Sylvanna's jaw tightened. Her gaze flicked to the lantern bearers her people had just saved, then back to the colossal nightmare assembling its joints like a living siege engine. "If it locks onto you alone?" she asked, voice rough, almost pleading though she kept it soft.
"Then he would give it nothing."
The crimson sash fluttered from Draven's fingers, twisting once like a spent ember before coming to rest upon the ruined moss. A hush fell over the clearing, as though even the corrupted breaths of the grove wished to witness the moment he relinquished his mark. Sylvanna felt it first: the sudden thinning of presence around him, as if the space he occupied had been scooped hollow. Raëdrithar's wings lost their crackle of static and settled into a wary hover.
Draven's eyelids lowered a fraction. Somewhere behind those steely lashes, doors he never named swung inward. They were massive things—wrought of iron thought and rust-stained intentions—each one forged to seal away pieces of himself no living soul had permission to see. He reached for the heaviest, the one rimmed in quiet grief, and dragged it shut.
A shard of memory flashed—train-quick: a field of bellflowers trampled beneath boot heels, a pale hand slipping from his grasp, the metallic snap of a man's laughter that was not joy but experiment. Pain bloomed behind his temples, bright and white. He drove it deeper, entombing it in darkness. A calmer void filled the vacuum—cold, precise, merciless.
The color ebbed from his cheeks; light abandoned his irises, leaving twin spears of winter glass. The air around him chilled enough that Sylvanna's breath erupted in mist.
The heartwood giant hesitated. Its sap-slick eyes glazed, head tilting like a beast deprived of scent. The puppetstrings of stolen memories went slack. For an instant the whole glade shivered with uncertainty, diseased roots curling back as though reconsidering. It recognized hunger yet found no flavor in the man before it. In that pause lay opportunity.
Draven moved first.
He lunged, low and fast, blades whistling through the fetid air. The right-hand sword sought the hip joint—where four root struts intersected—and sank to the hilt in gnarled tissue. Resin hissed on steel. The left-hand blade carved through the wooden gullet, severing a conduit of sickly sap that spewed in a bubbling arc. Draven's boots skidded across slick moss, but he corrected in a breath, shoulder rolling under a retaliatory swing. He planted a palm, pivoted, and slashed under the brute's arm where knots split to reveal tender cambium.
Lightning cracked overhead—Raëdrithar diving with wings ablaze. The chimera shredded the air, discharging forks of white-blue current that danced along the golem's barkplate. Wood blackened, popped. Sylvanna seized the opening, feet braced, shoulders square, unleashing a storm-kissed arrow. It streaked through the haze, its rune-lit shaft a comet in miniature, and detonated against a glyph etched in the monster's shoulder. Bark exploded outward, showering the glade with splinters that steamed where they landed.
Somewhere beyond the clash, a soul-wisp fluttered into view: the outline of a child, translucent and stuttering like a candle threatened by wind. It drifted toward Draven's path, a small hand reaching, mouth stretched in silent scream. He never faltered. The wisp streamed through him like fog past stone—finding no purchase in the vacuum where his recollections should have been, repelled by emptiness.
The golem lurched. It raised a limb the size of a felled mast and hammered downward. Draven slid aside; the blow buried itself half a span in the earth, shaking the ground with such violence that lantern-bearers stumbled. A chorus of dying branches echoed overhead. Vaelira shouted orders, her saber slashing defensive arcs as smaller corrupted forms closed on the perimeter. Her voice was iron, but grief cracked its edge each time she glimpsed the faces contorted into bark beneath the giant's skin—faces that might once have stood in her ranks.
Draven launched upward, boots striking one of the golem's embedded forearms. Muscles coiled, he vaulted higher, twin blades flashing in a pinwheel of silver. One buried deep in the collar seam he'd opened moments before. The other lodged in a gap along the sternum-plate. He hung there for a heartbeat, void of thought, void of weight, pinned only by the question of how best to kill something that was half memory, half root.
Another flash—gentler, sadder—breached his mind: a woman's lullaby smothered by smoke, the rough shove of a man's hand, a child's tiny gasp. He slammed the mental door harder. The upheaval cost him a second—just long enough for sap-veins to convulse around his embedded blade. Wood splintered. A backhand swung.
He dropped, blades wrenching free, rolled beneath the swipe, and came up beside Sylvanna. She loosed another arrow that screamed through bark-skin and burst in blue fire. The giant recoiled, moaning in a thousand voices, charred bark peeling like serpent scales.
"It's blind," Sylvanna hissed, eyes flicking from Draven's unnerving pallor back to the lumbering menace. "But it's not slowing."
"It's starving," Draven corrected, voice devoid of warmth. "Thing's never tasted nothing before." He wiped resin from his jawline, felt it hiss against his chilled skin.
Roots thrashed to either side, churning the ground into trenches. Warriors dodged and slashed. Vaelira held the center line, curved blade humming through fetid air, each stroke a prayer delivered with fury. When one young archer stumbled, she hooked his belt and shoved him behind her, blocking a spiked root meant for his chest. The impact rattled her gauntlets, but she did not yield ground.
Draven measured breathing patterns, mapped the tremors coursing through the giant's structure. Spasms always radiated outward from the same point: a pulsing amber fissure at the base of its neck. He nodded once—decision made.
"I need the core cracked," he said. Sylvanna already knew what that meant; her jaw clenched as she slid a final arrow from her quiver. Carved lightning runes glowed along the shaft, throbbing in sync with Raëdrithar's charged hum overhead.
Draven darted in. He went for speed over strength—two shallow cuts to draw the creature's attention, a dodge left, a feint high, and then a sprint up its torso while sap sprayed in boiling sheets. Every foothold burned like acid on contact; the stench of scorched resin filled his lungs. Still he climbed, eyes narrowed to slits against the radiating heat.
Halfway up, he felt the giant resonate—like a drumhead thrumming under mallet strike. The sound wasn't auditory; it rang in the marrow. Draven's chest tightened, and within that tightening, half-formed memories clawed for release: the echo of scorn dripping off a man's sneer, the fleeting warmth of someone's hand leaving his. He forced them down—nothing. He was nothing.
Hand over hand, he gained the collar ridge. Sap bubbled at the fissure, bright as molten glass. He drove his right blade into the seam, twisting until he heard wood crack in protest. A searing jet of resin spat across his forearm, melting leather, blistering skin beneath. Pain registered only as data; his mind filed it away for later.
"Strike," he barked, voice raw.
Sylvanna's arrow answered. Raëdrithar wheeled, wings framing the shot, dumping a full storm pulse into the shaft. Thunder boomed so close it punched breath from lungs. The arrow blurred into a streak of white fire, drilling through scorched air, trailing sparks that froze into glass droplets as they fell. It plunged into the very wound Draven's sword had opened.
For an instant, the grove glowed daylight-bright. The giant stiffened, every face carved in its bark stretching in silent wail, as if the souls within knew release was near and feared it. The fissure split wider, splitting the torso like overripe fruit. Sap geysered in golden arcs, steaming where it met cold air.
Draven kicked off, landing in a crouch as the golem's frame convulsed, shedding slabs of bark and resin-soaked fleshwood. It toppled with a colossal sigh—more melancholy than violent—roots curling inward as if ashamed. The boom rattled hollow logs, sent spores spiraling away in frightened flocks, and then the beast lay still.
Silence, at long last.
No whispers. No cries. Only the ragged music of survivors drawing breath.
Vaelira stepped over what remained of the monster's limbs, armor dripping sap. She sheathed her saber and glided to the side of a fallen warrior—a young cousin, by the resemblance. She knelt, removing her gauntlet to smooth damp hair from the corpse's brow. Her lips moved in archaic cadence, reciting rites too old for any human tongue. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes but never fell. They simply gleamed, unshed pearls of grief, until she inhaled and hardened her jaw back into command. seaʀᴄh thё Nôvelƒire.net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
Sylvanna reached Draven, catching the split leather at his shoulder. Resin sizzled in the wound, mixing with blood. She yanked a cloth free, pressing it tight while murmuring, "Hold." Her voice shook once before she steadied it. "That thing tried to dig into your mind."
"It can't dig into what's not there," he replied, eyes unfocused. The mental vault cracked ajar; distant sounds returned—gravel laughter, shattering glass, a mother's hum cut short. Draven shoved, but the door only latched halfway this time. A line of ache carved behind his sternum.
Sylvanna studied the haunted glassiness in his stare. "That… terrifies me, you know."
"Good," he said. It wasn't threat or boast—merely truth. The moment any ally forgot how far he was willing to go, they'd follow him somewhere too dark to return from.
She had no answer, only a sigh as she tightened the bandage.
Among shattered chunks of heartwood, something glimmered: a hair-thin filament of golden light. Draven knelt, passing his palm above until it lifted, coiling around his fingers like living silk. Memory-thread. When he touched it, a blurred vision flickered—hooded figure, scrollcases, a silhouette fleeing west beneath storm clouds. He recognized the gait: Orvath. Knowledge to weaponize later.
No words needed; he offered the thread to Vaelira. She rose slowly, closing it in a fist still slick with sap, knuckles white with purpose.
"We hunt next," she said, voice hollow but unbroken.
Draven inclined his head, echoing his earlier warning: "There will be no second chances if we hesitate again."
The wind shifted, rolling in from the sea. It carried salt sharpness, the tang of distant smoke, and a subtler note—something vast burning somewhere beyond sight. Draven inhaled, recognizing potential in the smell of ruin.
Let it burn.
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