Rafi's knees are raw when the crawlspace lets him spill into a cavern barely larger than a burial pit. He slams onto damp stone and rolls to his back, choking on stale air that tastes like old rain and moss. For a heartbeat, the tunnel behind him wheezes — a soft exhale of the hush's creatures sniffing at the threshold — then the silence folds shut.
No braid girl. No whispers. Just Rafi and the stuttering of his ribs.
He tries to stand, but his spine screams and he sinks to his knees instead. Then he sees it: a glow, faint but steady, seeping from the walls. At first he thinks it's fungus — but as his eyes adjust, he sees bark. Veins of living wood crawl down the cavern walls like ribs of an ancient beast. In the glow, thousands of small carvings pulse: scratches, initials, whole sentences gouged deep and sealed by old sap.
A shrine.
Rafi staggers forward, running his palm across the bark. Names — not just runaways like him. Prayers too. Pleas carved by children who crawled down here hoping the hush would listen kindly. The hush always listened, but never kindly.
He presses his forehead to the wood. It feels warm, and for an instant he's seven again: curled in the crook of his mother's arm, believing he'll be safe if he just stays small enough. But the hush smells that memory too — he feels it snake up through the roots, licking the old fear.
Rafi snarls at it, baring teeth the way feral things do. He takes the knife at his belt — dull, battered — and carves a line beside the oldest mark he can find. Not a name. Not a prayer. Just a wound.
This hush has eaten too many children. It will not eat him.
A faint noise breaks the heavy stillness — a patter, a soft sigh. The braid girl's shape slips into the shrine, her braid torn and matted with tunnel dirt, one eye swollen where claws found her. She does not look at him right away; she touches the bark with her filthy fingers, reading it the way one reads skin.
For a moment, neither of them speak. The hush is listening.
Then she grips his wrist. Her palm trembles, but her eyes are knife-sharp: Forward. Together, they step deeper into the roots, leaving the shrine's glow behind.