Chapter 41 The Thornwood Devours
Alberto crossed the invisible line where normal forest ended and the Thornwood began, and the air itself changed. It grew thick, metallic, tasting of blood and sap. The black peat stream gurgled beside him like a dying thing, and the moment his boot touched the first root the entire forest exhaled.
A single, hungry breath.
He took three steps and the moonlight vanished. Not clouded over, simply gone, as though someone had snuffed every star. Darkness pressed against his eyeballs. Only the faint gleam of the stream remained, a thin black ribbon that hissed when he stepped too close.
“Keep to the water,” he whispered, voice already shaking.
The first thorn came without warning. A branch no thicker than his wrist whipped across his throat and opened skin from ear to collarbone. Blood sheeted down his chest before he even felt the sting. He staggered, clutched the wound, and kept walking.
Then the whispering started.
“Turn back… he is already dead… let the roots have you…”
The words slithered inside his skull, intimate as his own thoughts. He shook his head violently and followed the stream.
The ground rippled. Roots erupted like striking serpents, looping his ankles, jerking him face-first into the mud. Thorns punched through his calves, his thighs, his back. He screamed, the sound swallowed instantly by the canopy. He slashed with the short sword, severing the roots, but for every one he cut two more replaced it. They dragged him backward. He dug the blade into the earth and hauled himself forward, inch by agonizing inch, until the roots snapped and flung him forward again.
He rose covered in black soil and his own blood.
The path narrowed until thorns scraped both shoulders at once. They did not just scratch; they burrowed. He felt them worming under his skin, seeking veins, coiling around muscle. When he tried to pull one free, the barb broke off inside him and the pain flared white-hot.
A child’s voice giggled from the darkness ahead. “Come play, little wolf who has no wolf.”
He stumbled into a clearing that had not existed a heartbeat earlier. Four identical paths led away, each lined with pale flowers that opened and closed like mouths. The scent of honey and rot rolled over him, dizzying. His knees buckled. The stream had vanished.
“Choose,” the forest crooned. “Choose wrong and stay forever.”
He dropped to his knees, hands sinking into soft earth that pulsed like flesh. The bond tugged weakly, a dying heartbeat somewhere far ahead and to the left. He crawled that direction. Behind him the clearing sealed shut with a wet sucking sound.
The trees began to bleed.
Sap the color of old blood oozed from every trunk, running down in thick rivulets that hissed where they touched the ground. Where it touched his skin it burned like acid. He tore off what remained of his shirt and used it to wipe his arms, but the cloth dissolved into red threads that burrowed into his palms.
A root the thickness of his thigh punched up through the soil and coiled around his waist. It lifted him high, high, until he dangled thirty feet above the ground. Thorns as long as daggers punched through his sides, his back, his ribs. Blood rained down in a steady patter. The root squeezed. He felt ribs snap like dry twigs.
He drove the sword into the root again and again until black sap sprayed and the limb spasmed, hurling him into a briar wall. Thorns speared clean through his shoulder, his thigh, pinning him spread-eagled. He hung there, gasping, while the briar tightened, thorns twisting deeper, seeking his heart.
With a roar that was half sob he tore himself free, leaving chunks of flesh behind. He fell, landed on more thorns, rolled, and somehow kept the sword.
The forest laughed, a sound like a thousand branches scraping bone.
Shapes moved between the trunks now, tall, thin things with too many joints and no faces. They reached for him with fingers of bark and thorn. One brushed his cheek and left a burning line that immediately began to blacken.
He ran.
Branches lashed like whips. One caught him across the eyes; he felt the eyeball burst, vision on the left side going dark. Another wrapped his throat and dragged him backward until his neck threatened to snap. He hacked blindly, felt the branch give, and lurched forward again.
The ground opened.
A pit yawned beneath him lined with thorns longer than his forearm. He teetered on the edge, windmilling, then pitched forward. At the last second a root snagged his wrist and yanked him suspended above the pit. Slowly, deliberately, it lowered him until the first thorn kissed his chest, then pressed. The point slid between ribs with a soft, wet pop.
He screamed until his voice shredded.
Then he twisted, brought the sword up, and severed the root. He fell the last few feet, thorns punching through his back, his legs, his arms. He lay there impaled, blood pooling beneath him, and for one endless moment he thought this was how he would die.
But the bond pulsed, faint, desperate, calling.
He dragged himself upward, thorns tearing free with sounds like ripping cloth, and crawled out of the pit on broken fingers.
The forest keeper rose ahead of him.
It was not a beast. It was the forest itself given shape: thirty feet of living wood and thorn, eyes twin green fires, mouth a gaping hollow dripping crimson sap. Roots for legs. Branches for arms ending in talons that dripped something that smoked where it touched the ground.
It spoke and the words vibrated inside his bones.
“You are mine, little broken thing. Your blood will feed me for a hundred years.”
The keeper reached. One talon punched straight through his left shoulder and lifted him like a rag doll. Thorns along its arm burrowed into his flesh, seeking arteries. He felt them sliding toward his heart.
With his remaining strength he drove the short sword upward into the glowing left eye. Green fire exploded outward. The keeper shrieked, a sound that shattered nearby trunks and sent shards of wood flying like shrapnel. It flung him away.
He flew, crashing through layers of thorn and branch, each impact driving more barbs into his body. He hit the ground hard enough to knock the remaining air from his lungs. The keeper thrashed behind him, blinded, uprooting entire trees in its rage.
Alberto crawled.
He could no longer stand. Thorns covered him like a second skin. Blood poured from too many places to count. One eye was gone. Several ribs had punched through lung; every breath bubbled red. The sword was still clutched in a hand that barely worked.
The black stream glimmered ahead, mocking, impossible, beautiful.
He dragged himself the final yards, leaving a wide red trail. The forest screamed behind him, branches clawing at his legs, trying to pull him back. He slashed weakly until the blade slipped from numb fingers.
Then he was across.
Moonlight struck his face like cold water. Normal trees stood ahead. The Thornwood’s edge.
Two guards on patrol saw the thing that crawled out of the darkness: a creature made of blood and thorns, one eye, clothes shredded to ribbons, skin flayed in a hundred places.
“Goddess have mercy,” one whispered.
Alberto tried to speak. His ruined mouth managed only a wet croak.
His legs gave out. He collapsed face-first onto the stone path, thorns snapping off inside his flesh, blood pooling beneath him in a dark lake. The sword lay inches from his outstretched hand.
The guards shouted for help as darkness finally claimed him.