They woke to rain. Or maybe they had never slept — only drifted sideways through the branches, eyelids flickering against the dark. Rafi could not remember closing his eyes. He only knew his cheeks were wet, and the braid girl was curled against his side like a small, wordless animal, trembling every time thunder rolled through the high canopy.
Drops pattered through leaves and dripped onto their shoulders, cold and gentle like a warning.
In this corner of the underwood, the trees seemed older than memory. Trunks gnarled into shapes that looked like hunched men frozen mid-crawl. Knots stared back like blind eyes. Roots rose and dipped like the ribcages of sleeping beasts. It smelled of soaked bark, bruised mushrooms, and the thin, coppery breath of something hiding underneath.
Rafi sat up slowly, muscles cramped and soaked through. His shirt clung to him like a second skin. He touched the braid girl's forehead, brushing away twigs tangled in her hair. She didn't flinch. Her eyes stared past him, past the trees, into something that hummed behind the rain.
He murmured nothing. The hush was always listening. Words gave it shape — so he let silence mean defiance.
They rose together when the rain eased, feet sinking in leaf-litter so thick it swallowed sound. A path coiled ahead, half-hidden under the ferns. It wasn't a path made by humans — not really. It wound where the hush wanted them to walk, where the roots lay shallow enough for skin to brush against them, where bark still remembered the warmth of living hands.
And along this path, the ghosts waited.
The first ghost was only bones. Antlers tangled in moss, a skull grinning from a cradle of ivy. But Rafi saw it lift its head as they passed — the hush wearing the deer's memory like a borrowed mask. A warning in bone-white silence: Keep walking.
They obeyed.
Farther on, a tree split at the base like a wound. Inside, scraps of cloth. A mitten. A shoe sole, so small Rafi's throat closed around the thought of it. Children who never made it back. Children who never stopped feeding the hush.
The braid girl pressed her palm to the bark. She did not cry. She did not scream. She stood very still, as if listening to every child lost in the roots whisper her name. Rafi grabbed her hand, tugged her gently onward. Each ghost tried to hold her back. Each ghost smelled like old rain and broken promises.
They stumbled into a hollow where the hush had grown bolder — here, trunks carried faces: knots shaped like mouths frozen open. Scratches spiraled along the bark, spelling nothing in any language Rafi knew, but his skin crawled as if he should understand.
A low wind slipped between the trunks and made them creak like ribs. The hush breathed out: Stay.
Rafi planted his feet. He pulled the braid girl close, her heartbeat frantic against his ribs. In that moment he almost wanted to give in — to sink among the roots and become one more whisper, one more memory to frighten other runaways.
But he felt her shiver. He felt how her hand clutched his sleeve.
They were alive. Even now.
So they turned their backs on the hollow of haunted trunks. The hush howled once in the wind, rattling branches so hard rain wept loose again in cold needles. They stumbled on.
Past the ghosts of bark and bone.
Past the names carved in places no living mouth would dare speak.
And somewhere ahead, in the deeper dark, something more than ghosts waited — something that still hungered for the warm blood of the living.
Rafi squeezed the braid girl's hand. She did not look at him, but she squeezed back. Enough to say: Not yet. Not today.
Together, they vanished into the next corridor of trees, while behind them the hush stitched new whispers into the wood.