The golden grapes burst under Meilin's fingers, their syrupy blood dripping in thick strands to the cellar floor. Jian counted each drop—*one, two, three*—until the seventh splattered like a dying man's last breath. The sound echoed against damp stone walls, mixing with the dry scrape of branches outside—wooden claws dragging across cellar doors. Zhao's revolver gleamed under flickering lamplight, its empty cylinder yawning wide.
Meilin moved first, licking grape juice from her palm with deliberate, feline grace. The sweetness clung to her lips as she smiled. Jian's scars burned beneath their bandages, vines writhing under his skin like worms in fresh earth. Zhao exhaled through flared nostrils, muscles coiled like a trap about to spring.
The cellar doors groaned.
Not from wind.
From something outside peeling them apart inch by splintering inch.
Darkness pooled in the corners—thick and heavy as spilled ink. Then, as if summoned, it *detached* from the walls, shadows twisting into slick, sinewy things that scuttled up the cellar stones like starving roaches. Jian's nose bled suddenly, the hot copper tang of it flooding his mouth before the droplets even touched his lips—dusty red motes disintegrating before they struck the ground.
"Don't."
Meilin's voice snapped like a cracked whip. She stood behind Zhao now—impossibly close, fingers tangled in the soldier's dark hair. A single silver strand of Meilin's white hair looped around Zhao's throat, tight as a noose.
"Her fate's bound to yours," Meilin whispered against Zhao's ear, breath fogging the cold steel of the revolver. "Kill me, and she becomes the next vessel."
Jian's vision tunneled—dark at the edges, sharpening on the seven scattered seeds before him. They pulsed faintly, their shadows stretching unnaturally long, crawling like centipedes despite the fixed lantern light. One seed quivered at his feet, already birthing a root—thin as a hair, blindly seeking the crevices in the stone.
Outside, the black tree shrieked. Wooden faces carved into its bark contorted in silent agony, milky sap weeping from knot-hole eyes.
"Wait—"
Too late.
Zhao jerked backward, skull meeting Meilin's nose with a wet crunch. The silver strand at her throat *shattered*, fracturing like glass. Meilin reeled, blood cascading from her ruined nose, lips parting in laughter—or a scream.
The shadows *struck*.
They fell from above in liquid ropes, coiling around all three in an instant. Cold tendrils slithered over Jian's skin, probing his wounds, caressing the pulsing vines beneath his bandages. The sensation made his stomach roll—invasive, intimate, like his grandmother's gnarled fingers checking his childhood fevers.
One seed *twitched*, then burrowed deep into Zhao's boot. Four others skittered spider-quick toward Meilin, vanishing beneath her skin. The last two rolled to Jian's knees, their shells splitting open—revealing rows of needle-teeth.
The seed's teeth sank into Jian's flesh like heated needles. No blood welled—only black sap, thick as molasses, oozing from the wounds to pool around his knees. It mingled with the liquid silver still dripping from Zhao's melted revolver, the two substances hissing where they touched.
Zhao cursed through clenched teeth, her boot radiating unnatural heat where the seed had embedded itself. She reached for her combat knife with a soldier's precision, but her fingers locked mid-motion—the shadow tendrils binding her wrist like iron manacles. Across the cellar, Meilin arched backward, her spine bending too far as the four invading seeds migrated beneath her skin. Her mouth stretched wide, but the scream that tore free wasn't entirely hers—it layered voices upon voices, a chorus of women screaming through one ruined throat.
Jian's own transformation progressed rapidly. The obsidian veins branching through his legs pulsed in time with Meilin's convulsions. His grandmother's warning slithered through his mind, as intimate as the vines under his skin:
They always forget—roots have teeth too.
The cellar doors exploded inward.
Not from the black tree's assault—but from the sudden atmospheric pressure change inside. The wooden faces torn from the tree's bark now hovered in a slow orbit around Meilin, their features sanded smooth as river stones. Where eyes and mouths had been, the grain swirled inward—whorls of ancient hunger.
Meilin rose without bending her knees, lifted by unseen forces. The silver strands of her hair unraveled violently, multiplying as they whipped through the air. They wove themselves into a floating cage around her thrashing form, the strands tightening with each revolution.
Zhao finally wrenched her knife free and plunged it into her own infected boot. Black fluid geysered upward, splattering across her jawline. Where it touched, her skin rippled—briefly adopting the texture of weather-beaten bark before reforming. She snarled at Jian, blood flecking her teeth:
"Cut yours out! Now!"
But Jian could only watch, paralyzed, as the two seeds in his thighs dissolved completely. The obsidian veins surged upward, mapping his torso in branching patterns. Somewhere beyond the pain, he registered three terrifying developments simultaneously:
The orbiting wooden faces had begun peeling open like blooming flowers, revealing inner layers of jade-colored teeth.
Tiny golden grapes were erupting from Meilin's puncture wounds—each no larger than a pea, each with a pinprick human face silently screaming inside the translucent skin.
Zhao's shadow-bound knife hand had turned pitch black up to the elbow, the darkness creeping toward her heart.
Meilin's remaining human eye locked onto Jian's. When her lips moved, the words bypassed his ears entirely—they vibrated directly in his bones:
"You were always the gardener, little cousin."
The jade teeth met silver strands with a sound like shattering glaciers.
For three suspended heartbeats, nothing moved. Then Meilin's body unfolded like an obscene origami sculpture - ribs blossoming outward into woody tendrils, fingertips splitting into root bundles. The golden grapes protruding from her flesh swelled violently, their miniature faces pressing against translucent skins with mute desperation.
Jian's blackened veins tugged.
Not toward Meilin.
Away from her.
Zhao noticed first. Her knife hand trembled as the darkness consuming her arm reversed direction, the inky tendrils now retreating toward the seeds still embedded in the cellar floor. She made a sound between a laugh and a sob: "It's not consuming us - we're anchors."
The realization struck Jian like the backswing of an axe. The vines in his body, Zhao's corrupted arm, even Meilin's transformation - none of this was random consumption. They were becoming rittels, human stakes hammered into reality to tether something far older.
Above them, the ceiling peeled away in spiraling layers, revealing not cellar timbers but the underside of massive grape leaves veined with silver. Wind howled through the new opening, carrying the scent of overripe fruit and freshly turned earth. The seven original seeds still on the floor sang in response, their melody vibrating up through Jian's bones:
"Root-breaker/Fruit-maker/Blood-sharer/..."
Meilin's collapsing form jerked violently as four new silver strands erupted from her scalp - completing some unholy zodiac. The strands didn't float - they plumbed downward, drilling through stone into whatever lay beneath. Jian's vision doubled again, the cellar walls becoming transparent as he perceived the vast root system below, its arteries converging on...
"Grandmother's burial plot," he gasped.
Zodge was already moving, her boot-knife singing through the air toward the nearest silver strand. But before steel met mystical hair:
CRACK.
The black tree's trunk erupted through the east wall, not as invading force but as crumbling relic. Its bark faces had gone slack, milky sap now flowing backward toward their shared roots. The wooden mouths disengaged from Meilin's cage, retracting with frantic jerks like fish realizing the hook was set.
Meilin's body hit the stones with a wet thud. Not dead - more alive than ever.
Her fingernails had become translucent amber shells housing tiny grapes. Her breath fogged the air in spores. When she spoke, the cellar itself repeated every word a half-beat later:
"Too late for cutting. The roots remember your summer sweat. Your winter blood. Your..."
A dozen seeds from the floor leapt as one into her open mouth. She swallowed convulsively, throat bulging, then smiled with lips that no longer had seams.
Jian understood now. This wasn't transformation - it was reconciliation. The vineyard's god had always taken its due in increments - a season's labor here, a stillborn child there. His grandmother hadn't been warding off the darkness, but metering it.
Zodge's knife found its mark at last - not in Meilin, but in Jian's left palm, pinning it to the moist earth. As his blood soaked into the stones, the obsidian veins withdrew from his torso like retreating serpents, flowing down his arm into the ground.
"For balance," Zodge gasped, her own darkened arm now cracking like dry clay. "Her anchor gets an anchor."
The cellar exhaled.
All sound ceased. All movement stilled. Even the floating wooden faces froze mid-orbit.
Then - with the terrible inevitability of sunset - Meilin stood. Not the Meilin who'd entered the cellar, not the monstrous thing she'd become during transformation, but something perfectly balanced between. Her silver strands now formed a bridal train that faded into the earth. The grapes growing from her body shone like polished amber.
"The harvest begins," she intoned, though her mouth didn't move. The words simply were, like wind through barley.
Outside, the first ripe grapes began falling from the vineyard's healthy vines. Each impact sounded suspiciously like a sleeping heartbeat.