A deep, still wind echoes through the forest of thorns.

Around him, he sees the remnants of the humans’ foolish attempt to save themselves – the bodies of the ones with the grey capes and metal armor impaled on spikes, petals opening on their branches that bloomed with the humans’ red blood.

As he walks among them, he touches a few of the sharp spikes and winces with delight as he feels the blessing of the Lady fill his body with every prick on his fingers. He closes his eyes, visualizing all the pain and all the terror these men and women with their silly swords and shields and bows and magic must have felt in their last moments.

They had struggled against the Lady’s gift. He wonders why. He wonders why they had fought till the bitter end.

He touches the silver locket that hangs from his neck.

He had been like them, once. Consumed with nothing but the flimsy pleasures of the flesh. He had not known, till he submitted, the true beauty the Lady offered him. That was all one had to do: just accept her. Accept her leaves and her brambles and her sharp, sharp thistles, and become one with something so much greater than oneself.

Well, he thinks. At least now, in death, you understand. You have become part of the Lady’s forest, and that is in itself a lucky, lucky gift.

He feels the rumbling in the earth all around him – the vibrations pulling him towards the center of the forest, where a gaping crater had once stood holding nothing but dust. Then, one glorious day, the Lady had burst forth from a simple seedling, and the dull, empty, soulless hole in the ground had become a nursery for her and her children.

Looking upon it now, seeing the veiny, undulating form of the lady’s bud, he feels the need to sink to his knees before she even commands it.

Her lair was no longer a simple crater. Now, it was her throne - brimming with brambles, filled with toxins, saturated with budding life no one on this dull, boring earth had ever seen before.

Then he hears her voice stroking the inside of his mind:

“Do our scouts report the truth?”

He savors the taste of her words – thick, smooth, and creamy like drops of honey melting in summertime - though he senses the urgency behind them.

“Yes, mistress,” he says. “In the Western reaches of your domain, the Lightborn, Raziel, has fallen. Though there were…complications.”

He waits for his Lady to address him, feeling the eyes of every tree, every branch, every dark blade of grass focused on his sweating face.

“Do tell.”

He licks his lips, sensing displeasure before he even got to the point.

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“He…that is to say…his blood was taken.”

The whole forest shakes – a vibration passing from the quaking ground up the bark of every vicious spike that emanated from the Lady’s earth.

“By whom?”

Another gulp.

“A – a dog, mistress.”

Deathly silence.

No quakes. No pulse. No vibrations. No movement of life at all.

“A Corgi, to be exact,” he qualifies, instantly regretting the addition.

The silence drones on, and after what seems like an agonizing eternity he thinks he might just have to scream to break it. But then comes a quivering. A rustling of the leaves in the bushes like that generated by a cool wind on a summer’s day. Then it gets louder. Louder. Louder till it fills the entire crater and the perimeter of shadowed boughs that surround it.

The Lady is laughing.

“My dear, sweet servant,” she says. “You almost had me worried.”

He watches as the petals of the Lady’s bud begin to slowly unfurl, and he is afforded a sight he was not even worthy to look upon: the pure, ripe form of the Lady’s true body.

She rises from the open petals, worming her way into the colorless skies above. Her body is long, lithe, and smooth like a snake’s, and his eyes follow the curvature of her abdomen up till it ended in a pair of buxom, green breasts – each the size of a boulder, glorious and shining in the night. He traces her serpentine neckline up to her face and beholds her true beauty – her hair draped in toxic, stinging leaves, her amber eyes framed by wreaths of thorns, and her voluminous lips tinged with the red blood of those who had tried to breach her lair and end her reign before it had truly begun, in vain.

For none could hope to stand against Lady Gyko, Demon-Flower, and Queen of the Ever-forest. The one the Greys foolishly labeled, ‘Darkseed’, in their ignorance.

She stares down at her servant with a mixture of pride and hunger. He can feel her desire to consume in her eyes – in the perfectly symmetrical black slits coated in amber that prospected him as prey. But she had kept him. She had kept him alive for a greater purpose: to lead.

Her arms emerge from her sides with slow, meandering intent: two thick vines ending in a series of three serrated razor ‘fingers’ that could cut through even the toughest metal. He knew, he recalled, laying a hand on his chest. He had felt their ice-cold mark on his flesh before.

“General,” she says. “My most precious little Thorn. We still have much work to do, don’t we?”

He feels one razor graze his chin, and the bark of every tree around him shudders in expectation.

“When the history of my glory is written, your former brethren will be naught but a footnote to my splendor.”

He nods. Her words ring true. They were fools – all of them. Children attempting the oppose the green hand of a God. He saw that now, as he saw so many things he never had before.

“Our campaign in the East proceeds without incident, My Lady,” he says. “But if the dog is not dealt with, I fear –“

The surface of the razor crosses his lips. He feels her vines twist round his ankles.

“Shhh,” she whispers in his mind. “My dear Thorn, do you have so little faith in your Lady? Fear shall not serve you. Action will.”

He instantly feels the hot flush of shame overcome him. But she wipes it away with her next command:

“You will take Seneca and a detachment of your warriors to the Western perimeter, and secure my kingdom’s flank,” she says. “Slay any who oppose you – animal or human. But bring this bungling mutt to me.”

He frowns slightly at the suggestion of taking Seneca – the Lady’s vicious chief assassin. But he could not question his Lady’s wisdom. Indeed, it may be that this task was a test not just for him, but for Seneca too.

And I can use that to my advantage…

He looks upon his Lady’s beauty once more before he stands and salutes – a gesture from his old days as a mortal. Then he looked down to find that, on impulse, his other hand had flown to grab the locket that dangled from his neck again.

It was true what they said: old habits die hard.

“It will be done, Lady Gyko,” General Thorn replies with renewed tenacity. “Upon my life, I shall bring this thieving hound to heel.”