The days after her encounter with the black-eyed boy passed like a lull before a storm. The village, sensing something invisible stirring, seemed suspended in cautious stillness. Even the children played less boisterously, their laughter stifled by the hush that blanketed the streets.
Chizzy tried to lose herself in the rhythm of daily life—gathering herbs, mending the roof of her cottage, helping Maura distribute medicine—but her mind never left the boy's words.
"When the roots start to bleed…"
She stared at the trees differently now, as if expecting to see them weep.
Ezra was quiet, too. He spent his evenings by her fireplace, sipping broth and poring through old texts they'd recovered from the chapel's cellar books about folklore, the Hollow, the great thinning between worlds. Most of them were half-burned, water-damaged, or incomplete. But fragments revealed enough.
"Your family was mentioned in one of them," Ezra said on the third night, tracing his finger over faded ink. "'The women of the white flame, bound by sorrow, bearers of the unsealing song.'"
Chizzy stared into the fire, her thoughts drifting. "My mother always sang when she was frightened. Softly. Under her breath."
Ezra looked up. "That wasn't just a comfort. That was a ritual."
Chizzy's throat tightened. "You think she knew? About all this?"
"She had to."
And that hurt more than she expected. The weight of a secret held for years, passed down without explanation, buried like a seed in her soul.
That night, she dreamed again.
Not of the Hollow Man. But of her mother.
She stood in the field behind their old house, barefoot in the moonlight, wearing the same pale dress she'd been buried in. Her eyes were full of sadness, but not fear.
"Do you hear it now, Chizzy?" she asked.
"Hear what?"
Her mother raised one hand and pointed toward the trees.
The forest groaned long and low like the exhale of a dying god.
"It's waking."
Chizzy woke with her hands clenched around the bedsheet, her forehead slick with sweat. She could still hear the groaning, faint but unmistakable.
Outside her window, the trees were swaying, though there was no wind.
By morning, the village began to change.
The fog returned not the thick, smothering kind they once feared, but a thin, unnatural veil that hovered just above the ground, carrying with it a hush that dampened even the chirping of birds.
And then the soil near the chapel cracked.
It was subtle at first small fissures in the cobbled path leading toward the prayer tree. But then the roots began to rise, pushing upward as though the ground no longer wished to hold them.
Ezra met her in the square.
"It's happening," he said grimly. "Just like he said."
Chizzy nodded. "The roots are waking."
They walked to the edge of the woods, hand in hand, where the boundary between village and forest always felt fragile. The lantern at her hip flared without warning. Its silver flame stretched upward like a signal.
"Something's beneath us," Chizzy said softly.
Ezra turned to her. "Then we dig. Or we run."
She looked into the trees, voice steady.
"We face it."