The hush led them, whether they liked it or not. Each step deeper into the wood felt like a heartbeat pressed against old wounds — the forest's roots opening just wide enough to swallow them whole again.
Rafi and the braid girl stalked Mere's procession from the shadows. The children shuffled ahead, masked and murmuring, draped in vines like little kings and queens of rot. Around them, the new guardians lumbered — bark-skinned giants trailing roots that pulsed faintly, as if the hush's pulse pumped inside them now.
By midmorning, the trees thinned, then split — a grove unlike any Rafi had seen. Each trunk bent away at the base, roots half-exposed, forming ragged arches that bled mist. The hush seeped from the soil like breath.
Rafi stepped inside. It felt like stepping into his own skull.
Inside the grove, the air rippled. Memories, torn loose from their hiding spots, drifted through the fog. He heard a scream that was his father's. He heard the hiss of fire eating through that first camp, back when he and his mother had tried to run. He smelled burned hair and pine sap.
He stumbled forward, fists clenched against his temples. The braid girl caught him — or maybe she fell against him herself. She shivered violently, eyes rolled back.
"Do you see it?" she rasped.
"What—" His voice cracked. A flicker in the mist: his mother's face, wet with rain, mouth moving — Run, Rafi, run—
He blinked and saw instead the braid girl kneeling in a hush hollow, roots coiled through her ribs, sap dripping from her lips. She was younger, maybe five or six. Small and lost and half-grown from the hush's dark soil.
"You were its seed," he whispered. The memory grove didn't lie. It unspooled truth like bark peeling in winter.
She didn't answer. Instead she clawed at her chest as if to rip out something he couldn't see. The mist pressed close. He saw Mere's shape deeper in the grove, arms wide as if embracing the memories. Children gathered around him, weeping or giggling as memories bled through their masks.
"You can't let it show you everything," Rafi snarled to himself. "It feeds on the pain. Your pain makes it strong."
He dragged the braid girl to her feet. Her eyes flickered between child and girl, hush and human. For a breath, he thought she'd break and bite him. Instead she buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed once, dry and bitter.
Past them, the guardians circled Mere, their claws raking bark that screamed like bone. He chanted: "I am the root. I am the hush. I am what you left behind."
Rafi wiped the braid girl's tears with a trembling thumb. "I'm going after him. Burn the memory if you have to. If he crowns himself hush king, we're all dead branches."
She lifted her head. In her cracked laugh was more rage than sorrow now. "Go. Tear his crown off, hero. I'll break the grove's mouth so it can't whisper us apart."
And through the grove's rift, Rafi stepped — his mother's ghost at his heels, his hands bloody with bark splinters — to end the hush again, or drown in its roots forever.