The hush slept. For the first time in countless breaths, it slept so deeply that even the wrong children scattered, half-blind and moaning as they lost the echo that tethered them together.
Rafi felt the hush's pulse fade from behind his eyes. He didn't trust it, but he knew this was their only door — open only while the thing dreamed with a full belly.
The braid girl tugged at him to stand. Her palms were raw, streaked with the rootheart's black sap. When she smiled — if it was a smile — it looked like a grimace carved in stone. Together, they pushed through the mossy hollow where the hush had swallowed the boy. The roots trembled but did not fight them.
Above them, the cavern's ceiling cracked with tiny snaps, the hush's veins curling back from the stones like hair shriveling in fire. Cold air trickled through, cruel and fresh. Rafi tipped his head back and drank it like water after a long fever.
The braid girl pushed him ahead. Always ahead. She didn't want him to look at the spot where the hush had eaten its due. She didn't want to look either.
They climbed through narrow clefts where roots once made walls. They crawled belly-flat through tunnels slick with old rot, scraping knuckles on stone that hadn't tasted daylight in centuries. Rafi's shoulders ached. His eyes burned. His ears rang with phantom whispers that might never stop.
Once, the braid girl slumped and didn't move. He dragged her up by the elbows, gritting his teeth when she hissed and tried to slap him away. No time for softness. No time for mercy. Not yet.
When they broke through a slit of shale into open forest, dawn was just fingering the black trees with frost. Mist pooled low to the ground. The hush didn't follow. It pulsed under the roots still, but quieter now — sated, for now, with what they'd left behind.
Rafi dropped to his knees in the snow-mudded moss, coughing the hush's ghost out of his throat. The braid girl crouched beside him, breath clouding the air between them. Her braid was half undone, filthy with sap and leaf bits.
She looked at him — no triumph, no tears. Just raw relief, carved deep into her sharp, pale face. She offered him her hand. He took it.
Behind them, the forest exhaled like an old god turning over in its sleep. Ahead of them, the world waited — still cold, still cruel, but theirs again.
They did not speak of the boy. They did not speak of the hush. They rose together and stumbled into the pale blue dawn, two shadows walking away from a mouth that would never forget them.