Mara ran.
The trees opened for her and swallowed her whole. The sky above Black Hollow flickered with roiling clouds, a thunderless storm churned in silence. The air was thick with the smell of rotted leaves and something sweeter, cloying — like syrup poured over decay. Her breath hitched in her throat, her lungs refusing to take in the air that stank of something not meant for people.
Her stomach burned.
She knew without touching that the root inside her had grown.
It pulsed now, like a second heartbeat just beneath her belly. Every step she took sent a twitch through her spine, as though something noticed, something watched, and worse — something hungered. Not just for flesh. For space. For ownership.
She collapsed in a clearing, fingers digging into the loam as her vision swam. Her skin crawled with invisible ants. Her bones creaked. And somewhere deep inside, she felt roots pushing against ribs.
The whisper came again.
Not in her ear. Not from the woods.
From within.
"You're a cradle now."
She tried to scream. She bit down instead. Blood filled her mouth. Her tongue throbbed — and for a terrifying moment, she imagined roots threading through it like veins.
A sudden pressure in her jaw. A pop.
One of her molars fell out.
She stared at it in the dirt. Its roots were gone. In their place were thin, black tendrils, still twitching.
Not a tooth.
A seed.
Something moved behind her.
She turned, fast — too fast. Her neck cracked. Pain spidered down her side. But it wasn't the pain that made her scream.
It was the woman standing there.
Naked. Pale. Her skin was torn in long, curling strips — peeled like bark, revealing nothing beneath. No blood. No muscle. Just darkness. Moving. Flickering, like shadows underwater.
The woman's mouth opened.
Too wide.
Far, far too wide.
And from within came not a voice — but a chorus.
Children.
"Down in the dirt she sleeps so still, Wrapped in root and bound in will. Crack the skin and plant the fear, Let the Hollow whisper near."
Mara stumbled backward, breathless, until her spine hit a tree.
It breathed.
The bark was warm. Sticky. It pulsed beneath her fingers.
She looked up.
Faces.
All over the trunk. Not carved. Not drawn.
Grown.
Dozens of human faces embedded in the wood, half-submerged, their eyes rolling weakly beneath a film of bark. Mouths moved but made no sound. One face she recognized.
Her mother.
"Run," her mother mouthed.
Too late.
The roots shot out of the ground.
They wrapped her arms. Her legs. Her throat.
They didn't squeeze.
They held.
Like a parent.
Like a womb.
The tree split open before her, a vertical maw lined with thorns and writhing vines.
She was dragged forward.
She fought. She kicked. She screamed.
The bark closed over her.
---
Darkness again.
But this time, she was standing.
Somewhere below. Deep underground. The air buzzed. Not with sound, but sensation — like a thousand invisible insects crawling just above her skin.
A room stretched before her, lit by a bioluminescent glow that came from the walls themselves. Roots pulsed with pale green light, and the floor squelched underfoot like wet meat.
She walked. Not because she wanted to — but because her body was being moved.
In the center of the chamber stood a monolith of fused flesh and wood.
A man, or what used to be one. Fifteen feet tall. His face was a mask of bark and screaming mouths. From his torso jutted limbs — some human, some not. Children's arms. Goat legs. A woman's scalp, stretched like parchment across a ribcage. Vines threaded through it all like veins.
And all of it breathed.
She fell to her knees.
The thing reached toward her with fingers made of bone.
It didn't touch her.
It pointed to her stomach.
The root inside her twisted. She gasped.
It answered.
The chamber exploded in sound.
Not noise. Meaning.
Hundreds of voices, all speaking at once.
Some crying.
Some laughing.
Some chanting.
"She carries the Hollow. She cracks the shell. The seed becomes soil. Soil becomes him."
Mara clutched her ears.
But it was too late.
She understood now.
She had never escaped the inn.
She had never run into the woods.
She was planted.
Every moment since had been a hallucination — a dream forced by the roots as they grew through her brain, mapping her memories, soaking up her fears, using her terror as fertilizer.
The real Mara Vex lay in a bed of soil, deep below Black Hollow.
The real Mara Vex had been dead for days.
What was standing now...
Was something else.
She opened her mouth to scream.
And from her throat, flowers bloomed.