Xela
TWENTY
The Heartgrove is a cathedral of horror.
I step through the gap between the massive trunks and find myself in a space that defies logic.
The canopy here rises higher than any ceiling I’ve ever seen—massive roots arching overhead to form a dome of living wood that blocks every scrap of light from above.
The darkness should be absolute. Instead, a sickly phosphorescence seeps from the bark itself, casting everything in shades of green and gray that make my eyes ache.
The floor is bones.
Not scattered bones. Not the remains of occasional victims. A carpet of bones, stretching from one edge of the grove to the other, packed so tight that stepping means crunching through layers of ancient death.
Skulls and femurs and vertebrae, some so old they’ve begun to mineralize, others disturbingly fresh.
The yellow-white gleam of recent kills mixed with the gray-brown of centuries.
One thing doesn’t fit the horror: a single seed, wedged between two skulls, still green at its tip. Not enough to grow in this darkness. But not dead, either.
“Generations.” Tharos’s voice is quiet. Reverent, almost, in a terrible way. “Everyone who’s died in Briargrave since the King took root. Their bodies end up here eventually. The forest brings them.”
“As offerings.”
“As fuel.” He moves through the bones with the ease of long practice, his feet finding stable footing where I see only chaos. “The King feeds on death. On suffering. The bodies are just... remnants. Shells left over after the feeding is done.”
I follow him, trying not to look too closely at the skulls beneath my feet. Trying not to wonder how many of them died screaming. How many of them are still screaming, somewhere in the mass of wood and root that dominates the grove’s center.
The Thorn King.
I’ve been avoiding looking at it directly. Some instinct—survival, maybe, or simple self-preservation—has kept my gaze skating around the edges of the thing that grows from the altar at the Heartgrove’s heart. But I can’t avoid it forever. Not if I’m going to understand what we’re fighting.
I force myself to look.
The King isn’t a creature. That’s the first thing I understand.
It’s not a being in any sense I recognize—not animal, not plant, not anything that belongs in a world with rules and logic.
It’s an accumulation. Roots and thorns and corpse-fused wood, piled and twisted and woven into a mass that pulses with its own dark heartbeat.
The mass grows from an altar of blackened stone—ancient, I realize, older than the forest itself.
The stone predates Briargrave; it was here when the first seeds took root, and the trees grew around it rather than through it.
Dark channels are carved into the altar’s surface, radiating outward like veins, stained with centuries of blood.
Sap seeps from the trunk behind the altar, thick and viscous, pooling in the channels and flowing outward into the root system that connects the King to every corner of the forest.
But it’s the faces that stop my breath.
They appear in the bark without warning.
One moment the surface is smooth; the next, features press outward from the inside—a nose, a mouth, eye sockets that somehow convey expression despite being empty.
The faces shift and change, appearing and disappearing in waves, each one frozen in a different configuration of agony.
Victims. I’m looking at the King’s victims, absorbed into its mass, their consciousness somehow preserved in the wood that consumed them.
As I watch, a face near the altar’s base opens its mouth. No sound emerges—the faces can’t speak, I realize, can’t do anything but express their eternal torment—but the shape of the lips is unmistakable.
Help me.
Another face appears, younger, pressed against the bark like a drowning person against glass.
Please.
And another.
Kill me.
I look away. Force myself to breathe. My hands have found my blades without conscious thought, gripping the hilts so hard my knuckles ache.
“This is what you’ve been containing.” My voice is steadier than I expected. “This is what you bound yourself to stop.”
“Since before you were born.” Tharos stands at the edge of the bone carpet, his eyes fixed on the King’s mass with an expression I can’t read. Not horror—he’s long past horror. Closer to exhaustion. To resignation.
“The hunters we killed...”
“Made it stronger. As I knew they would.” He meets my gaze, and I see the truth in his face—the guilt, the resignation, the terrible acceptance of someone who’s been making impossible choices since before I was walking.
“I had no choice. If they reached this place, if they tried to harvest it—the King would have broken free entirely.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s awake.” The King’s mass shifts as if responding to his words. Roots writhe through its bulk like muscles beneath skin. Thorns the length of swords emerge from the bark, retract, emerge again. “And it wants what it wants. Everything.”
A crown of blackened briars sits atop the mass, dripping sap that looks too much like blood. The crown is the oldest part of the King—the seed from which the rest grew, watered by violence and fed by suffering. As I watch, the crown shifts, tilts, like a head turning to study prey.
“Can you reinforce the binding? Push it back?”
“I’m trying.” His jaw clenches. I watch his hands curl into fists. “But the King is pushing back. The violence in the ravine—your hunters, my hunters, all that death and fear and rage—it’s stronger than it’s been since I took the binding. Maybe stronger than it’s ever been.”
“What do you need?”
“Time. Focus. And for you to not distract me.” He closes his eyes, his expression shifting into intense concentration that looks like pain. “Whatever happens next, stay back. Don’t interfere. And whatever the King offers you—”
“Don’t trust it. I know.” I take a step back, putting distance between us. “I’ll be here if you need me.”
He doesn’t respond. His attention is inward now, focused on the battle that’s been raging inside him since long before I arrived. The binding against the King. The warden against the monster. A war that stretches back generations, and will probably continue long after I’m gone.
I find a spot near the edge of the grove, my back against a root that’s too large to be from any normal tree.
The King’s mass pulses ahead of me, its faces appearing and disappearing in patterns that almost suggest communication.
Tharos stands between us, his body rigid with effort, his scars glowing brighter than I’ve ever seen them.
And I wait.