They stand on the edge of the hollow's mouth so long the sky forgets them entirely. Night inside the pit doesn't feel like night above ground — it breathes, it whispers, it remembers them.
When the braid girl moves first, it's not a step but a surrender. She drops to hands and knees, lowering her head as if bowing to an old god. The hush purrs approval in the dirt.
Rafi follows, palms scraping over wet moss, knees sinking into loam that feels warm as flesh. The root mouth yawns wider as they crawl — a tunnel or a throat, impossible to say which.
Inside, the hush stirs memories like leaves in wind. Rafi sees flashes behind his eyes: his mother's hands rinsing soap from a cup; the camp gates swallowing him whole; the first time he saw the braid girl running ahead through trees, barefoot and wild.
Each vision overlaps until the hush hums with all his grief at once — a soft chorus that mocks and soothes. The braid girl halts now and then, shoulders trembling when her own ghosts claw through her bones.
They crawl deeper until the walls drip roots and stones sharp as old teeth. The air thickens — not musty but sweet, sickly, like rotting fruit hidden under leaves.
When the tunnel tightens, Rafi presses his cheek against damp earth and breathes in the hush's breath. It murmurs promises: You made me. Your fear, your loneliness — I shaped myself from your hunger for belonging.
He wants to deny it, but the deeper he goes, the clearer the truth pulses: the hush was never just the forest. It is him. It is her. It is every wound they carried, fed by silence and shadows.
He thinks of cutting it out. He thinks of feeding it everything he is, letting it cradle him in perfect darkness. One means living half-ruined but free. The other means never being alone again, not even in death.
Behind him, the braid girl's hand closes on his ankle. She squeezes once — not to pull him back, but to say she is here too, with her own choice pressing like a blade to her throat.
Ahead, the tunnel flares into an open root-chamber that pulses with a slow heartbeat — the hush's true core, waiting for them to decide what kind of children they want to be when the earth is done swallowing them.