Something in the tunnels moves like spilled smoke, quick and boneless, tasting every exhale that slips from Rafi's mouth. He tightens his grip on the braid girl's hand, but she jerks away, pressing her back to the cold tunnel wall. The darkness closes in so thick it breathes against their skin — a wet, decaying hush that devours the small scrape of their boots against stone.
They had thought the tunnels would keep them safe from the larger forest — safer than the open night where the hush rains down spores like falling snow. But in this place, the hush has teeth that scuttle low and eyes that bloom like mold in the cracks.
Rafi tries to whisper her name — but he remembers too late: no names here, no voices to feed the echo. The braid girl lifts her finger to her lips. Even in the near black, he sees the tremor of her shoulders. She feels them too: the creatures born from their sleepless fear. Shadows given fur and claw.
A sound — like wet fur brushing the wall. Then a soft, sucking growl behind him. He spins, slams his palm to the stone — but claws rake the air near his throat.
The braid girl doesn't scream. She lunges, grabbing Rafi by the collar, yanking him down a narrow split in the rock wall. He stumbles behind her, lungs straining to swallow the filthy air, ears full of the scrabble and sniff of too many legs.
In this crack in the earth, the hush monsters can't crawl so easily. But the passage is too tight for two. She pushes him ahead — her braid brushing his shoulder once, like a goodbye — then turns back toward the skittering things.
He tries to reach for her, but she shoves him forward hard enough to knock the breath from his ribs. "Go," her eyes say. Then the crack swallows her from view.
Rafi wants to fight them all. Wants to wrench her back through the slit of stone and drag her deeper, where the hush might starve before they do. But he knows this forest: one fight means no escape. She buys him seconds. Nothing more.
He crawls on. In the dark, every scrape of his knee echoes like bones snapping. Behind him, a wet, snarling hiss and the muffled thump of something hitting flesh. His vision swims with memories: his mother's hands holding him tight the day before the world forgot them. His father's bootprints in the mud.
The hush loves these moments — the crack in him widening.
He crawls faster. Each heartbeat a prayer to the deep root, to the buried hush that, for now, does not speak.