Tear Down Heaven: Urban Fantasy Action with Witches and Demons by Rachel Aaron

Author:Rachel Aaron [Aaron, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aaron/Bach
Published: 2026-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

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ADRIAN HAD NEVER WORKED so hard to sink into his forest.

Merging with his Blackwood was normally like sinking into water, but he wasn’t on a prepared bed beneath his heart tree. He was on Gilgamesh’s palace floor. A hard stone floor built to reject every aspect of life. Adrian’s vines had already wrapped all the way around the building, but like every other part of the Blackwood except for himself and Boston, they couldn’t cross the threshold into the actual palace. He was still technically inside his forest because he had plants surrounding him, but Gilgamesh’s fortress was like a burn zone where nothing could grow.

That severely limited what Adrian was able to do, but ingenuity was the soul of witchcraft, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a good foundation to work from. His heart was pumping at the base of the biggest tree he’d ever grown. His body might be just a tendril pushing into the wasteland of Gilgamesh’s control, but his roots ran all the way back to the land of the living. He just needed to—

His progress was interrupted by a loud bash right next to his head. The hit cracked the stone cocoon of the Seven Walled City like an eggshell before Leander, who’d been standing over Adrian like a guard this whole time, muttered something under his breath. The walls pulled themselves back together a second later, and his sorcerer brother let out a sigh of relief.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I’ve reinforced the outer rings, though if you could work faster, that would be good.”

Adrian nodded and lay back on the ground again, closing his mind against the increasingly violent banging coming from the Prince of Envy to focus on his pulse. He could feel it strong and steady despite his heart not being inside his body, and Adrian threw himself into its waves like a harbor seal, diving down, down, down as fast as he could away from this dead land to the place where life still thrived.

There was a lot of it to choose from. Adrian had been growing trees since he was seven, but he’d never been plugged straight into the Great Cycles like he was now. No wonder his mother had been able to move their entire coven through his roots. Between the ocean of quintessence he’d poured in from his end and the centuries-long witchcraft the Blackwood Coven had prepared to meet it, the taproot of his new heart tree went all the way to the roots of the Great Blackwood itself.

He’d always felt the Great Forest at the edge of his consciousness. Now that he’d dived in headfirst, though, Adrian was suddenly swimming through primordial magic. He swore he could feel the Great Cycles turning around him, which was terrifying because they had no care for him. The engine of life was bigger than any individual soul, and it rolled over him like a boulder down a hill.

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