The outcast children drifted among the village's edge like windblown seeds no one dared sweep away. By dusk, they had made camp at the old goat pens — hollow fences, dry straw, and walls scribbled over with stick-figure prayers to keep the hush at bay.
But prayers meant nothing now. The hush hummed through them all, a pulse in the dirt. Rafi could feel it under his bare feet as he crept closer, hidden in the dark.
The crowned boy sat on a stump in the pen's center. His crown was fresh now — thick with bleeding sap, twigs snapping with new green buds. The others circled him like moths caught in candle wax, giggling, humming, scratching hush runes into their arms with jagged stones.
Rafi's throat burned as he watched. He thought of the braid girl — pale in their borrowed shack, her mouth whispering secrets in her sleep. He thought of the hush root once scorched from the world and how it had found these soft skulls to feed on again.
The crowned boy — Mere, they called him now — raised his hands. The children fell silent. He spoke like a priest: "We're not orphans anymore. We belong to the hush. It feeds us. Loves us. In here—" He thumped his chest hard enough to make ribs creak. "We are its mouth now."
One girl, younger than the braid girl had been when she first fled, crawled to his feet. She pressed her forehead to his knee and sobbed a single word: "Family."
Mere stroked her hair, eyes rolling back in bliss. Sap dribbled down his temples like sweat. "No more parents to beat you. No more hunger. The hush takes care of its seeds."
Rafi felt bile rise in his throat. He wanted to run in swinging his knife, scatter them like frightened birds — but he knew how the hush worked. Rage fed it. Fear watered it.
So he waited. He watched. And he learned.
A stick cracked behind him. Rafi spun, knife up — but it was the braid girl, hair tangled, eyes wild. Her breath steamed in the night air. "They want to go deeper," she rasped. "Into the bones of it. If they reach the core—"
He caught her shoulders. "You shouldn't be here. You're sick."
She laughed, the sound sharp as breaking bark. "We're all sick. The hush made us sick." She yanked free, pointing past the fence. "He's taking them to the Split Grove. That's where it breathes loudest. He wants to wear the hush like a skin."
Mere's voice rose behind them, chanting louder. The children echoed, teeth flashing under the moon.
Rafi grabbed the braid girl's hand. It felt too light, like holding dry reeds. "Then we stop him before he roots us all again."
Her eyes met his — ancient, exhausted, brimming with something both softer and more dangerous than the hush: hope.
"Together, Rafi. Or we die inside it."
Together, then. He squeezed her cold fingers tighter and stepped into the clearing, ready to tear down a crown made of sap and bone.