Thorn Rootweaver's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Thorn carried the staff back to his workshop behind Waylon's barn, where seventeen warriors already stood in silent rows. He laid the dark wood across his workbench and ran his fingers along the bone carvings, tracing the broad shoulders and thick arms of men who looked like the champions he wanted to make. He spent three days shaping the staff into his tallest warrior yet — eight feet of dense wood pressed and coaxed until arms thick as tree trunks hung at its sides. When it finally stood on its own, he stepped back and watched it join the others. Twenty warriors now. He needed nine hundred and eighty more. The thought should have exhausted him, but instead he felt the pull of that old silence, the promise of the desert learning his name when his army crossed the dunes. He moved the warriors at night, five at a time, carrying them to an old storage building he'd found past the settlement's edge. The structure had boarded windows and a side entrance no one used. Inside, he lined them shoulder to shoulder along the back wall. He kept a carved chest there too — maps of Sandmaw's outer regions marked with routes his army would take, sketches of formations that would make the settlement stop and stare. Waylon found him on the fourth night, standing in the doorway of the storage building with his arms crossed. "I followed you," Waylon said. His voice was flat. "I wanted to see where you kept going after dark." He stepped inside and looked at the rows of warriors, then at the open chest with its maps spread across the floor. "You told me you were making guards for the settlement. For Cernunnos." Thorn didn't answer right away. He watched Waylon's face, waiting to see if this would be the moment someone finally understood the scale of what he was building. But Waylon's expression didn't shift toward awe. It moved toward something colder. "What conquest are you actually planning?" Thorn felt the air tighten between them. He could deflect — tell Waylon the warriors were just practice, that the maps were old studies, that none of it meant what it looked like. But the words stuck in his throat because part of him wanted Waylon to see it. To see him. "I'm going to walk into Sandmaw with a thousand men at my back," Thorn said quietly. "I'm going to make the whole desert go silent." Waylon stared at him for a long moment, then shook his head. "You're building an invasion force. In secret. While living in my barn." He turned and walked toward the door, then stopped without looking back. "I'm not keeping this from Cernunnos. You've got until morning to tell him yourself, or I will." The door closed behind him. Thorn stood alone among his warriors, the silence around him no longer the kind he'd been chasing.