30. Tharos
THIRTY
THAROS
We don’t go further.
Not because I don’t want to—every inch of my body is screaming to take what she’s offering, to lose myself in her completely, to forget everything except the feel of her beneath me.
But she’s injured. Exhausted. Running on adrenaline and the desperate relief of surviving a battle that should have killed us both. And I won’t have our first time be a regret when the rush fades.
So we stop. Slow. Let the fever cool enough that we can think again.
She’s sprawled against me, her head on my scarred shoulder, her breath warm against my skin.
I’ve got one arm wrapped around her, holding her close, and my other hand is tracing absent patterns on her hip.
The hollow has grown quiet around us—just the distant creak of roots above, the soft drip of moisture somewhere in the dark.
“That was...” She trails off. Laughs softly. “I don’t have words for what that was.”
“Intense.” Her voice has that soft edge again, the one that surfaces when her guard is down.
She lifts her head, and her eyes are softer than I’ve seen them.
The steel is still there, but vulnerability has surfaced—real and dangerously beautiful.
“Do you make a habit of being this quiet after kissing someone?”
“I haven’t kissed anyone in a long time. I may be out of practice with the expected responses.”
“Try ‘that was amazing’ and ‘when can we do it again.’”
“That was amazing.” I allow myself a small smile. “When can we do it again?”
“Better.” She settles back against me, and the intimacy of it—her body relaxed against mine, trusting me completely—does strange things to my breathing. “Though I’d settle for ‘after we deal with the ancient horror trying to kill us’ as a timeline.”
“Practical.”
“Someone has to be.” Her fingers slide through mine, intertwining. “You said we have hours before the King can try again. What do we do with them?”
“Rest. Heal. Plan.” I should be focusing on strategy, on defenses, on all the ways the Consortium might attack when they inevitably return. Instead, I’m focused on the warmth of her palm against mine. The rhythm of her breathing. The scent of her hair beneath the blood and smoke.
“That sounds very responsible.”
“One of us should be.”
She snorts. “Too late for responsibility. That ship sailed when I let you kiss me in a bone pit.”
“You kissed me first.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I think back. Can’t remember who moved first. Just the rush of contact, the desperate hunger, the feeling of finding what I didn’t know I was looking for.
“No,” I admit. “I’m not.”
“Then let’s call it mutual.” She yawns, and the sound is so ordinary, so human, that my gut clenches. When’s the last time I heard someone yawn? When’s the last time I was close enough to another person to notice such a small thing?
“Sleep.” I tighten my arm around her. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You need rest too.”
“I can sleep when you wake. The hollow is safe enough for turns.”
She wants to argue—I can feel it in the tension of her shoulders—but exhaustion wins. Her eyes flutter closed, her breathing deepens, and within minutes she’s asleep against me. Trusting me to guard her. Trusting me with her vulnerability in a way that should terrify me.
It does terrify me.
But it also feels like what I’ve been missing for years. What I didn’t know I needed until I found it.
I don’t know how long I sit there, watching her sleep, before the forest speaks.
It’s not the King—the King’s voice is a pressure, a hunger, a constant assault against the walls of my mind. This is different. Quieter. The whisper of roots shifting, of bark creaking, of movement through the undergrowth far above us.
I go still. Focus my awareness outward, toward the edges of Briargrave where the boundary meets the world.
Movement. Lots of it. More than the scattered survivors should account for.
The Consortium is returning.
I knew they would. They’ve invested too much in this operation to retreat now—the hunters lost, the Binding Breaker destroyed, the power they came to harvest still locked inside the forest’s heart. They’ll regroup, resupply, try again. That’s what the Consortium does. They don’t accept failure.
But this feels different. The forest’s reaction is different. Not the coiled violence of anticipated battle, but unease. Dread. A sensation I haven’t felt in—
The forest flinches.
It’s subtle. A ripple of unease passing through the root network, a tension in branches that have never known fear.
The trees don’t flee—can’t flee—but they’re reacting to a presence.
A threat that makes the ancient, violent, hungry forest of Briargrave shrink from something for the first time in centuries.
What have they brought?
I ease Xela off my shoulder, laying her gently against the bone-studded wall. She stirs but doesn’t wake—exhaustion has claimed her too completely. Good. She needs the rest.
I need answers.
Pressing my palm flat against the hollow’s floor, I reach through the roots.
The bond is muted here, weakened by whatever quality makes this space resistant to the King’s influence, but it’s enough.
I can feel the shape of what’s coming. Fifty soldiers, maybe more.
Fire weapons. Silver-edged blades. The standard Consortium armament for dealing with orc-kind.
And a device.
At the center of their formation, carried on a wagon reinforced with runes that burn against my awareness—a device. Old. Wrong. The kind of wrongness that makes even the Thorn King stir uneasily in its throne of corpse-wood and root.
Another Binding Breaker? No. The first one was destroyed, and these things aren’t easy to make. This is different. Smaller. More focused.
Not designed to break the binding between warden and forest.
Designed to break the binding between warden and self.
They built two. The Engine and the Breaker—twin attempts at the same problem from researchers who couldn’t agree on which binding mattered more. We destroyed the cheaper one. They were never going to leave the second one in storage.
I pull my awareness back, my hand lifting from the floor. My heart is pounding—when did that start?—and my mouth has gone dry.
“Tharos?” Xela’s voice, sleep-rough but alert. She’s watching me with those sharp gray eyes, her hand already moving toward her blades. “What’s wrong?”
“The Consortium.” I force my voice steady. “They’re coming back. With reinforcements.”
“How many?”
“Fifty. Maybe more.” I push myself to my feet, start gathering my discarded armor. “And they’ve brought a device. Something that burns against my awareness the way poison burns skin. Something the roots pull back from.”
Xela is up now too, wincing as the motion pulls at her wounds. She reads my face.
“That bad?”
“I’ve never felt the forest shrink from anything before.”
We dress in silence. The hollow feels different now—not a shelter but a trap. If the Consortium finds us here, we’ll have nowhere to run.
“How long until they reach us?”
“Hours. Maybe less, if they know where to look.” I clasp the last of my armor into place, flex my hands in their vine-wrapped bracers. The binding pulses through me, weaker than usual but still present. Still mine. “We need to move.”
“To where?”
Good question. The Heartgrove is the obvious answer—my hold on the binding is strongest there, and the King’s power could help us fight. But the Heartgrove is also what the Consortium wants. Leading them directly to it would be playing into their hands.
“There’s a place. Near the boundary, where the old paths cross. If I can get there before they do, I can control the approach. Force them through the thornpaths I choose.”
“And if you can’t?”
“Then we improvise.” I look at her—at the woman who kissed me in a bone pit, who fought for me when the world said she should run, who’s standing here with her wounds barely closed asking how we’re going to survive instead of whether we’re going to survive.
She was never going to leave. We both knew that.
“Fine.” I cover her hand with mine. “But you follow my lead. When I say move, you move. When I say run, you run. No arguments, no heroics, no standing between me and whatever that weapon is.”
“I make no promises about the heroics.”
“Xela.”
“But I’ll try.” She squeezes my arm, then releases it. “Now let’s go figure out what’s scary enough to frighten a murder forest.”
We climb out of the hollow and into the darkness above. The forest has changed while we sheltered—the air is thick with tension, the trees leaning inward like they’re trying to hide. Even the ever-present creaking of living wood has gone quiet.
Briargrave is holding its breath.
And in the distance, through the network of roots that connects me to every corner of this ancient, hungry place, I feel the Consortium coming. Bringing death. Bringing fire.
Bringing a weapon that makes even the Thorn King afraid.
Whatever happens next, nothing will be the same.