The Third Son Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 5
Fantasy Sex Story: Chapter 5 - 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
Thomas shoved the barracks door wide. The iron hinges shrieked as old metal ground on old metal.
Twelve bunks lined the barracks walls, and eleven faces turned toward him, their eyes bright and white in the lantern light. Thomas had ordered the women to join the men’s bunkhouse to prevent something like this from happening.
They lurched up at once, their boots thumping an uneven rhythm across the boards. Thomas ignored the standing orders and stalked past them to the empty bunk at the far end.
“Don’t touch it,” he said.
He didn’t raise his voice because he didn’t need to. It came out low and iron-weighted, the voice that made men straighten even when they hated him for it.
Roger stood beside the bed with a lantern held high. Shadows leaped along the rough timbers like things trying to crawl out of sight.
Thomas stared down.
The blanket lay drum-tight, corners folded like a quartermaster’s demonstration. It looked too perfect for a boy who slept there. The pillow was fluffed and centered, and at the foot of the bed, a pair of boots sat perfectly parallel. Above, the cloak hook stood empty, but the pegs for training leathers were full.
“Name,” Thomas said.
“Kael, my lord,” Roger answered. “From the Eastern levy. He’s a quiet lad.”
“The bed hasn’t been slept in.” Thomas dropped to one knee and scanned the floorboards, eyes narrowing as if he could spear truth through the wood. But he found no scuff marks, no drag lines, and no hurried toe-prints where a frightened boy might have stumbled.
“A deserter took his boots, a sick boy went to the infirmary, and a drunk ended in irons,” Thomas said.
“He is in none of those places,” Roger said.
Tonight, the huntsman’s calm didn’t settle anything. Roger nodded toward the roster slate hanging by the door.
“His last check-in was at supper at sixth hour. He earned a mark for cleaning the grindstone,” Roger added.
Virden’s corridors had chokepoints, lantern posts, and patrol turns. A man didn’t disappear without someone seeing the moment.
“Who saw him last?” Thomas asked, turning to the room.
The young Rangers flinched. Farmhands and fisher girls a month ago, they were now pressed into wool and leather, staring at a prince who looked ready to tear the barracks apart plank by plank.
“I did, my lord,” Hyde said.
He was lanky, all elbows and fear. He stood by the third bunk, twisting the hem of his tunic until his knuckles blanched.
“Where?” Thomas asked.
“In the mess, my lord.” Hyde swallowed. “He said he was turning in early, that his head hurt.”
“Anything else?” Thomas crossed to him in two strides and stopped close enough that Hyde’s breath hitched. “Think. A name? A meeting? Did he look frightened?”
Hyde’s eyes flicked to Roger, then back to Thomas.
“He said the noise was too loud.”
“The mess was quiet,” Thomas said.
“Yes, my lord.” Hyde’s words hurried out. “It was just us eating, but he kept rubbing his arms like he was freezing. The fires were roaring.”
“Did he leave alone?”
“Yes.”
“Direction?”
“Toward the barracks, down the gallery.”
Thomas ran the path in his head. It was fifty yards of covered stone, lantern-lit, with an inner guard posted within sight.
Heat rose, not as a battle-flare but as a slow grind, a pressure that came from a world refusing to obey its own rules. His wood sense warned him of danger. If nothing else, he trusted that sense and knew that he had to act.
“Seal it,” Thomas said.
Roger lowered the lantern a fraction.
“Thomas—”
“I don’t care how late it is.” Thomas’s voice climbed with the storm inside him. “Bar the doors from the outside, and place two guards at the main entry and two at the rear. No one in or out.”
“The privies—”
“Buckets,” Thomas cut in. “For tonight, they use buckets. Double the perimeter rotation. I want a written check-in from every post captain every hour. If a mouse crosses the courtyard, I want it known.”
He looked back at Hyde.
“You’re sure he didn’t mention the woods? The glowing trees?”
Hyde shook his head hard enough to rattle his teeth.
“No, my lord, just the noise.” His voice dropped. “He said it sounded like scratching.”
A chill ran through Thomas’s gut.
Scratching.
“Roger, finish the sweep,” Thomas said. “Take every scrap of paper from his footlocker. If he wrote to anyone, I want to see it.” He stepped toward the door. “I’m going to the walls.”
He left before Roger could argue.
The corridor air felt wrong. Virden Castle’s stone usually steadied him, but this night, it pressed close, cold and final.
At the junction where the gallery met the main keep, Thomas stopped, peeled off his glove, and set his palm flat to the limestone. He closed his eyes and drew a breath that tasted of smoke.
Wood sense, Roger called it, though the wild had taught Thomas more harshly than any man. He pushed his awareness outward.
The castle answered with dull pulses. To his left, the measured thump of guards on battlements. Below, the warm chaos of kitchens where bakers already kneaded dough for the morning. Above, the slow heartbeats of people sleeping.
He drove harder until grit bit his palm and his skin became raw.
Rats scurried in the walls, two servants whispered in an alcove three turns away, and a horse shifted in the stables.
Kael didn’t answer at all.
Usually, a living man carried a distinct pressure, a localized heat of intent. Even a corpse held a fading weight. This was neither life nor death.
It was an absence, a hole in the world where a boy should be.
Thomas pulled his hand back. His fingers had stiffened, and nausea climbed his throat. The heat warning flared at the back of his skull, that sick sense of being watched from somewhere he couldn’t turn toward.
The lore demanded a target, and the lack of one made the world tilt.
He resumed walking, faster now.
By the time he reached the lower courtyard, the weather had turned. Now, the wind knifed down from the north, carrying sleet that hissed against torches and died in angry sparks.
Mud churned by drills and traffic had become a glossy slurry, and rain slicked the cobbles near the stables. Thomas marched into the center and scanned near the barracks entrance.
“Lantern!” he shouted to the gate watch.
A guard slid down a muddy slope with a shuttered light, his boots skidding, and his pride forgotten.
Thomas crouched and examined the ground. Prints lay everywhere. He identified hooves, cartwheels, boots layered into a day’s history, but rain was melting it all into gray soup.
“Damn it,” he breathed.
“You’ll not find him in the mud, lad.”
Roger appeared at his shoulder, his cloak heavy with water. He kept the lantern raised, lighting not tracks but their futility. There was no sign of him.
“If he were dragged,” Thomas said, tracing a smudge that might have been a heel, “there would be a sign. We would see a scrape, a struggle, something.”
“Or he went willingly,” Roger said. “Or he was taken by something that doesn’t leave boot marks.”
“Everything leaves marks,” Thomas said, standing; mud slid from his fingers. “Even direwolves break twigs. The world doesn’t stop obeying itself because we’re afraid.”
“The rain has been falling long enough,” Roger said. “Whatever was here is now in the drains. We need a plan, Thomas, not you tearing at the dark with your bare hands.”
Thomas looked into the yard’s corners, where torchlight lost itself, and shadows held tight. Foreboding sat over the stones like a weight.
“I want the stable boys,” he said, “the washerwomen, and the gate porters. Wake them.”
“Thomas—”
“Now.”
An hour later, the guard office by the gatehouse reeked of wet dog and nervous sweat.
Thomas sat behind a scarred pine desk. Harnish, the gate porter, stood near the door, trembling, his thick neck slick with rain, his hands like shovels clutching the log as if it could ward off blame.
“I checked the book, my lord,” Harnish stammered. “No one left after sunset, and the gates have been barred since the bell.”
Thomas snatched the log and flipped pages. It was in messy script, but legible. There’d been grain wagons that left. Lord Varric’s courier came in, and Patrol B returned.
“What of the postern?” Thomas asked.
“Barred and chained; I have the keys on my belt.”
“And the sally port?”
“Rusted shut since the last war, my lord. It would take three men with sledgehammers to open.”
Thomas slammed the book shut, and Harnish flinched like a struck dog.
“Bring the night washerwomen,” Thomas told the guard at the door, “and the scullions. Someone saw a boy walk fifty yards in a lit corridor.”
“Thomas.”
Roger stepped from the corner where he had been leaning against a spear rack and set a hand on Thomas’s shoulder.
“Stop.”
Thomas shrugged him off.
“We hold the line. That’s the duty. If we can’t hold the barracks, we can’t hold the kingdom.”
“You’re terrifying them,” Roger said quietly. “Harnish looks ready to piss himself. Fear doesn’t give truth; it gives whatever they think will make you stop shouting.”
“Then you do it,” Thomas said, already moving past him. “Set a timeline, including supper seating, barracks entry, last words. Two Rangers to verify every point—no guesses. I want facts, something ... anything I can work with.”
“Good,” Roger said, “we can do that.”
“And double the checks again,” Thomas added, grabbing a quill and dragging a blank rotation sheet toward him. “I want guards on the roof, in the cellar. If it moves, I want a spear pointed at it.”
Roger’s sigh was low and tired, but he nodded and ushered the porter out.
Thomas stared at the rotation sheet.
The North Tower had two men.
He crossed it out.
North Tower with three men.
The door opened again, softly. Thomas didn’t look up.
“Verify the supper seating. I want the names of the recruits on his left and right.”
Silence.
He looked up.
Lady Maria stood in the doorway in a deep-blue robe pulled tight against the draft. Her auburn hair was braided back, her silver strands catching lamplight. She wasn’t looking at the paper; she was looking at him.
She watched him for three breaths.
“You’re working at the wrong enemy,” she said.
The softness of her voice didn’t blunt the blow.
“I’m securing the castle,” Thomas snapped, dropping the quill. “One of my men is gone, vanished inside the walls. If I don’t lock this place down, who’s next? Catherine? The pups?”
“You’re acting like a guard captain chasing a cutpurse,” Lady Maria said as she stepped in and closed the door. The castle’s noise dulled, and rain drummed the shutters. “You’re moving pieces and calling it certainty.”
“That is how you catch things,” Thomas said, standing. “You remove the unknowns.”
“Not this thing,” Lady Maria said. “The enemy doesn’t need your doors. It waits in the gap between your thoughts and slips where you can’t post a guard.”
“So, we do nothing?” Thomas threw up his hands. “We sit by the fire and pray the magic grows bored?”
“We lead,” Lady Maria said, steel wrapping her velvet. “You chase footprints in soup while the castle panics. Servants see their prince running, and because you run, they believe the monster is close enough to hear your breath.”
“I’m not afraid,” Thomas lied.
“No, you’re frantic,” Lady Maria corrected. “Hollen and Varric are watching. They see you tightening screws on your own people, and it looks like weakness, Thomas, like you don’t know where the blow is coming from.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas shouted.
Maria didn’t flinch, her eyes holding something old and sorrowful.
“Then stop pretending a thicker door will stop it.”
Thomas’s chest heaved as he stared at the rotation sheet, at his frantic strokes of ink.
It was useless. If someone, or whoever served them, could pluck a boy from a lit corridor, an extra spear was only another body waiting to be taken.
He couldn’t stop them, but stillness felt too much like surrender.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.