Rafi had dreamed a hundred times of leaving the forest — but this wasn't how he'd pictured it.
Sunlight filtered through frost-laced branches, thin and almost gentle. In the hush's belly, every shadow had teeth. Out here, the shadows were still sharp, but they didn't whisper anymore. They only watched, patient as the bones buried under the snow.
They found the clearing by accident. Or maybe it found them. A place where someone had burned old brush piles long ago, leaving sooty rings in the ice-crusted dirt. Black ash clung to Rafi's boots, mixing with the hush's dried sap that still stuck under his fingernails.
The braid girl sat on a log that had half-sunk into the frozen ground. She unwound what was left of her braid, picking out splinters and flakes of bark with slow, deliberate fingers. Her hair fell around her face like a dark curtain, hiding the bruises beneath her eyes.
Neither of them spoke much. Words felt too loud, too fragile. The hush had stolen the softness out of language, left them raw in a way that silence almost soothed.
Rafi crouched at the edge of the ashes, tracing circles in the dirt with a stick. He found a piece of bone under the soot — rabbit, maybe. He didn't flinch. Dead things didn't scare him the way living things did.
His stomach cramped. Hunger gnawed at him like an old dog come home to claim its due. The hush had promised warmth, food, an end to loneliness. Now the promise was gone and the bite of real hunger came back meaner than ever.
He heard her stand behind him. The braid girl touched his shoulder, light as moth wings. When he turned, she pressed a scrap of dried mushroom into his palm. A tiny mercy. He chewed it slow, pretending it filled more than it did.
In the distance, crows argued in the treetops. Their voices were just voices — not the hush's claws scratching inside his skull. He clung to that fact: just crows, nothing more.
When the wind shifted, he smelled smoke again. Not the hush's rot-sap, but real smoke — campfire, or a hunter's hearth. The braid girl smelled it too; her head snapped up, eyes darting past the trees as if expecting teeth to leap out of the shadows.
This time, though, there were no teeth. Just the cold, the crows, and the weak scent of other people.
Rafi swallowed the last crumb of mushroom and rose to stand beside her. He didn't say they'd be okay. He didn't promise anything. He only reached for her wrist and felt her pulse beating steady under dirt-streaked skin.
Together, they stepped away from the ashes, deeper into the thawing woods — following smoke, following hope, or maybe just following each other, because there was no hush left to follow them anymore.