The Third Son Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 13
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 13 - Thomas Mycroft thought the border’s monsters were a far‑northern problem—until soldiers and children vanish from his own barracks and a cold, clever thing begins to pull at men’s minds. Bound to a direwolf pack and a weaponized knowledge stone he only half understands, Thomas rides north to rip the rot from the ground. But while he hunts the heart of a ruin that feeds on the living, merchants and nobles conspire in the city below. His wife, Princess Regent Catherine, faces knives.
Caution: This Fantasy Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Romantic High Fantasy Horror Mystery Magic Slow Violence
The road north from Buncombe was wide and paved, a testament to Virden’s wealth; to Thomas, every mile of it stretched like a blade. When they hit the Grens River and entered the province of Pekin, they hit winding dirt tracks.
He rode at the head of his formation, keeping the pace at a ground-eating trot. It wasn’t a gallop, nor a funeral march, though his gut twisted toward the latter. It was fast enough to show anyone watching that they weren’t stopping for pleasantries.
When they reached the capital of Pekin, Duke Able housed them overnight. After they broke their fast, they were back on the road.
“Griffin, keep the spacing tight,” Thomas called out, the breeze snatching his voice and carrying it over green fields gone too quiet. “Hyde, Brann, you’re in the center column; stay between the more experienced Rangers.”
The formation was a protective cage dressed as an escort. Thomas had placed his five young charges in the middle, insulated by seasoned Rangers on fresh mounts. The gifted recruits didn’t need to see the horizon too clearly, and whatever watched from the roadside didn’t need to see them.
Brann’s shoulders were jammed up near his ears, his knuckles white on the reins. Every time a bird burst from the roadside brush, his head snapped toward it. Thomas had caught him flinching twice when they’d passed a group of dead trees two miles back. Flinching at nothing visible, just the feel of the air. The boy had the sensitivity, all right, and where they were, that sensitivity would be as much a liability as a gift.
Roger dropped back from the vanguard to ride beside Thomas, the huntsman’s eyes crinkling against the sun, reading the tree line.
“You’re crowding them,” Roger said quietly. “Give the lads room to breathe, or they’ll panic before we hit the province line.”
Thomas didn’t look at him, just kept his eyes sweeping the road, trusting his peripheral vision.
“If they breathe too deep, they’ll taste the frost. If they panic, we handle it, and if they get snatched, we fail.”
Roger grunted, but he signaled the flankers to ease off a yard.
Pressure bloomed in the back of Thomas’s mind before he saw her. Their bond pulled taut, a tether to the wild.
Frost was a white blur in his periphery. She refused the road, preferring the folds of the terrain, the damp ditches, the hedgerows, and the edges of coppiced woods. Every mile or so, she cut across the road ahead, her paws silent despite her size. Her yellow stare found him through the column, held him for a heartbeat, and then she vanished into the brush.
’I am here. The pack moves.’
Frost had matured since she became a mother. It was much the same for him, having a son to care for. The stakes were raised when they were responsible for more than themselves.
The bond tugged in his chest, an anchor, while his mind worked at the shape of the war that was brewing. It was not a war of armies, but of something older.
By late afternoon, the rich green fields blurred into wilder, rolling scrub. The sun dipped, and the shadows stretched long. The temperature dropped fast, not just evening cool, but a biting chill that found the gaps in his leather and settled in his bones.
“South fork campsite,” Roger said, pointing to a raised clearing near a stream. “Good sight lines, dry ground.”
“Make it happen.”
The transition from travel to camp was always a test. In the castle, these men were soldiers on a drill field, but out in the wild, they were tired men with sharp weapons and thinning nerves. Thomas watched them dismount and how their eyes tracked the tree line.
He swung down, handed his reins to a groom, and watched Roger work.
The huntsman didn’t shout. He moved with well-practiced efficiency, pulling a slate board from his saddlebag and propping it against a stone near the fire ring, then chalked names with quick, slashing strokes.
“Listen up.”
His voice was conversational, but it stopped the Rangers from unbuckling their sword belts.
The men gathered, the horses’ heat steaming in the cooling air. Thomas watched his charges. Brann’s face had gone the color of old cheese, while Hyde kept glancing north, as if something there had spoken his name.
“Rules for the road,” Roger said, tapping the slate. “Watch rotation is posted. Two men per shift. You sleep in your mail, boots on.”
A groan rippled through the younger recruits because mail was heavy and hot.
“If you need to relieve yourself,” Roger continued, “you take a partner, go to the designated line, do your business, and come back. No wandering off for firewood, no taking a moment to admire the stars.”
“Even for a piss, Huntsman?” asked Kellen, trying to hide nerves behind a grin. “Seems a bit intimate.”
Roger stepped closer to the fire; shadows cut across his face.
“We’re heading toward things that take men without leaving footprints. If you vanish with your trousers down, there won’t be a body to send home because the dark doesn’t leave anything to bury.”
No one spoke. Kellen’s mouth closed, the joke forgotten.
“Understood,” Thomas said.
The group went still because the prince had spoken.
Thomas walked to the fire ring, unclasped his heavy cloak, and sat on a log; he didn’t ask for a tent or demand the privacies of his rank. He began to unlace his bracers, piling them neatly beside the fire, accepting the grit and cold alongside his men.
“The huntsman’s word is law in camp,” Thomas said, meeting the eyes of each recruit in turn. “I’m on the third watch. Wake me when it’s time.”
He saw the shift as the tension in the recruits’ shoulders dropped an inch. If the duke’s son was sleeping in the dirt and following watch protocols, then the danger was real, and they were being treated as men and women who could face it.
Later, when the camp had settled into the rhythmic stillness of chewing horses and cracking embers, Thomas walked to the edge of the light.
“Third watch isn’t for four hours,” Roger said, materializing from the darkness, holding a mug of something steaming.
“Resting my mind, not my body,” Thomas said, taking the mug.
It was willow-bark tea, bitter and hot, tasting of the deep woods.
He moved past the picket line, stopping just inside the boundary of gray stones Roger had set. The ground was hard there, packed earth with tufts of dying grass.
Thomas set the mug down and knelt, placing both palms flat against the soil.
He needed to know what was out there, had to feel it.
Thomas closed his eyes and breathed out, quieting his thoughts, then pushed his awareness down, past the cold skin of the earth, into the root systems and the damp soil. His wood sense expanded outward like ripples in dark water.
He registered the heavy, rhythmic thud of horses’ hooves shifting nearby, then the Rangers as bright sparks of heat and heartbeat against the cool background of the night. And Frost curled up near the fire, which meant that there were no dangers close by.
He pushed further, reaching out fifty yards, then a hundred.
Small lives pulsed in the forest. Field mice scurrying in the tall grass, their hearts frantic. A fox moving along the tree line, hungry and focused.
Then, to the north-northwest, he hit a wall.
Not a presence, but an absence, a hole in the world, the sensory input dropping away as if the forest had been carved out by a knife. No insects whirring, no wind rustling, just a dead, gray void that felt like rot, like something had died there and kept dying, over and over. If anyone rode into it, Thomas suspected they wouldn’t ride out. The silence would swallow them whole.
He pulled back sharply, gasping, his eyes snapping open, and he rubbed his hands together, shaking off the numbness that had crept up his forearms. Metal and rot coated his tongue.
“Bad?” Roger asked; he hadn’t moved.
“There’s a scar.” Thomas stood, brushing dirt from his knees, fighting the urge to shiver. “To the northwest. Loop us wide around that copse tomorrow. Don’t let anyone ride close. The earth is dead there.”
Roger nodded slowly.
“I’ll put Brann and Lina on firewood counting to keep his hands busy. He’s staring at the dark too much. He feels it coming.”
“And Hyde and Kellen?”
“Water duty, heavy buckets. Hard work keeps the fear manageable.”
Thomas looked at the recruits near the fire. They were eating, but their eyes were wide, tracking the sparks as they drifted into the black sky. Cornered, they looked cornered, and they didn’t even know by what.
“It’s not just fear, Roger.” Thomas looked back into the dark. “Something is hunting us.”
The next two days across the Abingdon heartland felt like a funeral procession.
News traveled faster than horses. By the time they passed the larger market towns, people were lining the fences. Not festival crowds, just farmers in silent lines, their rakes and hoes in hand. Their families hung back, children gripping their mothers’ skirts.
They sensed it. The air felt wrong, heavy with unseen moisture. The prince’s own Rangers riding north in force weren’t a patrol, but an omen.
A group of children ran alongside the column near a mill town, laughing, trying to keep pace with the horses. One of the Rangers reached into his saddlebag for a sweet biscuit to toss to them.
“Hold.” Thomas’s voice was low but sharp.
The Ranger froze.
“Eyes front so as you don’t feed the panic. If we throw bread, they think we’re buying goodwill because we can’t save them, but if we ignore them, they think we’re busy doing our duty.”
They rode through without stopping, the silence of the crowd pressing against Thomas’s ears. He could smell their anxiety; it smelled sour on the wind, mixing with chimney smoke.
Efficiency was the wall Thomas built between his men and the fear of the populace. But the wall cracked on the road to Rutland.
The column rounded a bend to find the road blocked. A farm wagon had been pulled across the lane. A thick-set man in the rough wool of a freeholder was shouting at a small group on the verge.
The group was Wildling.
It was a family: a man, a woman, a child wrapped in furs that looked salvaged from a trash heap, all exhausted and gray-faced with dust. The woman clutched a bundle to her chest as if it were the last thing of value in the world.
“I said open it!” The farmer brandished a pitchfork.
“You lot are stealing chickens from here to the river. Open the sack, or I open you!”
The Wildling man stood in front of his wife. He held a sling, which looked innocent enough, but Thomas knew how effective one was in the hands of a Wildling. But the Wildling held it low, not attacking, but trembling.
Thomas raised a hand, and the column halted with a jingle of bits and a creak of leather.
The farmer looked up, saw the royal crest on the saddle blankets, and puffed up his chest.
“My lord! These savages are thieving—”
Thomas swung down from his horse with a heavy thud of his boots, but no weapon drawn. He walked straight into the space between the pitchfork and the sling.
He stood with his back to the Wildling family, facing the farmer.
“Step back.”
The farmer blinked.
“But my lord, the sack—”
“Is none of your concern.” Thomas kept his voice flat. “This is the King’s road, and you’re obstructing a military column.”
The farmer’s hand tightened on the pitchfork. For only a moment, Thomas saw the calculation in his eyes, a freeholder considering whether he could push back against a prince. Whether the war he’d heard about gave him license.
Roger signaled, and two Rangers spurred forward, flanking the scene, their bows unslung. The lethal geometry collapsed the farmer’s bluster, and he lowered the pitchfork, his face reddening.
“They’re ... they’re swarming down,” he muttered, backing toward his wagon. “More every day; nothing but trouble.”
Thomas turned to the Wildling man. Up close, he smelled of old smoke and unwashed fear, a primal reek that raised the hair on Thomas’s arms. The man’s eyes were dark, darting from Thomas to the Rangers, wide with shock.
“Go,” Thomas said.
The man hesitated, looked at Thomas’s sword, then at his face. He gave a sharp, jerky nod and grabbed his wife’s arm.
They scrambled into the ditch, up the embankment, and were gone, running like something worse than Thomas was at their backs.
Thomas had no doubt that the freeholder would never catch a Wildling in their element. He watched them go. They weren’t running from justice. They were running from the north.
On the third day, the ground changed as the soft loam gave way to the rocky, uneven spine of his home province of Montrose. Cold bit through the gaps in Thomas’s leather, and the air tasted of pine and wet stone.