3. Xela
THREE
XELA
The forest gets worse after the outer graves.
The path narrows until I’m scraping through gaps in the undergrowth, thorns tearing at my armor and leaving shallow cuts on every exposed inch of skin.
The light fades again, dimmer than before, until I’m navigating by touch as much as sight.
The constant creaking of wood sounds less like trees settling and more like breathing—slow, patient, hungry.
I find more bodies as I go. Not displayed, this time. Incorporated. Skeletons with their bones fused into tree trunks. Bodies half-swallowed by roots, only faces visible, frozen in expressions of agony. A hand reaching up from the earth, fingers still clutching the hilt of a broken sword.
The forest floor is a graveyard. I’m walking on the dead.
Hours pass. Maybe. Time has stopped meaning anything. My waterskin is half-empty, and I should stop to rest, but every clearing I find feels wrong. Watched. Hostile. The few places where the thorns retreat seem deliberate, like traps waiting to spring.
I keep moving.
The air grows thicker. Heavier. Scented with decay so strong I can taste it on my tongue. Somewhere ahead, a massive corpse is rotting.
I draw my blades before I see it.
The clearing is larger than the others. Maybe twenty paces across, ringed with trees that lean inward like spectators at a fight. The floor is bare earth, packed hard, stained dark with old blood. And at the center—
Bodies. Fresh bodies. A hunting party, from the look of them—five men and women in mismatched armor, weapons still gripped in dead hands. They haven’t been posed. They’ve been left where they fell, sprawled across the blood-dark earth like offerings.
Offerings.
A shape moves in the trees—massive, silent.
I drop into a fighting stance, blades up, eyes scanning the treeline. The movement came from the left. No—the right. The sound is everywhere, a shifting and creaking and groaning that seems to come from the forest itself.
Then the ground erupts.
Roots burst from the earth in a wall of thorns and twisted wood, blocking the path behind me. More roots surge from the sides, from the front, boxing me in until I’m standing in a cage of living forest. The thorns are longer than my forearm. Sharper than any blade I’ve ever held.
And from the shadows beyond the cage, a voice like grinding stone:
“You should not have come here.”
Running is useless—I can see that now. The roots have sealed every exit. The thorns would tear me apart before I made it three steps.
Instead, I lower my blades. Just an inch. Just enough to signal that I’m not about to attack.
“Tharos Blackroot.” My voice doesn’t shake. I’ve trained it not to shake. “I’m here for you.”
Movement in the shadows. A massive shape adjusting its position. The forest around me seems to lean closer, as if every tree and vine and root is straining to witness what comes next.
“Many have been.” The voice again. Closer now. Coming from directly ahead, from the darkness between two massive trunks. “The forest keeps their bones.”
He steps into the light.
Seven feet tall. Broad enough to block the path completely.
Dark green-black skin marked with scars that look like bark—raised, rough, textured like actual wood.
His forearms are wrapped in vines that seem to grow from his flesh, connecting him to the roots beneath the earth.
His hands are massive, fingers ending in curved talons, stained dark with sap and soil.
His face is weathered. Hard. A heavy jaw, thick tusks worn uneven from use, deep-set eyes that burn with faint light in the forest’s perpetual twilight. He’s looking at me the way a predator looks at prey—assessing, weighing, deciding whether I’m worth the effort.
I’ve faced monsters before. I’ve killed things that made grown men scream and run.
I’ve never felt this outmatched.
But I’ve also never felt anything quite like the heat that sparks in my gut when those burning eyes meet mine. Recognition, maybe. One killer acknowledging another. Or a pull I don’t have time to think about.
“I’m not like the others.” I keep my voice steady. “I work alone. And I didn’t come here to steal anything. I came here for your head.”
His expression doesn’t change. He steps closer, and the roots beneath my feet shift and settle, as if the forest itself is adjusting to his presence.
“You came here to die.” Not a threat. A statement of fact. “What remains to be seen is how long you last.”
The survival instinct—the part that’s spent thirty years fighting, refusing to give up—snaps into focus. I’m trapped in a cage of thorns, facing a monster who controls the forest itself, armed with nothing but steel and stubbornness.
The odds are impossible.
I smile anyway.
“Then I guess we’ll find out,” I say. “Won’t we?”
The orc studies me for a long moment. I hold his gaze, refuse to look away, refuse to show the fear that’s trying to claw its way up my throat. The forest presses close, thorns rustling, roots shifting. Waiting for a command.
Then a flicker crosses those predator’s eyes. An emotion I can’t name. His head tilts slightly, and for just a second, his attention isn’t on me as a threat—it’s on me as a puzzle. A piece that doesn’t fit his expectations.
“You’re not afraid.” The statement comes out almost questioning.
“I’m terrified.” No point in lying. “But fear is just information. It doesn’t make decisions for me.”
Another long pause. The thorns around me don’t retreat, but they stop pressing closer. The roots beneath my feet go still.
“You should go,” the orc says finally. “Turn back. Leave this forest. The contract isn’t worth what the forest will take from you.”
“Can’t.” I sheath one blade, slowly, keeping my movements visible and non-threatening. “The contract is all I have. The money is the only thing standing between me and—” I stop. He doesn’t need my life story. He doesn’t need anything from me except my absence or my death.
“Standing between you and what?”
I don’t answer. I shouldn’t answer. He’s a target, not a confessor. But the way he asked—the tiredness in his voice, the bone-deep weariness of someone who’s been isolated for far too long—
“Between me and becoming one of those bodies in the outer graves,” I say. “Just another corpse posed for the forest’s gallery. At least if I die trying to complete this contract, it means something.”
The orc’s expression shifts. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to see that I’ve surprised him.
“The forest will take you,” he says. “Whether you fight or surrender. Whether you kill me or I kill you. Briargrave is patient.”
My jaw tightens. “I came here for money.”
“No.” He steps closer still. Close enough that I can smell him—earth and sap and a darker note beneath, one that makes my pulse kick in a way I don’t want to examine. “You came here because someone you loved walked into this forest and never came back. You came here for revenge.”
The words hit like a blade between my ribs.
Cyrilla. How does he know about Cyrilla?
“The forest remembers everything.” As if he heard the question I didn’t ask. “Every heartbeat. Every footstep. Every drop of blood that falls. Your grief bleeds off you like heat. The forest tasted it the moment you crossed the boundary.”
My hands want to shake. I force them still.
“Then the forest knows I’m not leaving,” I say. “Not until I finish what I came here to do.”
Silence. The thorns rustle. The roots stir. The orc stands before me like a statue, scarred and terrible and somehow, impossibly, striking in the way that violence is striking when it’s done without hesitation.
Then the roots around me withdraw.
Not all of them—not enough for me to escape, if escaping were even possible. But enough to give me room to breathe. Enough to signal that, for the moment, I’m not about to die.
“The Consortium sends more hunters,” the orc says. “A larger group. They entered the forest two days ago. They’re burning a path toward the heart of Briargrave.”
I blink. “The Consortium—”
“They followed you.” His voice is flat. Cold. “You led them here. Whether you knew it or not.”
Damn. The backup team. The one I knew they’d send, because the contract was too valuable to trust to a single hunter. They must have been tracking me since before I entered the forest. Using me as a pathfinder.
“How many?” My voice comes out steady despite the ice spreading through my chest.
“Many. Enough to cause trouble.” The orc turns, presenting his back to me—a gesture of either supreme confidence or profound indifference to whether I try to kill him. “Enough to wake what should stay sleeping.”
“What exactly?”
He stops. Doesn’t turn around.
“An entity that will kill us both. One the forest has been containing for eight hundred years.” A pause. The glow of his eyes is visible even in profile. “One that wants to be free.”
He starts walking again. The thornpaths open before him, close behind him, swallowing him back into the shadows.
“Wait.” I move forward, stop when thorns press against my chest, warning me back. “What am I supposed to do?”
His voice drifts back through the trees, already fading:
“Survive. If you can.”
Then he’s gone.
The roots around me withdraw fully. The thorns pull back. The path ahead opens—not back toward the treeline, but deeper into the forest. Toward the darkness. Toward whatever the orc is trying to stop.
I could turn around. Find my way out. Abandon the contract, the money, the revenge.
But Cyrilla walked into this forest five years ago. She walked in and she never came back, and I’ve spent every day since then wondering what killed her. Wondering if I could have stopped it.
Now I know. The orc. The warden. The monster who controls the forest that swallowed the only person I ever loved.
My hands find my blades. The steel is cold against my palms.
I follow him in.