FORTY-SEVEN
THAROS
She kisses me. Brief but fierce, a promise wrapped in pressure and heat. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. Not with tears—Xela doesn’t cry easily—but with something deeper. Something that looks like determination and fear and love all tangled into one.
She’s quiet for a moment. Processing. I watch her think—watch the calculations happen behind those storm-colored eyes. She’s been a survivor her whole life. She understands risk and reward, the calculus of choices that might get you killed.
“Stay close.” I release her, turn back to the altar. “Not too close—the power I’m about to channel could hurt you. But close enough that I can feel you.”
“How close is that?”
“I don’t know. Just...” I take a breath. Let it out slowly. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She moves to stand a few feet behind me. Her presence pulses through the binding—a warm pulse at the edge of my awareness. “I’m your anchor, remember?”
I remember. It’s the only reason I think this might work.
I place both hands on the altar. Feel the cold stone bite into my palms. The binding surges up to meet me—eager, desperate, as if the forest itself knows what I’m about to attempt.
The King’s voice rises in my mind. No. You don’t understand what you’re doing. We are one. We have been one for centuries.
“We’ve never been one.” I let my awareness sink deeper into the binding. Past the surface layer of the King’s influence, past the hunger and the rage and the accumulated horror of centuries. “You just wanted me to believe that. Wanted me to think that killing you meant killing myself, so I’d never try.”
The forest whispers around me. Not words—feelings. Pain and hope and something that might be gratitude. Briargrave knows what I’m doing. Knows I’m trying to save it.
I reach deeper.
The binding is... vast. Complicated. I’ve lived with it since before Xela was born, and I’ve never fully understood its depths. There are layers—strata of power and memory, threads that connect to every part of the forest. Some of them are mine, woven into the fabric when I drank from the sap springs and gave my blood to the altar.
And some of them are wrong.
I can feel the King’s influence now—not as a presence in my mind, but as an infection in the binding itself. Dark threads wrapped around the forest’s core, squeezing, feeding, taking. It’s been doing this for centuries, draining Briargrave’s life to fuel its own growth. Making the forest sicker, hungrier, more violent.
Without the King, Briargrave would still be dangerous. But it would be a natural danger—the danger of a wild thing, not a malevolent one.
I push deeper still. Past the surface layers. Past the decades of accumulated horror. The binding resists—not the forest’s resistance, but the King’s. I feel it clinging to the threads I’m trying to untangle, trying to hold on to what it’s claimed.
Not yours, I think at it. Never was.
The King’s fear washes over me. Stop. You’ll kill us both. You’ll destroy everything.
I ignore it. Focus on the threads. On finding where the King ends and the forest begins.
The further I reach, the harder it becomes. The King has had centuries to intertwine itself with Briargrave. Its roots run deep, wrapped around the forest’s oldest memories, tangled with the binding’s fundamental structure. Separating them is like trying to remove rot from wood without destroying what remains.
But I’m not alone. Xela’s warmth registers at the edge of my senses—not felt through the binding but through the simple fact of her body a few feet behind me, her breath, her steadiness. Every time the King’s influence tries to drag me deeper, tries to lose me in the labyrinth of its making, I find her. Her hand finds my back. Her life, bright and fierce and refusing to let me go.
There.
Deep beneath the layers of hunger and violence, buried under centuries of accumulated horror, I find it. The original heart of Briargrave. Hurt. Buried. But alive.
The forest was here first. Before the King. Before the shadow-magic tainted the Veillands. Before any of it. And it’s still here, underneath everything, waiting to be freed.
I begin to pull.
The sensation is indescribable. Like peeling apart two things that have fused into one, like separating bone from muscle, like tearing something essential and hoping what remains can survive. The King screams—not in my mind, not through feelings, but out loud. A sound that shakes the grove, and the mass convulses.
Xela swears behind me. She moves closer, hand finding my back. The contact burns—my scars have split open—but I don’t pull away. I need her. Need the anchor she provides.
