Chapter 18: The Pith Below

The descent was not a staircase, nor a ramp, nor even a proper path. It was a spiraling tunnel of fibrous pulp, moist and glowing faintly from within. The walls pulsed softly, alive with breath or memory or both.

They moved in silence, save for the soft squelch of footsteps and an ambient, low hum that seemed to echo through the meat of the fruit-flesh around them.

"I feel like we're walking down a giant fruit esophagus," Stanley muttered. "Someone please tell me this isn't digestive."

"It probably is," Calyx replied, calm as ever. She pressed a palm against the wall as if to read it like Braille. "Let's just not trigger the gag reflex."

Rafael led the way, one cautious step at a time. After the Grove, he felt... lighter. Like something hollowed had been patched over with wax paper.

His memory of her voice—whatever her name had been, whatever she had said—was gone. And in its place, a silence that echoed.

But something else had taken root. His veins felt warmer, charged. Not power, exactly, but potential. A readiness that wasn't there before.

Lira walked beside him, humming a tune that made no sense but echoed oddly against the walls. The melody shifted with every twist of the tunnel, as though the passage itself responded.

"What did you really mean about the seven notes of sorrow?" Rafael asked, breaking the silence.

She didn't stop humming. But she answered, "The Flute of Rains won't play for the unscarred. Sorrow carves the holes; breath makes the music."

"Cryptic as ever."

"I get paid by the riddle."

Stanley snorted. "You're not even getting paid."

Lira only winked.

The descent narrowed. The pulpy walls thickened into cords, like muscles bracing against an incoming impact. The tunnel twisted tighter and tighter until it squeezed them into a final turn—and then the world dropped away.

They spilled out into a massive chamber that swallowed light. The glow of the pulp had faded. No fruit shimmered here. No reflective water. Only dry air and shadow.

The floor was uneven, layered with curled stems, cracked seeds, and spined husks. It smelled of bitter resin and ancient regret.

In the center rose a stalk—a twisted column of petrified pith, hollow and wide at the top, shaped like the bell of a giant flower. But it wasn't blooming.

It was listening.

Rafael stepped toward it, drawn by something he didn't fully understand. The air grew thick with tension. Static. Expectation.

"Is that... the Flute?" Stanley asked, peering around.

"Part of it," Lira said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "This is the Mouth. The Instrument sleeps here."

"Then where's the rest of it?"

A sound rose. Low and steady. Like wood groaning underwater.

From the far edge of the cavern, something enormous began to rise.

It wasn't born of flesh, but rind and marrow. Ten feet tall at least, the giant unfurled itself from the earth like a tree waking up. Its joints cracked with the sound of roots tearing soil. Bark layered its arms, and one eye socket leaked golden syrup. In its hands, it carried a spine-thick frame of wood, almost skeletal.

The Flute of Rains.

But it was bound—chained to the cavern by thick vines, shackled at both shoulders. Its limbs strained, but it did not attack. It waited.

"Oh," said Calyx. "So that's the rest of it."

The giant turned its syrup-dripping gaze on Rafael. It tilted its head—not in malice, but as if measuring him.

Rafael's forearm tingled. The seven runes from the Grove still pulsed faintly beneath his skin.

The Flute-Guardian raised the instrument—not in warning, but in offering.

Lira's breath caught. "It wants you to play."

Rafael swallowed. "I don't even know how to play a kazoo."

"Then don't blow. Breathe. Let the sorrow do the rest."

His fingers trembled as he stepped forward. The chamber held its breath.

He reached out.

The moment his fingertips touched the aged wood, the world split open.

A thousand lives flashed before his eyes: a battlefield drowning in rain, a mother burying her child in soaked soil, a soldier watching his homeland vanish in the mist. He felt their grief, tasted their salt, heard the mourning winds.

The flute responded. It didn't sing—it wept.

The chamber filled with storm: gale and thunder, scent of petrichor and blood-orange. The sound shook the marrow of the earth. Stanley dropped to one knee. Calyx stood like a tree in the wind. Lira clutched her cloak tight.

Rafael's body strained. The sorrow poured through him. It hurt—but it meant something. Every tremor in his spine, every tear on his cheek—it meant something.

And when he finally let go, the song ended.

The Flute-Guardian slumped. The chains around it fell slack, vines recoiling into the soil. It bowed, a motion both tragic and triumphant.

Lira approached, reverently. "You passed."

Rafael nodded, chest heaving. He didn't speak.

Then, the wall behind the Flute cracked.

It didn't break like stone. It unraveled—as though made of old song, peels of harmony stitched into silence. A new passage formed, opening into pitch darkness.

But from that dark, a sound emerged.

A laugh. Feminine. Familiar (at least for Rafael). Hungry.

Rafael's fingers clenched around the now-silent flute. His pulse surged.

Calyx looked to him. "Do we follow it?"

"We already are," he replied.

They stepped forward.

And behind them, the pith sealed shut like a closing throat, swallowing the past into silence.

***