They left behind the clearing where the hush had breathed them nearly into death, dragging what was left of themselves deeper into the muttering dark. Each step felt like treading water inside a nightmare — the deeper they pushed, the thicker the trees, the softer the soil, the less sure they were the world still obeyed the same rules.
Above them, the canopy folded tighter until light turned bruised green. Branches knotted together like the fingers of giants pressing them down. It smelled of wet rot and raw bark, of old things turned sour in secret.
Rafi paused first, one hand pressed to a trunk swollen with a split like a mouth. He whispered inside himself that it was only a tree, not the hush watching him — but the hush didn't need eyes anymore. It wore the forest the way it had once worn their fear.
The braid girl trudged behind him, coat torn and hanging loose, hair tangled with leaves. She did not speak. She hadn't spoken since the root chamber spat them out into this deeper place. Her silence pressed on Rafi's back harder than the hush's invisible pulse.
They found bones there, half-swallowed by moss. Small ones: a raccoon's leg, a fox's jaw still studded with teeth. But some bones looked too long for animals, too narrow for grown men. Rafi turned them with the tip of a stick until he found a scrap of flannel tangled in the roots beneath — a child's shirt, rotted into threads.
He dropped the stick as if it were a burning coal.
They kept going.
Hours stretched like skin pulled thin. Once, Rafi saw a patch of sky — a ragged circle of dusk framed by high limbs — but the hush coiled around his ribs, murmuring in the drum of his chest: Don't leave. Deeper. Always deeper. He pressed his hands over his ears but the pulse remained inside.
When they stumbled into a clearing at last, it was not empty. Trees bowed inward, trunks bent at impossible angles, all leaning over a patch of ground so black it looked bottomless. Ferns ringed it like a crown around a wound.
Rafi's foot sank when he stepped closer. The soil quivered, slick as lungs. He yanked back, panting. The braid girl only stared — then, without warning, she stepped forward and sank to her knees beside the pit. She reached out, fingers brushing the muck. The hush in the ground welcomed her touch like a hungry pet.
"Don't," Rafi croaked, voice rusted from hours of silence.
She turned her head. Her eyes glistened but did not blink.
The hush in the underwood gathered itself in the still air — a sound like old lullabies being hummed backward. The pit pulsed once. Beneath their feet, roots shifted like muscle.
He thought of the old stories they whispered back in camp — of kids who wandered too far and never came back, who became part of the hush: bones under moss, eyes grown over by vines, memories leaking forever through the soil.
He couldn't lose her too.
Rafi dropped to his knees beside her, ignoring the wet that crept through his jeans. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pressed his forehead to hers. She smelled of earth and sweat and a fear that no longer had words.
The hush crooned in the ground below, offering rest.
But rest was a lie.
Rafi pulled her back, inch by inch, until her fingers left the pit's edge. He whispered inside himself — no more roots in flesh, no more silence swallowing them whole. They would keep crawling, keep bleeding, keep burning if they had to.
Behind them, the hush murmured deeper, as if disappointed — but patient.
Always patient.
Rafi and the braid girl crawled backward from the clearing, half dragging each other into the bent corridor of the underwood where the trees leaned so close they had to duck beneath splintered limbs.
Each branch scraped a promise along their skin: You can never outrun what loves you.
But Rafi thought, with a vicious, trembling courage — Then I'll tear love out root and tooth and bone before it devours us whole.
Somewhere ahead, a wind stirred, sharp with distant moonlight. They pressed toward it, leaving the hush to watch them from the pit of its belly, waiting for the next time they would stumble and be too tired to rise.