Mara awoke to darkness.
Not the kind you find in a room without windows.
This was deeper. Thicker. The kind of dark that has weight, that presses on your chest and fills your throat with invisible hands. She didn't remember falling asleep—only running. The trees. The singing. The roots.
And then... nothing.
She couldn't see.
She couldn't move.
But she could feel.
The sensation of wet soil hugged her body. Cold. Slick. Claustrophobic. Her arms were pinned at her sides, and something fibrous held her legs. Not tightly. But deliberately. Gently, like a spider cradling its prey.
She tried to scream—but soil filled her mouth.
And then she realized she wasn't just buried.
She was growing.
Tiny rootlets brushed the inside of her cheeks. Something writhed beneath her skin—small, thread-like movements just under the surface of her arms. Her fingers twitched involuntarily. Her toes flexed, cracked, and split. Pain bloomed, but not like a wound. It was internal. Deep. As if her bones were being replaced with something else.
She thrashed. Soil fell away from her face, enough to suck in a gasp of damp air.
It reeked of rot and copper.
Light flickered above—faint, greenish, like swamp gas. Mara looked up and saw she wasn't underground in the usual sense. She was in a hollow—an open womb in the earth, surrounded by tangled vines and pulsing roots that throbbed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
And above her, carved into the dome of the earthen ceiling:
"THROUGH HER, HE GROWS."
A sound came then.
Worse than a scream.
A whimper.
Mara turned her head, slowly, every vertebra in her neck cracking like brittle wood.
In the far corner of the chamber, a man crouched. Shirtless. Eyes gouged out. Skin marked with carvings—symbols like those under the bed. He rocked back and forth, mumbling nonsense through bloodied lips.
Except… it wasn't nonsense.
It was her name.
Over and over.
"Mara… Mara Vex… Mara, Mara, Mara…"
She tried to crawl toward him.
The roots tugged her back.
The man stopped rocking. Lifted his face.
And smiled.
His mouth was full of teeth that weren't human—long, black, spindly things that twisted like wire. Something moved behind them. Multiple somethings.
Then, from the center of his chest, a bloom erupted—a flower, made of flesh and bone, opened with a crunch and a wet gasp. From it, a long tendril unfurled and snaked across the soil, toward Mara.
She screamed.
The soil didn't echo her voice—it drank it.
The tendril touched her cheek. It was warm.
It whispered in her head: "Feed. Join. Root. Bloom."
Mara twisted, and this time the roots released.
She scrambled to her feet, slipping and cutting her palms on jagged bones half-buried in the ground. Fingers. A jaw. A necklace still clinging to a half-dissolved throat.
She ran.
Through tunnels of earth that pulsed and shifted as she moved. One moment they stretched endlessly, the next they squeezed in around her ribs, brushing her ears, whispering secrets in children's voices.
> "He found her bones in the garden bed,
He planted dreams inside her head…"
A burst of light—real light—came into view. A hole.
She clawed toward it.
Just before she reached it, a hand shot out from the wall and grabbed her ankle.
But it wasn't a hand.
It was a foot. An upside-down, backward foot, with too many toes and skin like paper mâché soaked in bile.
Mara kicked. It howled.
She broke the surface.
Moonlight washed her vision. She was in the woods again—but not the same woods.
No sound. No breeze. Just trees with bark that seemed to breathe. In the distance, she saw houses—familiar ones—but wrong. The windows pulsed like eyes. Smoke curled from chimneys even though it was spring. And someone stood at the edge of the tree line.
The innkeeper.
Her face gone. Literally gone. Just smooth, featureless skin, like wax melted too long.
She raised one hand.
And pointed toward Mara's stomach.
Mara looked down.
And screamed.
From beneath her skin, just above the navel, something pressed outward.
A root. Thin. Pulsing. Moving in sync with her breath.
Growing.
Inside her.