The air thickens before they even see the spores. It clings to Rafi's skin like fevered breath — wet, sour, tinged with something sweet that curls around the edges of sense. He tries to focus on the braid girl's footsteps ahead, but the light behind his eyes flickers with shapes that shouldn't be there: a flicker of his mother's voice calling him home for supper; his father's broad back turned at the camp gate, walking away for the last time.
No. Lies. All of it.
But the forest doesn't care what's real.
The tunnel spills them into a cavern so wide and low it feels like the forest's belly. Veins of ghostlight pulse faintly from the ceiling, and drifting down from those trembling roots are countless drifting spores — soft, white flecks that swirl and multiply with every breath.
The braid girl hesitates. Rafi can see her lips move but hears nothing over the roar in his skull. The hush stirs those spores like embers in wind — feeding illusions, igniting old griefs.
He tries to say her name, but instead he sees himself back at the camp gate. He's six. His father lifts him, laughing, promises he'll be back by dusk. Promises break. The hush tastes like broken promises.
Rafi staggers. His knees thud to the spore-laced dirt. The braid girl clutches his shoulder — or does she? For an instant, her hair falls away, and beneath her skin crawls something dark and hollow-eyed, wearing her bones like borrowed clothes.
He screams. She screams back. Or maybe she's screaming at her own ghosts: her mother's rage, a cellar door, a whispered secret she swallowed with her tongue.
Above them, the spores pour down thicker, smothering the cavern in drifting ash. It sticks to sweat and open cuts, burrows into eyelids and nostrils.
Rafi claws at his face until blood weeps from beneath his fingernails.
Focus. The hush feeds on this.
He looks at her — the braid girl, not the phantoms. He seizes her wrist. Her eyes blaze back at him through tears and dirt. She drags him up, half-carrying, half-hauling him across the choking floor.
They stumble through spore drifts that swirl like flocks of tiny moths. Each step peels a layer of self away: his last day at the camp, the first night alone under rain, the taste of burnt soup the elders fed him.
Forget it all.
They reach the far side — a split in the cavern wall leaking thin moonlight. The spores hiss in the backdraft, pulling whispers from the hush: Stay here. Be loved. Be lost. Be mine.
They crawl through the crack, choking, coughing up the forest's lies. Beyond, the tunnel smells of wet roots and living air — clean enough to burn their lungs awake.
Behind them, the spore sea seethes, starved for more dreams to devour.
They don't look back.