The Briar has become a battlefield of shifting corridors, transforming my army into scattered, panicked fragments.
A soldier crashes into me, his face shredded, blood pouring from gashes along his neck. He grabs my shoulder, gasping. “They’re coming from the thorns!”
Before he can finish, a hook-shaped vine pierces through his chest and yanks him backward into the dark.
I stagger, my heart rabid.
This isn’t a battle anymore.
It’s a massacre.
“Farron!”
One of my brother’s voices. I can’t tell which one, but I rush toward the sound. In the chaos, I smash into two of my soldiers. There’re hands on my shoulders, my face. I search beneath the helms. It’s them, Dom and Billy, their matching eyes mad with terror.
“We have to get out of here,” Billy yells. “Order the retreat before we’re all dead!”
My brothers’ fear is infectious, and I feel it stealing my breath, turning my legs to water. Looking around, I see soldier after soldier strung up like bloody banners, waving upon their thorn flag posts. Caspian, asserting his dominion over my realm with my own dead men and women.
No. I cannot give in to fear now. I must find my valor.
And to do that, I need to reach the most sacred space within my heart. The part of me that always gives me courage. That has given me hope and lit up even my darkest days.
The ember of the Green Flame.
I slam my hand to the ground.I do not fear death.Green fire erupts from my palm, carving veins of flame into the earth like a thousand roots cracking through stone.Death cannot touch those who stand by my side.My vision narrows to a pinpoint of power—my heart, my breath, my very soul threading into the weave of life and death.
Come back to me.
I reach out to the bodies strung up on the thorns, the soldiers torn apart in the bramble’s maw. I feel them—thin, silken strands of their essence—frayed but still present.
With a cry, Ipull.
Green flames explode across the battlefield. Every corpse I reach ignites in a fiery resurrection. One by one, they jerk upright, limbs twitching, armor clanking, eyes blazing with emerald fire. They pull themselves free of the thorns. Their wounds still gape. Blood still seeps from their mouths.
But they rise.
Dozens of them. Hundreds.
The Green Flame obeys me.
I do not fear death.
I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve done?—
One of them turns. It’s the boy, the one on the cusp of manhood.
His eyes are wide open—green and gleaming—but they do notsee. They stare past me, blank and hollow. The soldier stumbles forward with a jolt, head cocking to one side like a broken doll.
One lets out a wet, gurgling moan.
Another snaps its own neck into place with a sharp, unnaturalcrack.
They are not the same as Dayton, who awoke with his heart still filled with sunshine.
These are…these are…
These are wrong.
