“I’m motivated.”
We dress in silence, helping each other with clasps and buckles, working around injuries that have stiffened while we rested. When we emerge from the hollow, the forest is burning.
The Severance Engine sits a hundred yards from the Heartgrove, its runes blazing with that sickly green light. Consortium soldiers form a protective wall around it—thirty at least, the survivors of the force that entered Briargrave. They’ve seen what we can do. They’ve watched their comrades die. And still they advance.
In my mind, the Thorn King stirs.
The moment has come. Are you ready, warden?
I look at Xela. At the woman who fought an army for me. Who gave herself to me in a hole in the ground while the world burned. Who’s standing beside me now with blood on her face and steel in her eyes, ready to face overwhelming numbers because running was never an option.
“Stay behind me,” I tell her.
“Not a chance.”
“This is going to get ugly.”
“Everything’s ugly. I’m used to it.”
I reach for the door in my mind. The barrier between myself and the King. The wall I’ve maintained for decades, the only thing keeping my identity separate from the forest that wants to consume me.
Let me in. Let me help you.
I take a breath.
And I open the door.
THIRTY-SEVEN
XELA
Tharos changes.
I watch it happen—the moment stretching into forever, seconds becoming hours as his body transforms before my eyes. His scars split open, one after another, and the air around him charges with something ancient.
His eyes shift.
The amber I’ve come to know—warm, fierce, hungry in ways that make my pulse race—dims and darkens. The color drains away, replaced by depths that look like shadow-stained wood. Like ancient things growing in eternal twilight. When he blinks, I see the forest in those eyes. Centuries of accumulated hunger given form.
The air around him thickens. Charges. I feel it pressing against my skin, making the fine hairs on my arms stand up, making my teeth ache with a pressure I can’t explain.
Then he moves.
And the forest moves with him.
Not responding to commands the way I’ve seen before—not the deliberate orchestration of violence I witnessed in our earlier battles. This is different. Seamless. When his hand rises, thorns erupt from the ground a hundred yards away. When his footshifts, roots roll beneath the surface like waves in dark water. He doesn’t control Briargrave anymore.
He is Briargrave.
The transformation should terrify me. This is what he’s been holding back. This is the power he’s contained at the cost of his humanity, the reason he’s spent decades in isolation and solitude. The man I gave myself to an hour ago—the man whose body I know intimately now, every scar and ridge of bark-rough skin—is disappearing into the monster he warned me about.
It’s terrifying.
And it’s beautiful.
“Tharos?”
He turns. Those dark eyes find me, and for a moment I don’t know if he recognizes me—if there’s anything left of the man beneath the power flooding through him. The sap flowing from his scars has begun to glow faintly, making him look like something from before the warden’s binding was ever written down.
