We run.
The forest parts for us. This is frantic—trees bending out of the way like they’re trying to escape, roots smoothing into paths so fast they leave gouges in the earth. Briargrave is terrified, and its terror is pushing us toward the source.
The King’s scream grows louder as we approach. I can feel it now—not just hear it, but feel it vibrating through my bones, through the new awareness that’s been growing since my blood touched this soil. Fear and confusion and something that might be pain.
“Tharos—”
“I know.” His grip on my hand tightens. “Whatever this is, it changes everything.”
We crest the final ridge, and the Heartgrove comes into view.
The altar still stands at the center. The massive trunk behind it still rises toward the canopy. But the King...
The King is wounded. Badly enough to know it.
I can see it in the way its mass has shrunk, pulling back from the edges of the grove like a tide retreating. In the way its roots have gone slack, no longer pulsing with dark sap. In the way the faces pressed into its bark have finally, finally gone quieter—not screaming the way they were, not watching with the same hunger, but not gone either. Waiting.
The crown of blackened briars lies shattered on the altar. Black petals scattered like ash across the bone-carpeted floor.
“The Severance Engine.” Tharos’s voice is barely a whisper. “It did more damage than we realized. Than the King realized.”
“Is it... is it dead?”
“Dying — slowly enough to be dangerous.” His hand finds mine, squeezes. “The weapon severed something essential. Cut off part of what was feeding it. But it’s still here, and it knows what’s happening to it. A wounded animal looking for a way out.”
“Out where?”
“Anywhere it can hold. The forest is rejecting it. If it can’t keep its grip on Briargrave, it will try to take root in the next thing it can reach.” He looks at me, and I understand what he isn’t quite saying — that the next thing it can reach has my heartbeat and my name. “Now we have a chance to end this. Permanently. But only if we get there before it finds somewhere new to land.”
The King’s scream rises one final time—a sound of rage and terror and desperate, calculating defiance. Then it fades, and the forest falls silent.
Not the silence of waiting.
The silence of something gathering itself for one last attempt.
“The Heartgrove.” Tharos pulls me forward. “We need to reach it before the King recovers. Before it finds a way to heal.”
I let him lead me toward the grove. Toward the entity that’s been his burden and his prison for longer than I’ve been alive. Toward the end of something ancient and terrible.
And toward the beginning of something new.
FORTY-SIX
THAROS
The Heartgrove is dying.
I feel it the moment we cross the boundary between forest and sanctum—a wrongness that seeps into my bones, a weakness that echoes through the binding like a hollow note. The massive roots that once arched overhead to form a living cathedral now sag against each other, cracked and weeping dark sap. The canopy that blocked all light has thinned, letting shafts of pale sun pierce the perpetual twilight after eight hundred years of darkness.
And the bones underfoot crunch differently. Softer. Less vital. As if the forest’s grip on its dead is finally loosening.
Xela’s hand tightens in mine. I haven’t let go of her since we started running—can’t bring myself to. The awareness between us pulses with every heartbeat, and her fear and determination bleed through as clearly as I feel my own. Her palm is warm against mine, calloused and strong, and the contact grounds me in ways I couldn’t have imagined before she entered my life.
“It looks different,” she murmurs. “Smaller.”
She’s right. The King’s mass has shrunk to a fraction of what it was when I last stood here. The roots that once filled the grove—writhing, pulsing with dark sap, reaching for anythingliving—have pulled back toward the altar at the center. They lie slack against the bone-carpeted floor, motionless, deflated. Some have split open, revealing hollow cores where dense wood should be.
The faces in the bark have finally gone silent. No more screaming, no more watching with those empty, agonized eyes. They’re still there—I can see them pressed into the wood, victims of centuries of feeding—but they’ve stopped moving. Stopped suffering. Whatever the Severance Engine did, it gave them peace at last.
