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Fae tightened her grip on her sickle.

The drizzle became a downpour, soaking through their clothes, freezing them to the bone.

Then—

A voice echoed from within the trunk.

"Who trespasses…on my domain?" A guttural screech made them look around. The words were a confused garble that seemed to echo all round.

The leathery bark parted down the centre.

Something slithered inside, then a creature shaped by nightmares crawled out.

Its limbs were elongated and sinuous, folding and unfolding as though her bones had too many joints. Its body seemed stitched together from wood and flesh, bark fused to pallid skin the colour of a snake's underbelly. Where a nose should have been, there were only hollow pits. Its eyes burned crimson—wet and furious in a face that was neither male nor female.

A monstrous mouth stretched too wide. Needle-like teeth lined her gums in overlapping rows, glistening. A slick, putrid ooze dripped from between them.

And in terrible contrast, her hair spilled outward in a halo of silky black strands, unnaturally lustrous against the rot of her form. It seemed to tilt its head, as if considering them, and then its mouth moved in the parody of a smile. A click emanated from her neck.

The dead forest seemed to resurrect. Roots burst upward as branches snapped inward.

The very trees seemed to lean toward them, as though answering her call. Thick tendrils lashed out, coiling around Kenji's arms, around Sulien's legs. A large tentacle-like vine wrapped Blaidd within its coils while another relieved him of his axes. Sap sprayed from ruptured bark, burning wherever it touched skin.

Kenji tore at a vine, only for two more to wrap around his torso.

Sulien half-shifted, claws raking, but the vines only responded by suspending him upside down.

The creature did not look at them.

Its crimson gaze was fixed entirely on Fae, as if the others were nothing more than background noise. A vine whipped forward and coiled around the handle of her sickle, wrenching it from her grip and flinging it into the mud.

"Ah, the blood…" she hissed softly, advancing slowly. "Faelynn"

The name rolled from her mouth like a cherished prize.

She slithered closer, her body sinuous like a serpent.

"You are so like him," she sing-songed in a grating murmur, ”My useless life-giver. My father who abandoned me.”

Her long, splintered fingers lifted, hovering near Fae's face. "The same nose; same stubborn chin."

Her fingers struck in a swift move, tearing gashes into Fae's cheek, making her scream. The creature's crimson eyes burned brighter with delight. "The same cursed eyes."

Fae's pulse thundered in her ears as the fingers traced her neck. She was held immobile by a vine.

"I have waited to claim you," the creature whispered, "for so very long."

Her gaze flicked briefly toward the tree behind her, toward the trapped faces writhing faintly beneath the bark.

"Every soul I harvested was but a taste." Her withered lips curled. "But the one I craved was yours."

She leaned in closer, the stench of rot and sap thick in the air between them. "But first..." she murmured. "First, I wanted to feast on your pain."

The rain slicked down Fae's temples, burning as it slid into the wounds on her cheek.

"I wanted you to feel small. Unwanted. Like you were nothing."

A low, delighted chitter escaped her throat. "Oh, how it pleased me to have you serve me while your lifemate had to look away."