FORTY-SEVEN THAROS
FORTY-SEVEN
THAROS
She kisses me. Brief but fierce, a promise wrapped in pressure and heat. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. Not with tears—Xela doesn’t cry easily—but with something deeper. Something that looks like determination and fear and love all tangled into one.
She’s quiet for a moment. Processing. I watch her think—watch the calculations happen behind those storm-colored eyes. She’s been a survivor her whole life. She understands risk and reward, the calculus of choices that might get you killed.
“Stay close.” I release her, turn back to the altar. “Not too close—the power I’m about to channel could hurt you. But close enough that I can feel you.”
“How close is that?”
“I don’t know. Just...” I take a breath. Let it out slowly. “Don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” She moves to stand a few feet behind me. Her presence pulses through the binding—a warm pulse at the edge of my awareness. “I’m your anchor, remember?”
I remember. It’s the only reason I think this might work.
I place both hands on the altar. Feel the cold stone bite into my palms. The binding surges up to meet me—eager, desperate, as if the forest itself knows what I’m about to attempt.
The King’s voice rises in my mind. No. You don’t understand what you’re doing. We are one. We have been one for centuries.
“We’ve never been one.” I let my awareness sink deeper into the binding.
Past the surface layer of the King’s influence, past the hunger and the rage and the accumulated horror of centuries.
“You just wanted me to believe that. Wanted me to think that killing you meant killing myself, so I’d never try. ”
The forest whispers around me. Not words—feelings. Pain and hope and something that might be gratitude. Briargrave knows what I’m doing. Knows I’m trying to save it.
I reach deeper.
The binding is... vast. Complicated. I’ve lived with it since before Xela was born, and I’ve never fully understood its depths.
There are layers—strata of power and memory, threads that connect to every part of the forest. Some of them are mine, woven into the fabric when I drank from the sap springs and gave my blood to the altar.
And some of them are wrong.
I can feel the King’s influence now—not as a presence in my mind, but as an infection in the binding itself.
Dark threads wrapped around the forest’s core, squeezing, feeding, taking.
It’s been doing this for centuries, draining Briargrave’s life to fuel its own growth.
Making the forest sicker, hungrier, more violent.
Without the King, Briargrave would still be dangerous. But it would be a natural danger—the danger of a wild thing, not a malevolent one.
I push deeper still. Past the surface layers. Past the decades of accumulated horror. The binding resists—not the forest’s resistance, but the King’s. I feel it clinging to the threads I’m trying to untangle, trying to hold on to what it’s claimed.
Not yours, I think at it. Never was.
The King’s fear washes over me. Stop. You’ll kill us both. You’ll destroy everything.
I ignore it. Focus on the threads. On finding where the King ends and the forest begins.
The further I reach, the harder it becomes.
The King has had centuries to intertwine itself with Briargrave.
Its roots run deep, wrapped around the forest’s oldest memories, tangled with the binding’s fundamental structure.
Separating them is like trying to remove rot from wood without destroying what remains.
But I’m not alone. Xela’s warmth registers at the edge of my senses—not felt through the binding but through the simple fact of her body a few feet behind me, her breath, her steadiness.
Every time the King’s influence tries to drag me deeper, tries to lose me in the labyrinth of its making, I find her.
Her hand finds my back. Her life, bright and fierce and refusing to let me go.
There.
Deep beneath the layers of hunger and violence, buried under centuries of accumulated horror, I find it. The original heart of Briargrave. Hurt. Buried. But alive.
The forest was here first. Before the King. Before the shadow-magic tainted the Veillands. Before any of it. And it’s still here, underneath everything, waiting to be freed.
I begin to pull.
The sensation is indescribable. Like peeling apart two things that have fused into one, like separating bone from muscle, like tearing something essential and hoping what remains can survive.
The King screams—not in my mind, not through feelings, but out loud.
A sound that shakes the grove, and the mass convulses.
Xela swears behind me. She moves closer, hand finding my back. The contact burns—my scars have split open—but I don’t pull away. I need her. Need the anchor she provides.
“Keep going.” Her voice is strained. “Whatever you’re doing, keep going.”
I pull harder.
The dark threads resist. They’ve been woven into Briargrave for so long that they’ve become part of its structure.
Removing them is like pulling thorns from flesh—painful, destructive, necessary.
The forest groans around us, trees bending and swaying.
Roots erupt from the ground, not attacking but thrashing, convulsing as ancient parasites are ripped from their grip.
Stop.
The King’s voice isn’t a whisper anymore. It’s a roar, desperate and furious and terrified. I feel it trying to fight back—trying to burrow deeper into the forest, to find new holds, new ways to anchor itself.
But I have Xela. And Xela has me. And between us, we’ve built something the King can’t break.
I pull.
The binding shrieks. Power surges through me—more than I’ve ever channeled, more than I knew existed. My vision goes white. My body feels like it’s being torn apart from the inside. I hear Xela scream my name, feel her hands on my shoulders, her presence burning against my awareness like a sun.
And then—
Something tears.
The King comes free.
Not completely—not yet—but the bond between it and Briargrave has been severed at its deepest point. The dark threads unravel, snapping and dissolving as the forest rejects them. The King’s mass shudders, contracts, begins to pull away from the altar like a wounded animal retreating from a fight.
The faces in the bark finally go still. Truly still. At peace.
I collapse against the altar, hands still pressed to the stone, every scar burning. My vision is spinning. My thoughts are fragmenting. I’ve given everything I have, and I don’t know if it’s enough.
“Tharos.” Xela’s arms wrap around me, holding me upright. “Stay with me. Don’t you dare leave now.”
“Didn’t... leave.” The words are hard to form. “Just tired.”
“You did something. I felt it. The whole forest felt it.”
“Separated... them.” I force my eyes to focus. To look at the King’s mass, retreating to the edges of the grove. “Forest and King. No longer... one.”
“Is it dead?”
“Dying.” I push myself upright, leaning heavily on Xela. She supports me without complaint—strong enough to hold me, steady enough to keep us both standing. “But not dead. Not yet.”
The King’s voice rises one last time. Thin. Broken. Filled with rage that can’t find purchase.
You think this changes anything. I am still here. I will still consume you both. I will—
“You’ll do nothing.” Xela’s voice cuts through the King’s threats. I turn to see her drawing her blade, gray eyes fixed on the retreating mass with deadly intent. “Tharos weakened you. Pulled you away from everything that was keeping you strong. And now...”
She steps forward. Places herself between me and the King. Her stance is perfect—balanced, ready, the posture of someone who’s been fighting her whole life. The blade in her hand catches the light filtering through the canopy, turning steel to silver.
“Now you face me.”
The King laughs—or tries to. The sound comes out wet, broken, more wheeze than mockery.
You? A human? You think you can destroy what has existed for centuries?
“I’ve killed a lot of things.” Xela raises her blade. “Creatures that were supposed to be unkillable. Monsters that kingdoms couldn’t stop. This is just one more.”
The King’s mass shifts. I can see it trying to pull itself into something coherent—trying to form the towering nightmare of roots and thorns that it’s used to terrify victims for centuries.
But it can’t. Whatever I did when I pulled it free of Briargrave, it damaged something fundamental.
The King is diminished in ways that go beyond physical form.
She looks back at me. Her expression is fierce, determined, and underneath it all—loving.
The woman who fought an army for me. Who anchored me when everything else was falling apart.
Who saw past the bark and scars to the man I’d buried.
Who chose me, against all reason, against all survival instinct.
“Rest,” she says. “I’ll finish this.”
I want to argue. Want to stand at her side for the final battle.
But my body has given everything it has, and what remains is barely enough to keep me conscious.
The separation cost me more than I realized—the emptiness yawns in my chest where the King’s presence used to be, the raw edges of a wound that will take time to heal.
“Be careful.”
“I’m never careful.” She smiles—quick, sharp, beautiful. The same smile she gave me in that hollow the night everything changed between us. “But I’m very, very good.”
She moves toward me first. Closes the distance between us in two steps and kisses me—hard, desperate, a claiming as much as a goodbye. I taste her on my lips when she pulls away, feel the ghost of her touch on my face.
“Don’t die,” I manage.
“Same to you, warden.”
She turns and walks toward the King’s retreating mass. Her shoulders are squared. Her blade is ready. And I watch her go, knowing that everything I am now rests in her hands.
The forest watches with me. For the first time in centuries, Briargrave and I want the same thing.
We want the King to die.