Xela
TWENTY-SIX
The battle stretches into eternity.
I lose track of time, of injuries, of everything except the next attack and how to survive it.
The King doesn’t tire—the forest sustains the body it’s wearing, feeding it strength that should have run out long ago.
I’m running on adrenaline and stubbornness, my muscles screaming, my lungs burning, my blades growing heavier with every swing.
I can’t win this fight. I know it almost immediately. The King is too strong, the forest too compliant, the odds too stacked against me. Every cut I land heals within seconds. Every blow I dodge is followed by two more. Every moment I survive is borrowed time, and the interest is compounding.
But I don’t have to win. I just have to last.
A vine catches my ankle. I go down hard, bones jabbing into my back, the air driven from my lungs. Tharos looms over me, his fist raised for a strike that will end everything.
I roll. The fist pulverizes bone where my head was a heartbeat ago. Fragments spray across my face. I lash out with my blade, open a gash across his thigh, use the moment of imbalance to scramble back to my feet.
“Why do you keep fighting?” The King sounds genuinely curious now. “You can’t hurt him. You can’t save him. Every moment you resist just prolongs your suffering.”
“Maybe I like suffering.” I spit blood—when did I start bleeding from the mouth?—and reset my stance.
“I’ve been here for centuries. Longer. I’ve consumed wardens who thought themselves stronger than you, hunters who thought themselves faster, armies who thought themselves numerous enough to overwhelm.” Tharos’s head tilts, that wrong expression studying me. “What makes you think you’re different?”
“I don’t think I’m different.” I circle slowly, looking for an opening I know won’t come. “I think I’m stubborn. And sometimes, stupid determination is worth more than all the strength in the world.”
The King attacks again. I meet it with everything I have left.
Steel rings against root. Blades flash and bite, drawing lines of dark blood that heal as quickly as they open.
I’m taking damage too—a gash across my ribs that burns with every breath, a vine-burn on my arm that’s started to blister, bruises blooming across my body from impacts I barely remember.
The pain is a distant thing, pushed aside by the desperate focus of survival.
I watch Tharos’s face as we fight. Look for the flickers I saw before—the moments of hesitation, the brief struggles for control. They’re still there. Brief. Getting briefer. But they’re there.
“Tharos.” I say his name between strikes, between desperate dodges. “I know you can hear me. You’re still fighting. I can see it.”
“He’s not fighting.” The King’s voice carries an edge now. Annoyance. “He’s drowning. Losing himself in the current of my will.”
“Then why do you sound worried?”
The next strike comes faster. Harder. I barely block it, feel the impact rattle through my skeleton, taste copper on my tongue. But I also see Tharos’s hand tremble. See his arm pull back a fraction before the blow lands, reducing the force just enough that I’m still standing.
He’s protecting me. Even possessed, even drowning in the King’s control, some part of him is still trying to protect me.
And then the King changes tactics.
Something shifts in the possessed body’s expression—not hunger, not triumph. Grief. A grief that doesn’t belong to the thing wearing his face. Red hair. A woman with green eyes. The shape of a memory I’ve never seen but recognize from what he’s told me.
Seren.
The King is using her now. Reaching into the history he just shared and pulling out the oldest wound.
“Fight it.” I press forward now, not attacking but advancing, forcing him to retreat or strike me down. “Don’t let it have her.”
“Stop.” The King’s voice wavers. “You can’t—”
“You broke through before. In the ravine, when the King tried to use you against me. You tore yourself free because I was worth fighting for.” I’m near him now.
Too near for my blades to be useful. Near enough to see the war happening behind his eyes—hunger and humanity battling for supremacy.
“I’m still worth fighting for. I’m still here. Fight your way back to me.”
“Save your strength. The King could try again—”
“Not yet. Not for a while.” He catches my hand, presses it harder against his face. The gesture is desperate, almost helpless. “The possession takes a toll. On both of us. It will need to recover before it can push that hard again.”
“How long?”
“Hours. Maybe longer.” His thumb traces patterns on my palm, and I have to fight not to shiver. “Long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
He doesn’t answer. Just looks at me with those fierce eyes, his expression stripped of everything except exhaustion and naked want.
“You should have run.”
“I told you. Running isn’t my style.” My free hand grips his shoulder, feels the tension in muscles that are still trembling. “I also told you I’m not leaving until you come back. And here you are.”
He makes a sound that might be a laugh. Might be a sob. Hard to tell with someone who’s spent years forgetting how to do either.
“You’re impossible.”
“I’ve been called worse.”
“Why?”
The question hangs between us. I think about everything that’s happened since I entered Briargrave. The battles. The conversations. The moments of unexpected intimacy. The way he looks at me like I’m worth protecting.
“Then everyone else was blind.” I move closer, drawn by gravity I can’t resist.
“You’re not a monster.”
“Neither are you.”
We’re inches apart now. I can feel his breath on my lips, see the individual scars that map his weathered face. The Heartgrove is silent around us, the King’s presence dimmed to a distant pressure. For this moment, at least, we’re alone.
“This is a terrible idea.” His voice is rough.
“The worst.”
“The King will use it against us.”
“Probably.”
“We could both die because of it.”
“We could die anyway.” I bridge the remaining distance, press my forehead against his. “At least this way, we’ll have a reason worth dying for.”
His hand slides from my cheek to the back of my neck. His fingers tangle in my hair, grip tightening with a desperation that makes my pulse race. We stay like that for a long moment—breath mingling, bodies close, balanced on an edge neither of us can name.
Then he pulls back.
“Not here.” His voice is strained. “Not like this. When we—” He stops. Starts again. “If we do this, I want it to be real. Not a reaction to near-death. Not desperation or adrenaline or the relief of survival.”
“You’re saying you want to wait.”
“I’m saying I want to do this right.” His thumb traces my lower lip, a gesture that makes me shiver. “I’ve had one night with someone I cared about, once. Before the binding. And I’ve spent years regretting that I didn’t take more time. Didn’t make it matter.”
“Seren.” The name I remember from our conversation earlier.
“Yes.” Pain flickers across his face. “I won’t make that mistake again. When I touch you—” His voice drops. “When I take you, I want it to be a choice. Not a reaction.”
The words send heat flooding through me. Not just arousal—though there’s plenty of that—but a deeper warmth. Recognition. Respect. He’s treating this like it matters. Like I matter.
“Okay.” I pull back slightly, give us both room to breathe. “When we do this right. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, we survive.” He pushes himself into a sitting position, wincing as the movement pulls at wounds that haven’t fully healed. “The King is recovering. The Consortium might be regrouping. And we’re sitting in the heart of a forest that wants us both dead.”
“Business as usual, then.”
“More or less.” He reaches out, takes my hand. The grip is gentle this time, tender in a way that makes my throat tighten. “Thank you. For not giving up. For believing I could break free when I wasn’t sure myself.”
“I told you. You’re worth it.”
“Keep telling me.” His eyes meet mine, and there’s raw vulnerability in his expression. An openness I’ve never seen before. “When the King whispers that I’m nothing but a monster—when the binding makes me forget why I’m fighting—remind me what I’m fighting for.”
“You’re fighting for Briargrave. For everyone who lives within reach of this forest.”
“Not just that.” His grip tightens. “Not anymore.”
The words settle into me like warmth into frozen ground. I don’t know what we’re building here. Don’t know if it can survive the King’s hunger, the Consortium’s assault, the hundred things that could destroy us both. But I know it’s real. I know it matters.
And right now, that’s enough.
“Rest.” I squeeze his hand once, then release it. “The King said hours before it can try again. Use them. I’ll keep watch.”
“You’re injured too.”
“I’ve been worse.” A lie, probably. But he doesn’t need to know that. “Sleep. We’re going to need everything we have for what comes next.”
He looks like he wants to argue. Then exhaustion wins, and he nods.
“Wake me if anything changes.”
“I will.”
He settles back against the bones, his eyes closing. Within minutes, his breathing evens out—the deep, steady rhythm of someone who’s learned to sleep when they can, wherever they can. A soldier’s sleep. A survivor’s sleep.
I sit beside him, watching the Heartgrove for any sign of the King’s return. The faces in the bark are still. The roots and vines lie dormant. But I can feel the ancient hunger lurking at the edges of awareness, patient and malevolent and endlessly, terribly focused.
The King is quiet through the trees. Not absent—I can feel it everywhere, patient and waiting. But it says nothing. Just watches, the way something watches when it has decided to let time do the work instead.
That silence is worse than anything it has said.
I don’t respond. Don’t give it anything to work with. Just sit in the darkness with my blades across my knees, watching over the man who’s given me what I thought I’d lost forever.
Hope.
The King can wait all it wants. I’m staying right here.