’s been waiting for this moment for centuries.
Then it attacks.
