Feast of the Fallen (Villains of Kassel #3)

Epigraph

A seed doesn’t wonder what it will become. That’s the first mercy.

Small enough to pocket. Small enough to smuggle in a fist. I was once a seed. Traded. Bartered. Owned.

They never predicted what I would become.

Bury a seed and it obeys—at first. Quiet. Patient. But leave it alone too long and it will overtake a kingdom.

It waits, taking only what it needs. Time is a seed’s only possession. Patience is forced as dampness turns to rot, splitting it open in what feels like death.

But a seed doesn’t die. It endures.

It climbs through pressure and darkness, rung by rung, until it breaks free, ever aiming for the sky, until, one day, it towers over all that once buried it like a dirty secret.

Cut it back and it only grows more aggressively. A seed is never just a seed. It is the metamorphosis of time and darkness from which insidious giants are made.