The Bleeding Orchard lay just beyond Hollowgrave's last row of cottages — a stretch of gnarled trees that never bore fruit, only leaves the color of dried blood. Children dared each other to enter, but few did. They said the orchard breathed. That if you pressed your ear to the soil, you'd hear the heartbeat of something buried long before the town was built.
Ezra Vann had never believed the stories. Stories kept villagers quiet, obedient. Ezra was a man of fences, patrols, and lantern oil. The orchard was just trees. Until tonight.
The scream had drawn him there. Thin, stretched, as though it traveled a long way before reaching him. He should have ignored it. But he didn't.
Lantern in hand, Ezra crossed the orchard's edge. The air shifted instantly — colder, damp, heavy, like stepping underwater. His boots sank into moss that squelched as though alive. The lantern's flame sputtered, casting light that seemed swallowed whole by the trees.
The sound came again. A creak. Not wind. Not rope. Not quite human either. Ezra followed it until the Old Willow loomed ahead, its split trunk gaping like a rotten mouth.
And there she was.
Marla Nire. The baker's apprentice. Seventeen. Ordinary in every way that made her forgettable — until now. She hung from the willow's branch, swaying gently, a puppet on an unseen hand. The rope dug into her throat, but her eyes were open. Too open. Staring without blinking, as though forced to witness something.
Her mouth was crammed with soil, packed until it spilled down her chin. And carved into her chest, deep enough to glisten with blackened blood, was a rune. Ezra didn't know the symbol, but the shape hurt to look at. Like it wasn't meant for mortal eyes.
The lantern slipped from his grip, glass shattering on stone. Darkness surged in, broken only by the pale gleam of her skin.
Ezra stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a root that hadn't been there before. He tried to run. His legs refused. Then Marla's head twitched. Just once. Toward him. Soil spilled from her lips like words she couldn't form.
Ezra screamed then — a raw, desperate sound — and fled. He didn't stop until he collapsed at the chapel doors, beating his fists bloody against the wood.
Inside, the bells tolled.
They hadn't tolled in thirty-three years.
Across town, Magistrate Lenora Blight raised her head from her desk. The bells' echo settled in her bones. The scar behind her ear flared hot, reminding her of the pact she had sworn never to break. She poured her tea with a steady hand, but her reflection rippled in the cup — distorted, smiling though she was not.
At the mortuary, Eula Bramble stirred awake in her chair. Blind eyes stared into the dark, though she saw more than anyone else. "Borrowed flesh," she muttered. "And it hasn't settled yet."
And on the road into Hollowgrave, Cassian Vale paused at the gates. He hadn't planned to return. The town had burned him once before, branded him mad for what he'd uncovered in their archives. But the bells had called him, and the air smelled the same as the day he left: copper, damp earth, and rot.
At his feet, a cloaked beggar whispered through broken teeth:
"She's not dead. She's only waiting."
When Cassian looked down, the man was gone. Only a single worm writhed in the mud where he had been.
By dawn, Marla's body had been cut down. The orchard stood silent, roots tangled like veins, soil soft as if freshly turned. Cassian inspected the ground beneath the willow.
No footprints. No rope marks. No sign she had ever hung there at all.
And yet, when he touched the trunk, the bark was warm — pulsing faintly, like skin over a heartbeat.
The wind shifted. A whisper coiled through the branches:
"You're late."
Cassian turned, heart racing. No one stood behind him.
But the soil at his feet had begun to move.
As though something beneath was trying to crawl free.