Wraithwood Botanist

But the people around him had a different vibe. A different aura. Tyler could feel the people from legacy families. Being near them felt like he was deep under water, pressure bearing down on his skin.

A commotion suddenly broke out behind him.

Tyler turned and saw a teen with a straight blonde comb-over pushing another sharply dressed teen behind them.

"I don’t care who your family is, what they do, or who they bribed to get you here," the aggressor said. "You’re going to the back. The very back. Behind the dregs and slackwits and animals."

The other teen looked at the ground. "My family supplies you guys with clax. I doubt they want hostilities."

"Oh… they supply us with clax. How problematic. I suppose that if their son messed around and ended that order, we’d have to get a new supplier and put you out of business."

Tyler watched the exchange with a rising sense of indignation on the other teen’s behalf. His mind swam with thoughts of caving in that asshole’s cheekbones and landing a healer a twenty thousand hawk job to piece fragments back together.

He didn’t always think so violently, but there’s something about training for battle in a hostile landscape that brings out the worst in people.

"Now’s not the time," Kalas said.

Tyler turned to his master. The man had tribal arrays temporarily tattooed to his body for the Harvest.

"Don’t worry," Tyler whispered. "I’m not."

Even though he had an incomparably strong teacher, he had only been training for four months. The teens around him had been training their whole lives and had superior resources. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, the disparity was too vast, too absolute. So he wouldn’t inject himself into other people’s business.

"You’ve grown," Kalas said.

"Thanks."

The two stood in silence, mentally ticking down the time. Tyler thought it would never end, as if time had suddenly stopped and wouldn’t resume until the end of the Harvest when life would suddenly speed up to make up for lost time.

It was at that moment that he met Hadrian Dante.

He stopped his conversation with Railain Vestra, the other rider that conquered the Bramble and looked over at him. He had sandy brown hair in a male version of a pixie cut with the mid fade so perfect that it somehow looked regal. He was standing in whitish silver armor that was not particularly flashy aside from the Dante insignia over his heart, a symbol so commanding that no one could mistake him.

After a few words and a smirk that made the Vestra sneer at him—but then watch him almost longingly as he walked away—he approached Tyler with a slight smirk.

"Tell me, Scion," Hadrian said as if they were already mid-way through a conversation. He turned to Kal. "Do you want to kill that man?"

Tyler shivered and stammered out: "W-What?"

"I asked if you wish to kill that man. You do have ears, yes?"

Tyler hated Hadrian on contact. But the question was valid, and he spoke with renewed confidence as he turned to Kal.

"No," Tyler said. "But I do want to kick his teeth in."

Hadrian snorted. "How crude."

"Crude?" Tyler asked. "What would you do?"

"I would destroy him." Hadrian looked him in the eyes. "If I were you, I would summon my people. Leverage my connections. Play games or lay traps. And I would do it discreetly. There’s no shame in fighting from the shadows when death awaits those who fight in the open. Shame only comes to those stronger than their opponents who still resort to underhanded tactics and leverage their connections. Remember that."

Without further discussion, Hadrian disappeared into the crowd, mingling with other powerful college-aged men and women. Tyler watched him for a moment with fascination, but was distracted when the Harvest truly began.

A woman in golden armor suddenly floated to the sky with the illusion that she could fly. For a moment, she looked like an angel. Then she spoke.

"The Harvest is amongst us!" she announced, voice amplified by a glowing array on her shoulder. "It will be the most consequential moment of most of your lives. Some will score a lucky hit and earn great rewards; most will die."

The cheering harvesters fell still.

"There’s a reason fewer than a thousand people challenge this forest each year. It’s teeming with poisonous plants that rot limbs and beasts that spears you cannot pierce. It inspires betrayals and unmarked graves. It drives people to madness. Despite that, twelve thousand people stand before me, drawn to a shallow fantasy—and most of you will die for it. If that rightfully concerns you—we ask you to leave now."

The crowd shifted, and Tyler could hear people leaving in the distance. He wanted to be one of them, but when Brexton Claustra flashed him a bizarre thumbs up, he kept his feet planted.

"It seems half of you are sane," the woman continued. "The rest are free to die. Now let’s set some ground rules. The Bramble is a ten-mile stretch over a paved pathway. It’s wide enough for twenty-five people—our limit is twenty. If you accidentally step off the path, the forest will attack you and everyone around you. It’s that risk that leads to the other major rule: do not go into the Bramble. If you’re even suspected of running off, a trained team will dispatch you. So if you’re one of the many idiots talking about going after Mira Hill’s dropped package—think again."

She glanced at some of the younger family members, and they tensed up.

"Other than that, there are no other rules. File through the pathway. Once you climb the staircase at the end and enter the mouth, you must continue a half mile into the forest—no matter how tired you are. The base camp in the mouth is only open to those with an ADA pin—even if you’re dying."

Tyler looked at his pin guiltily.

"That’s all."

Immediately following her words, the massive arrays on Galfer’s Gate lit up in rapid succession as Harvesters exchanged grins and back slaps and strange handshakes that Tyler had only recently come to know. As for the legacy families, they stood stoic and silent as the gate unlocked with a booming click, and it swung outward in an arc as wide as a football field.

A path fit for fairy tale giants spread deep into the forest on a flat plane beyond it, narrowing until it resembled a sharp triangle, wide at first and tapering in the distance.

On either side of that cobblestone pathway were trees and plants worthy of a Dr. Suess novel. They weren’t necessarily colorful (although some were). It was more their shapes. Some had limbs that curled like pasta, while others had straight base branches with connecting branches that reached upward perpendicular like comb prongs.

"You may begin," the leader said.

"Come," Kalas said, leading him into the forest in the center row, right next to Hadrian, as they disappeared into the forest.

It was surreal.

2.

Walking through the Bramble wasn’t what Tyler had expected. The ground was smoothly paved and the cobblestones were carefully crafted, forming intricate artwork on the ground. It was meticulous and fascinating, but he tried not to look.

He hadn’t forgotten what happened during the Trial of Survival, and the forest within didn’t disappoint.

Trees were alive.

Branches swayed like illusions overhead as vines coiled in serpentine twists. "Flowers" seemingly sprouted from nowhere, and there were vibrant plants in alien shapes. It sometimes felt like the gods had melted a crayon box in the forest, dripping the wax in abstract patterns for artistic flare.

It worried him—

—but it didn’t faze Hadrian. The smug asshole was walking around with a permanent smirk on his face. It was like Brexton’s but far different in flavor. Whereas Brexton was drugged up and amused, hungry for thrill and chaos, Hadrian walked with a straight back and an unyielding air of confidence.

That persona bothered Tyler in general, but what really got under his skin was that Hadrian Dante didn’t seem arrogant. He had the air of someone who had visited the forest yearly since he was ten and had the power to back up his freakishly handsome appearance that couldn’t be natural.

Hadrian Dante was the real deal, and his confidence simply reflected it.

He hated it.

Brexton caught Tyler glancing at Hadrian and gave him a friendly wave as if to remind him that he was still there. Tyler stiffened and turned away. The trip passed on.

The path was curious. Instead of the path rising with the elevation, the path continued flat, cutting through the mountain until they found themselves in a sharply cut ravine that stretched high into the heavens—so high that they couldn’t even see the trees.

It was this phenomenon that made the time fly past, and in only three hours, they made it to the staircase that led to the forest.

Reaching it wasn’t a pleasant experience. It looked like the staircase to heaven, stretching half a mile into the sky with steps so steep that his mind immediately conjured scenarios of one harvester slipping, triggering a human landslide.

Single fall kills two hundred on the stairway to heaven, the headline would read.

What a joke.

"One for the road?" Brexton asked Aiden at the base of the stairs, offering his flask.

Aiden nodded, unscrewed it, and then dumped the contents onto the stairs without even smelling it.

"That mentality’s gonna kill you one of these days," Brexton warned playfully.

"My desire to help friends will get me killed?" Aiden asked with faux surprise. "That was real poison in that flask. I practically saved your life."

"Tell that to your killers," Brexton retorted. Then they started the climb, with Tyler following close behind.

His pace only took him so far. Soon, the two were mere dots above him. Then they got farther still until they vanished entirely, joining the razor streak of sunlight in the endlessly high walls.

He pressed on, wondering when it would ever end, disoriented by the experience. He had gone through hell with Kalas’s training over the last four months, so he was in the best shape of his life, but he was still sweating like a pig as he walked up, feeling like someone who tried to sprint a marathon, only to be left shambling like the undead, his arms begging for mercy.

He pressed on.

And before he knew it, he was staring at salvation, the end of the staircase where the walls suddenly opened up, exposing trees.

His heart started pounding then, and his mindset flipped to a state of crazed paranoia.

It all started with a simple question:

Would she be waiting?

Could she make it in time?

Could she make it at all?

That was a dark question that got darker the more he thought about it. While thousands of harvesters would meet the beasts beyond the mouth, culling the herds for the ones in the back, Mira would have to pass through all of them to get to the "Mouth" of the Bramble.

Right?

All of them.

No, there was no way. She was probably in the back, waiting for a Dante to make contact. Then, she would have escorts. The question was when and where he would meet her—

—if ever.

What if she was dead?

A loud commotion suddenly broke him out of his thought loop, injecting adrenaline directly into his brain. The people yelling weren’t the commoners on the bottom. They were elites from the seven legacy families.

"Get on," Kalas said, jumping in front of Tyler.

"Wait, you want to move toward it?" Tyler cried.

"It’s distant. It’s best to see the disturbance, assess, then run if necessary.

Tyler grimaced, shaking as he jumped onto Kalas’s back. A moment later, they were flying up the stairs at a blinding pace, passing the middle families with ease. The elites had also moved up but everyone else froze—and for good reason. Before they even made it a hundred steps from the top, he heard someone boom. "Wait for orders! We still don’t know what’s going on!"

Kalas flew past the frozen scions, flying up the steps until they reached the mouth. Then they felt it, cold and chilling and oppressive. Third evolution beasts.

He didn’t feel a sinister aura creeping around the area like fog, just that same pressure he felt from the Dante adults standing beside him—but it felt more intense. More overbearing. Suffocating even.

"Don’t attack, you fool!" Hadrian yelled in the distance. "I refuse to be dragged down by your feeble blindness."

A group of younger Dante, Melhan, and other elites stood out front with their adult guardians, visibly trembling with swords and bows and hands at the ready.

"Blindness? There’s seven of them!"

"And a human riding it. Now lay down your weapons. I have neither the time nor the patience to entertain your meek idiocy."

Tyler’s heart thudded as Kalas caught up, pushing through the crowd and dropping Tyler. When he got to the front, he saw what had caused the uproar.

Seven white and blue wolves stood at the end of the path, snarling and baring their canines. Each was the size of a rhino and stood on the mouth of the Bramble, a massive circular area about a football field across, lined with cobblestones.

It was a bizarre scene but Hadrian had captured the essence of the situation. On the back of the smallest wolf was an object—a human—and there was only one human in the forest.

Tyler stepped forward with bated breath. "Mira?" He took another step, and before anyone could process his actions, he started sprinting at the wolves.

Hadrian and the Dante flew after him, as his family was part of his guard detail—but they didn’t stop him. They just watched his expressions to see if the woman on the wolves was, indeed, Mira Hill, and once Tyler’s eyes filled with tears and choking emotions, they gave him space as he rushed after her.

Mira, in turn, rode her wolf at him as well. No one followed them. The wolves stood on one end and the Dante on the other, both creating walls to prevent anyone from disrupting the reunion.

Then he heard her voice, and he had to believe it.

"Tyler!" she screamed. "You idiot! You stupid goddamn idiot!"

Her voice turned hoarse as she jumped off her wolf and rushed toward him at a speed he could barely comprehend. And in the blink of an eye, she had nearly tackled him like a linebacker, taking his breath away as she squeezed him.

"You idiot… you stupid fucking idiot," she whispered.

"Hey," he cried, gasping for breath. "I don’t want to hear that from the girl who decided to live here. What the hell are you, anyway? Princess Mononoke."

Mira laughed, sucking rapid breaths to keep the oxygen flowing. He could still remember her obsession with Studio Ghibli growing up. She used to watch Howl’s Moving Castle over and over again. It was annoying. So he compromised and made her throw on the others from time to time.

He didn’t know why he thought of that memory, but it brought tears to his eyes as he squeezed her. "I’ve missed you," he said.

"I’ve missed you, too…" She took three rapid breaths. "Idiot."

They held each other for what seemed like forever until they finally released. Then he looked around. "Where’s Kline?" he asked.

Mira stifled a sob, and he couldn’t tell if it was natural or just part of the emotion. But she still looked up with puffy red eyes and said, "Kline’s… gone."