The roots bend and open like a mouth around them. The passage behind shrinks to a crawlspace of bone and damp breath, but ahead: a chamber, low and wide, tangled in webbing spun from the hush's oldest secrets. The air hums — a lullaby made of every cry the forest ever swallowed.
Rafi leans against the tunnel wall, fighting the taste of spore ash on his tongue. The braid girl pulls him on — her grip fierce enough to remind him they're alive. Barely.
The chamber's walls pulse with a soft heartbeat glow. It takes Rafi a moment to see what the glow feeds: shadows snared in gossamer threads, suspended like moths caught in a lamp's halo. Human outlines. Children. Adults. Maybe both. Memories caught and pinned, endlessly repeating in flickers.
One shadow stirs beside him — a boy his age, eyes wide, mouth open as if mid-scream. Another shape flickers behind it: a woman pressing her hand to the boy's chest. Her outline trembles, splits apart, reforms, then fades again like breath on glass.
Rafi touches the web. The strands tremble under his fingertips, threads of thought and sorrow vibrating into his bones. A voice — his mother's — Why did you run? He jerks back, but the hush hums: Stay. Know. Become.
The braid girl moves closer to a cluster of shadows near the far wall. One figure is clearer than the rest — a thin, stooped elder, chanting in a tongue older than the camp's prayers. The web drinks in his words and loops them over and over: protection songs turned to chains.
She raises her knife. Rafi whispers hoarsely — What are you doing? She doesn't answer with words. Her blade slices through a sticky strand. The web recoils, an echo of distant weeping filling the chamber. Shadows flutter, unanchored for a heartbeat — and then vanish into the walls, free or lost forever.
The hush moans through the roots overhead, outraged. The webbing twists and recoils, but the girl is a blur of motion, slashing more strands, tearing holes in the hush's nest of memory.
Rafi helps, hacking with shaking hands. He carves through his own shadows — a boy at a window, a father's silhouette walking away. Each thread he severs burns cold across his ribs, but the burden lifts. His mind feels scraped raw but clean.
When they stop, the chamber trembles — a beast roused in its sleep. Webbing curls back into the walls, shadows leaking out like spilled ink. The hush tries to speak through them but can only hiss, broken, half-silent.
The braid girl wipes sweat and spore dust from her brow. For a moment, she smiles — a flicker of wild triumph before fear floods back in. They're deeper than ever now. No going back.
She touches his shoulder, urging him toward a tunnel that slopes downward, veins of black root coiling along the floor like serpents. The hush growls through the walls: a warning, a promise that it still has secrets they haven't bled from it yet.
Rafi glances back once — the nest now an empty cocoon — then follows her down into deeper dark.