Years slipped by the way wind slips between old branches — unseen but never silent. In the village by the forest's edge, people told stories in hushed tones near cooking fires: of a black tree that bled nightmares, of children who vanished and returned with eyes older than any grown man's.
And sometimes, when the moon hung fat and amber, the bravest among them crept to the clearing where no roots dared grow anymore. They left tokens — trinkets, bones, scraps of cloth — as if the hush might still listen, might still hunger for their secrets.
Rafi watched them from the shadows beyond the firelight. His hair was shot through with gray now, though he was not yet an old man by the village's counting. He leaned on a staff he'd carved from a sapless limb of the black tree — all that remained of the hush's beating mind.
Children still found him. Runaways. Orphans who heard the faintest echo and fled their roofs and rules for something bigger, something terrible. He never turned them away. He told them his story in a voice cracked by years but steady as bedrock: This forest once whispered us into monsters. Now it is only trees. Listen if you wish, but remember: roots remember everything.
He never lied and told them they were safe. He never lied and said the hush could not grow again. All things hungry for secrets are never truly dead. He only taught them how to listen and choose what to believe.
On certain nights, Lale stood beside him under the crowning branches. She never fully left the hush behind — there was always a tremor in her hands when the wind hissed wrong through the canopy. But her eyes stayed clear, her smile a soft promise: I am here. I am more than what grew inside me.
She walked the forest's fringe like a guardian ghost, braiding thorn twigs into doorways so no root would ever again slither close unseen.
Sometimes, when dawn mist blurred the trees to old memories, Rafi would hear the hush in the rustle of leaves. Not words — just a reminder that the past is soil, and every story worth telling grows from it. He would touch his staff to the black bark and whisper: I remember you. But you do not own me.
And then he would turn to the next frightened child at his side — a child born decades after the last fire burned the hush to silence — and he would say:
"Tell me your name. Tell me your fear. And together, we will plant something better in its place."
The forest breathed. It remembered. But it no longer devoured.
And so did the children — once lost, now found, never hush again.