Xela
FORTY-NINE
The fight is brutal.
The King doesn’t tire. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t feel pain the way living things feel pain. Every wound I inflict seems to enrage it rather than weaken it. Every cut I land just makes it angrier, makes its attacks more frantic, more desperate.
It throws everything it has at me—roots and vines and thorns erupting from its mass in endless waves.
For every wound I inflict, it seems to grow three more limbs.
For every opening I find, it closes two others.
The grove becomes a nightmare of movement, of reaching tendrils and slashing barbs, of dark sap spraying through the air like blood.
I’m faster. More precise. My blades find weak points the King doesn’t know it has—the spaces where faces push against the bark, where the wood is thinnest, where decades of feeding have made the structure unstable.
I leave gouges in its mass that weep dark sap.
I sever roots that were reaching for my throat.
I cut through vines that wrap around my arms and tear them away before they can tighten.
I fall into a rhythm. Duck. Slash. Roll.
Strike. My body moves on instinct, responding to threats before my conscious mind can register them.
The training I received as a child, the lessons beaten into me by mercenary sergeants who had no patience for weakness—it all comes back in a flood of muscle memory and adrenaline.
But I’m also bleeding.
A thorn catches my left arm, opening a gash from elbow to wrist. The pain is distant, muted by the fury of the fight, but I feel the blood flowing. Feel my grip on my blade weakening as the muscle beneath the wound starts to fail.
Another thorn rakes across my thigh, deep enough that I feel the muscle tear. I stagger, catch myself, force my leg to keep working through sheer will.
A vine wraps around my throat before I can stop it, squeezing, cutting off air. The world starts to dim at the edges. I drive my blade through its base with my weakening left arm, feel the vine go slack, tear it free with my other hand. Gasp for breath that burns going down.
The King laughs.
YOU FIGHT WELL, LITTLE HUNTER. The voice echoes inside my skull, cold and amused despite the wounds I’ve inflicted. BUT YOU CANNOT WIN. I HAVE FED ON WARRIORS FOR CENTURIES. CHAMPIONS. HEROES. MONSTERS. YOU ARE NOTHING NEW. YOU ARE JUST ANOTHER MEAL I HAVEN’T FINISHED YET.
“Maybe not.” I duck under a root that would have taken my head, roll across bones that crack beneath me, come up slashing. My blade takes three vines in a single stroke. “But I’m still standing.”
FOR NOW. The King’s mass shifts, consolidating.
I see it gathering itself for something bigger—something that will end this fight one way or another.
It’s pulling in its scattered limbs, concentrating its power, preparing for a final assault.
YOUR WARDEN IS DYING. I CAN FEEL HIS LIFE FADING WITH EVERY brEATH.
WHEN HE IS GONE, THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO STOP ME FROM CLAIMING YOU AS I CLAIMED HIM. AS I CLAIMED YOUR CYRILLA.
I risk a glance back. Just a moment—half a second—to see Tharos slumped against the altar, his bark-scars split and weeping, his breathing shallow and labored. He looks broken. He looks like he’s already given everything he has.
But his eyes are open. And they’re fixed on me.
“I’m not leaving you.” I don’t know if I’m talking to him or myself. “Whatever happens. I’m not leaving.”
His lips move. I can’t hear what he says—the King’s roar drowns out everything else—but I can read the shape of it.
Finish it.
I turn back to the King. And I do something I’ve never done before.
I stop calculating.
I’ve spent my whole life planning. Measuring odds.
Figuring out the smart play, the safe play, the play that keeps me alive even when everything else goes wrong.
It’s kept me breathing through situations that should have killed me a dozen times over.
It’s the reason I’m still standing when so many others have become part of the forests and dungeons they tried to clear.
But right now, planning isn’t enough. Right now, I need something more.
I need to be reckless.
I think of Tharos. Of the way he looked at me that first night—not with fear or contempt, but with curiosity.
With recognition. Two killers seeing the same darkness reflected back.
I think of the night in the hollow, his hands on my skin, his voice rough with emotions he’d forgotten how to express.
I think of every moment since then—every touch, every kiss, every whispered promise we made to each other in the darkness.
I’m not losing him. Not now. Not after everything we’ve survived.
I charge.
The King’s response is immediate. Roots erupt from the ground beneath my feet—I leap over them, using one as a springboard to launch myself higher.
Vines whip toward my face—I slice through them without slowing, my blade singing through the air.
Thorns punch toward my chest—I twist, feel them tear my armor, feel one score a line of fire across my ribs, and I keep going.
My left arm has gone numb. Blood loss or nerve damage—doesn’t matter. I switch my blade to my right hand, let the other hang useless at my side. One weapon instead of two. It’ll have to be enough.
Because I can see it now. Between the writhing roots, behind the wall of faces, deep in the center of the King’s mass—
The heart.
A core of pure black wood, pulsing with dark energy.
It’s the size of my head, maybe larger, covered in a lattice of veins that glow with sickly green light.
The source of everything. The seed from which the rest grew until it became something that could think.
Something that could want. Something that could kill.
If I can reach it—if I can drive my blade through that pulsing core—the King dies. Everything it’s built, everything it’s consumed, everything it’s stolen from this forest and the people who wandered into it—it all ends.
The King sees what I’m doing. Feels my intention through whatever awareness it has of the world.
Its attacks become frantic, desperate. The coordinated assault becomes chaotic, roots and vines striking at me from every angle without strategy.
Just raw survival instinct, a wounded predator thrashing against the thing that’s trying to kill it.
Roots slam into me from all sides. One catches my hip, spins me around. Another slams into my shoulder hard enough to crack bone. A vine catches my ankle and I stumble, nearly fall, catch myself on a root that was reaching for my throat and use it to pull myself upright.
Thorns open wounds across my back, my arms, my face. I feel skin split, feel muscle tear, feel blood flowing from cuts I don’t have time to count. The pain is everywhere now—a constant roar that threatens to overwhelm my senses.
Blood runs into my eyes. I blink it away. Keep moving.
The heart pulses. Faster now. Like it knows what’s coming. Like it’s afraid.
I drive forward. Through roots that grab at my legs. Through vines that wrap around my sword arm and try to pull the blade from my grip. Through a wall of thorns that shreds what’s left of my armor and scores lines of fire across every inch of exposed skin.
The King screams.
No. You cannot. I am eternal. I am Briargrave. I am—
“Dead.”
I plunge my blade into the heart.