We spend the morning exploring the changes.
The Heartgrove is transformed. Where the King’s mass once dominated the space, now there’s just the altar—ancient stone fused to the massive trunk, dark channels carved into its surface. The bones still carpet the floor, but new growth is pushing up between them. Moss. Flowers. The first green things I’ve seen in this grove since I took my post.
“Look.” Xela points to a patch of sunlight near the altar’s base.
I follow her gaze and find something I never expected to see in Briargrave: a seedling. Tiny and fragile, its leaves still curled tight, pushing up through the carpet of bones with stubborn determination.
“Life,” I murmur. “Real life. Not the King’s twisted mockery of it.”
“The forest is trying to heal.”
“It’ll take time. Centuries, maybe. The King fed on this place for so long that the damage goes deep.” I crouch beside the seedling, touch one delicate leaf with a finger that’s killed more people than I can count. “But it’s starting. That’s something.”
Xela kneels beside me. Her hand finds mine, and we look at the seedling in silence—two people who built their lives around violence, watching something innocent try to grow.
“I never thought I’d see something like this here,” she says.
“Neither did I.” I turn to look at her—at the woman who fought an army for me, who killed a god for me, who refused to see me as the creature I’d become. “I never thought I’d see a lot of things that have happened since you walked into my forest.”
“Like what?”
“Like hope.” The word feels strange on my tongue. Foreign. I’m not sure I’ve used it in decades. “I’d forgotten what it felt like. To want something beyond just surviving until the next day.”
“What do you want now?”
I stand, pulling her up with me. My hands find her waist, draw her close until there’s no space between us. She comes willingly, her arms wrapping around my neck, her body fitting against mine in ways I’m still learning.
“You,” I say. “A life that’s more than just containing horrors. Time to figure out who I am when I’m not fighting to keep something terrible from breaking free.”
“That’s a lot of wants.”
“I’ve been saving them up.” I lean down, brush my lips across hers. “Seems like a good time to start spending.”
She laughs against my mouth. The sound vibrates through me, settles into places I’d forgotten existed. I’ve made her laugh before—brief, surprised sounds, often sharp-edged with dark humor. But this is different. This is joy.
I want to hear it every day. For as long as she’ll let me.
The kiss that follows isn’t desperate. Isn’t hungry. Isn’t two people trying to feel alive while death waits outside. It’s slow, deliberate, exploratory—the kiss of two people who have time now. Who can afford to take things at a pace that isn’t survival.
Her fingers thread through my hair, scrape lightly against my scalp. I shiver—the sensation more intimate than violence, more vulnerable than any wound I’ve taken. My hands slide up her back, feeling the ridges of her spine through her shirt, the warmth of her body, the steady rhythm of her breathing.
“Here?” She pulls back enough to meet my eyes. Her lips are swollen from kissing, her cheeks flushed. “In the Heartgrove?”
“Where else?” I gesture at the sunlight streaming through the gaps in the canopy, at the flowers pushing up through the bones. “The King is dead. This place isn’t a temple to horror anymore. It’s just... a place. Our place, if we want it.”
“Our place.” She tests the words. Seems to like how they taste. “I could get used to that.”
I lower her to the ground—gently, carefully, the way I’ve learned to touch her when we’re not in the middle of a battle. She pulls me down with her, and we settle into a patch of warm grass that’s somehow grown in what used to be sterile bone.
This time, we take our time.
I strip away her clothes slowly, revealing the body I’ve learned over the past weeks—the scars, the muscle, the places where she’s soft and the places where she’s hard. I kiss the knife wound across her ribs, the claw marks on her shoulder, the new scars from her fight with the King. She arches into my touch, her breath coming faster, her hands pulling at my own clothes with increasing urgency.
“Patience,” I murmur against her stomach.
“I’ve been patient.” Her voice is strained. “I’ve been patient for days, watching you sleep, not knowing if you’d wake up. I’m done being patient.”
I laugh, and give in to her impatience. My clothes join hers on the ground, and then there’s nothing between us but skin and sunlight.
