37. Xela
THIRTY-SEVEN
XELA
Tharos changes.
I watch it happen—the moment stretching into forever, seconds becoming hours as his body transforms before my eyes. His scars split open, one after another, and the air around him charges with something ancient.
His eyes shift.
The amber I’ve come to know—warm, fierce, hungry in ways that make my pulse race—dims and darkens.
The color drains away, replaced by depths that look like shadow-stained wood.
Like ancient things growing in eternal twilight.
When he blinks, I see the forest in those eyes.
Centuries of accumulated hunger given form.
The air around him thickens. Charges. I feel it pressing against my skin, making the fine hairs on my arms stand up, making my teeth ache with a pressure I can’t explain.
Then he moves.
And the forest moves with him.
Not responding to commands the way I’ve seen before—not the deliberate orchestration of violence I witnessed in our earlier battles.
This is different. Seamless. When his hand rises, thorns erupt from the ground a hundred yards away.
When his foot shifts, roots roll beneath the surface like waves in dark water. He doesn’t control Briargrave anymore.
He is Briargrave.
The transformation should terrify me. This is what he’s been holding back.
This is the power he’s contained at the cost of his humanity, the reason he’s spent decades in isolation and solitude.
The man I gave myself to an hour ago—the man whose body I know intimately now, every scar and ridge of bark-rough skin—is disappearing into the monster he warned me about.
It’s terrifying.
And it’s beautiful.
“Tharos?”
He turns. Those dark eyes find me, and for a moment I don’t know if he recognizes me—if there’s anything left of the man beneath the power flooding through him.
The sap flowing from his scars has begun to glow faintly, making him look like something from before the warden’s binding was ever written down.
“Still here.” His voice is layered now—his voice and others beneath it. The rustle of leaves. The groan of ancient wood. The whisper of roots that have been growing since before humans walked this land. “Still me.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.” He turns toward the Consortium army, toward the Severance Engine with its screaming runes and its wall of soldiers. “Stay back. Watch my flanks. And if I stop being me—”
“I’ll put you down myself. We covered this.”
His mouth curves—barely, just a flicker of warmth in that transformed face. Even with the forest looking out from behind his eyes, I can still see him in there. The man who chose me.
“Good.”
He moves.
I’ve seen Tharos fight. I’ve watched him call the forest to war, witnessed the brutal efficiency of his violence. But that was restraint. That was control. That was a warden containing his power while directing it toward specific targets.
This is annihilation.
The soldiers guarding the Severance Engine die first. He doesn’t walk toward them—he flows, moving through the burned trees like shadow given form. One moment he’s beside me; the next he’s among them, and the forest is screaming with him.
Roots explode from the earth, not targeting individuals but erupting in waves that catch entire squads.
Soldiers go down shrieking as root-spikes broad as a hand’s span pierce their armor from below.
Vines whip from the branches overhead, not to catch and strangle but to tear—ripping limbs from bodies, pulling men apart with terrible strength.
Blood soaks into the ground. Briargrave drinks it eagerly.
The Severance Engine’s operators die in moments.
Tharos tears through them like they’re made of paper, his clawed hands rending armor and flesh with equal ease.
He doesn’t just kill them—he consumes them, drawing their blood into the earth, feeding it to the roots beneath their feet.
The forest pulses with each death, growing stronger, growing hungrier.
I can feel it now—the hunger that’s been pressing against my awareness since I entered this place. It’s no longer passive. It’s active. Demanding. And Tharos is both its voice and its weapon.
The siege engine shudders. Its runes flicker as the operators fall, as the ritual maintaining them falters. For a moment, I think it’s over—that we’ve won, that the weapon will fail.
Then someone steps up to the controls.
I know the face. The handler showed me a sketch when she sealed the contract—Vorn, she said, the Consortium’s specialist for jobs like this one.
Don’t engage him if you have a choice. He’s good and he doesn’t carry the rules other people carry.
The silver-haired woman in the ravine had spoken his name like a backup plan she’d rather not need.
He shouldn’t be here yet. He’s here anyway, and he’s reaching for the levers that control the Severance Engine.
“Reform!” His voice cuts through the chaos, sharp with command. “The weapon still functions! Protect the engine at all costs!”
The remaining soldiers snap to attention. Professional to the core, trained to follow orders even when hell is erupting around them. They abandon their scattered defensive positions and form a wall of flesh and steel between Tharos and the siege engine.
It won’t be enough. Not against what Tharos has become.
But Vorn isn’t stupid. He saw what happened when we faced the first wave. He knows what Tharos is protecting.
“Target the woman!” His finger stabs toward me. “The warden will break if she dies!”
Ten soldiers turn. Move. They’re not trying to get past me this time—they’re coming for me with killing intent clear in their eyes. Crossbows rise. Blades clear sheaths. They’ve seen what Tharos can do when he’s focused on them.
They want to see what happens when his focus is torn away.
The forest had already done its work. Of the seventy-strong force that had entered Briargrave, days of attrition—the ravine, the thornpaths, the burning corridor—had reduced them to this ragged remnant.
I don’t wait for them to reach me. I’ve never been good at waiting.
My blades are in my hands before I’m consciously aware of drawing them. The first soldier who reaches me is overeager, lunging with his sword instead of keeping his guard up. My blade finds his throat, and I’m already moving past him before his body hits the ground.
Three more converge. I parry, dodge, counterstrike. Two of them fall. The third gets his blade through my guard, and steel bites into my shoulder.
The pain is immediate. Intense. I’ve been cut before—too many times to count—but this one is deep. Blood flows freely, soaking through my leathers, making my grip on my blades slick and uncertain.
I kill him anyway. Let the momentum of his own strike carry me inside his guard, drive my blade up under his chin and into his brain.
Seven left.
A crossbow bolt takes me in the thigh.