They woke at the edge of the ruin — two shadows breathing in a forest no longer dreaming them awake. Dawn bled pale over the tree line, washing the world in a thin gold that clung to their skin like a promise they weren't sure they deserved.
Rafi lay flat on the cold ground, eyes half-closed, watching a trickle of wind stir the ashes where the hush's veins had once pulsed. He waited for a voice, a soft tug in his head — but there was nothing. Only the wind, rustling like an old friend who asked nothing in return.
Beside him, Lale sat cross-legged, staring at her palms. She turned them over, as if hunting for the hidden sprigs that had once sprouted under her skin, the moss that had crowned her bones. But her hands were only hands. Raw. Scarred. Clean.
"It's too quiet," she said at last. Her voice trembled with the shape of a question neither dared say out loud: Who are we now, if not children of the hush?
Rafi pushed himself upright, wincing at the tug of fresh burns across his ribs. He scanned the clearing where blackened trunks stood like gravestones for a forest that had devoured generations. Somewhere beneath the soot, old bones lay mingled with roots turned to brittle charcoal. He wondered if his mother's laughter still drifted between them — if the hush would ever truly stop echoing in the dark part of him that loved it despite everything.
"Maybe quiet is good," he said. "Maybe we get to decide what fills it now."
Lale didn't look at him right away. She closed her eyes instead, lifted her face to the thin sunlight. She whispered, "Do you hear anything?"
He held his breath. Listened. A bird — real feathers, real blood. A breeze nudging a fallen branch. No hum in his veins, no lullaby threading his thoughts together. He laughed, and it sounded cracked, but right.
"Nothing. Not a word."
Her shoulders dropped, an invisible weight slipping off. She laughed too, breathy, almost broken. Then, without warning, she lunged at him — arms tight around his neck, braid stub brushing his jaw.
"Don't leave me in this quiet," she murmured.
"Never," he vowed, tasting the truth on his tongue like clean rain after a long drought.
They pulled apart just as the other children emerged — wide-eyed, filthy, blinking at the unfamiliar sun. Mere stumbled at the front, sap scars crusted along his collarbones, but no throne of roots behind him now, no hush voice telling him he was king. Just a boy again.
One by one, the children gathered around Rafi and Lale. They didn't speak. There was nothing left to explain — the hush was ash, the hunger gone. What came next would be choice.
Rafi turned toward the open trail that wound away from the blackened clearing and into the waking world. He could almost see houses beyond the first hill, fields where roots never whispered, people who would look at them and wonder who these wild things were crawling back from the trees.
"It's time," he said. He reached for Lale's hand. She took it, her grip small but iron-strong.
They stepped together over the threshold where roots used to bind their ankles, past the last twisted stump, into a silence that belonged to them alone.
Behind them, dawn set fire to the ashes one last time. But no voice rose from it. No promise of forever.
Just a hush that stayed gone.