They stumbled through the last tangle of brambles just as dusk peeled away the daylight. Rafi's legs shook with each step, but the braid girl barely seemed to notice — her limp now fused to her stride, part of the strange grace that hunger and exhaustion couldn't break.
Before them opened a clearing that didn't belong on any map. It was a circle of earth sunken like an old wound, its rim crowned by crooked trees whose branches bowed inward, like bony hands weaving a roof of knotted darkness.
Inside the ring, nothing moved — no wind, no insects humming at the edge of night. Only the hush, coiled thick in the heavy air, so close it almost pulsed under Rafi's skin.
The braid girl stepped over the rim first. Her bare foot sank into moss so deep and spongy it sucked at her heel like a mouth tasting salt.
Rafi hesitated at the edge. He could see now that the hollow's floor was no ordinary clearing. The middle dipped like a sinkhole trying to swallow itself — and at the pit's deepest curve, the earth split open into a raw black cavity.
Around it, roots the size of his arms knotted over each other in a spiral, as if the forest's veins all fed this one hungry mouth.
When he stepped down, the trees shifted above him. They didn't sway with wind — they bent, creaked inward, branches cracking like ribs folding around a secret. The hush laughed softly inside the sound of splintering bark.
Closer to the pit, his ears rang. Whispers bounced in ways that made no sense — a word behind him repeated in front of him, another fluttered near his feet. His own heartbeat seemed to echo from the hollow's throat.
The braid girl knelt beside the opening. She didn't look at him; her eyes were fixed on the blackness inside the earth, her hands resting in the moss like she belonged to it. Rafi thought she might speak, but her mouth only twitched around words that never left her tongue.
The hush pulsed out of the hollow now — no longer a voice but a warmth, thick and cloying, rolling over him like the breath of something ancient and patient.
He realized, too late to stop trembling, that this was not just a place. It was the place — the hush's true nest, where it had waited for him long before he was born, where it promised he could stop fighting.
He knelt too, knees digging into soft decay. The hush brushed his neck, gentle as a parent's palm: Welcome home, my broken little thing.
Above them, the trees bent lower, weaving a tighter crown. Shadows thickened until the clearing forgot the sun altogether. The hush swallowed the last scrap of birdsong. Nothing left but breath and roots and the low murmur of something inside the hollow wanting them both to come closer.