The Roots Remember
By nightfall, the thorns had taken the entire east wing. They moved through stone like water through sand, finding cracks and seams invisible to the human eye, exploiting the palace's architecture with an intelligence that suggested something more than botanical instinct. Kassia stood in the west gallery, watching through a window as a briar thick as her arm forced its way through a second-story casement, scattering glass into the courtyard below. The palace staff had evacuated. The guards had tried to cut the growth back and had lost three men to thorns that moved like striking serpents. Only Kassia remained, because she alone understood what the throne was doing.
It was grieving. Virellia had poured her life into the throne — not metaphorically, but literally, feeding it drops of her blood mixed with rainwater, singing to it in the old tongue that plants understood, shaping its growth with her will until the boundary between the queen and her creation had become so thin that neither could exist fully without the other. Now that Virellia was gone, the throne was reaching out, searching for the connection it had lost, and finding nothing, it grew further, faster, more desperately, consuming the palace in its blind, rootless hunger for the mind that had guided it.
Kassia pressed her palm against the wall, and felt the vibration of the roots moving through the stone beneath.