Ash Beneath the Roots

The place where the boy had slept still smoldered come morning, though the earth was cold to touch.

I knelt there while the threadless children woke in fragments—eyes opening, bodies staying still, the learned caution of those who'd survived by never fully trusting dawn. The youngest girl had wet herself in the night. I smelled it, saw the shame in how she curled tighter, trying to hide what couldn't be hidden in our close quarters.

I moved to her without thinking. Used my last clean cloth to help her clean up, quick and quiet while the others looked away. She trembled under my hands, not from cold.

"He's not coming back," she whispered. "Is he?"

The scorched crescent in the earth held no answers. Just absence shaped like prophecy.

"No," I said. Truth was the only kindness I had left.

Behind us, Dorian packed what little we owned. His movements were sharp, efficient, already decided. But the shard pulsed heat through my bones—a lazy, satisfied warmth that whispered of roots grown too deep to pull.

"We need to move." His voice carried that particular flatness that meant argument was unwelcome but expected. "Whatever took him knows where we sleep."

The children looked between us, sensing the fracture. Some already gathering their nothing-belongings, ready to follow wherever. Others watching me, waiting for the word that would override his logic with something else. Faith, maybe. Or just the terrible comfort of staying still when movement meant admitting we were prey again.

The shard contracted, squeezed my ribs like a possessive hand. It wanted me rooted here. Wanted me to make stand, to dare whatever hunted us to come for what was mine.

Mine.

When had I started thinking of them that way? These broken children with their hollow eyes and careful silence?

"Tonight," I heard myself say. "We'll move tonight. Let them rest first."

Dorian's jaw tightened, but he nodded. Compromise. The space between what wisdom demanded and what the thing in my chest wanted.

He waited until the children scattered—some to gather water, others to practice their stillness—before approaching. We stood at careful distance, the gap between us measured in more than steps.

"You look tired," he said.

I almost laughed. Tired was too small a word for what pulled at my bones. I felt ancient. Felt newborn. Felt like something wearing the shape of a girl who'd forgotten why she'd wanted to be human in the first place.

His hand moved—almost reached for me, stopped. The shard flared warning, and he felt it. I saw him feel it in the way his nostrils flared, catching the scent of divine possession that clung to me now like smoke.

"You're starting to look like the ones we were taught to fear."

The words landed soft as ash, twice as choking. Not an accusation. Just observation from someone who'd taught me to observe. To see truth even when it cut.

I wanted to deny it. Wanted to say I was still Aria, still the girl he'd pulled from the mud and taught to be nothing so I could be everything. But my reflection in his eyes told different stories. The silver that threaded through my pupils. The way shadows bent wrong around me. The careful distance even the bravest children maintained, like approaching too close might burn.

He walked away before I could find words that weren't lies.

The forest stirred wrong all morning. Trees that should have been still swayed without wind, and twice I caught movement in peripheral vision that vanished when I turned. The children felt it too—pulled closer together, voices dropping to whispers even the wind couldn't catch.

Then the mirror-boy brought me the corpse.

A rabbit, throat torn out clean. Nothing unusual in that—the forest was full of small deaths. But burned into its flank, still smoking though the flesh was cold, was my mark. The inverted crescent I'd carved into my own wrist, perfect in every detail.

"When?" I asked, though my tongue felt thick.

He tilted his head, that old smile playing at too-young lips. "You were dreaming loud again. Walking, too."

The shard pulsed satisfaction. Had I done this? Marked this small death while my consciousness slept? Or had it used my hands for its own purposes, the way it used my bones for shelter?

I buried the rabbit quick, but the children had seen. Had smelled the char of divine claim on innocent flesh. They looked at me different now—still trusting, but with the kind of faith reserved for things that might save or damn with equal ease.

By afternoon, fever took the scarred boy.

Not the transformed finger—that seemed to pulse with its own vitality. But his body burned hot, eyes rolling white, the kind of sick that came from pushing too hard through fear and forest. I laid him in shade, tried to cool his skin with wet cloth, but the fever climbed.

"Let me," I said, calling flame before anyone could stop me.

Just this once, I begged the flame. Be kind.

It came eager. Too eager. Silver light spilled from my palms like water from a broken dam, and where it touched him—

He screamed.

Not healing. Not transformation. Just burning, silver fire eating at his fever but taking flesh-payment for the privilege. His skin blistered, blackened, began to peel—

Hands hauled me backward. Dorian's arms around my waist, dragging me from the boy who convulsed now, caught between fever and flame. Other hands—the children's—threw dirt on silver fire that didn't want to die.

"No more healing," Dorian said against my ear, holding me while I shook. "Not until you know what you are."

What I was. As if there were words for it. As if anyone had made language for the thing between divine and mortal, between mother and monster.

The boy lived. Barely. His fever broke but left him scarred in new ways, silver patterns spidering across his chest where my healing had kissed too hard. He looked at me when consciousness returned—not with fear or accusation. With something worse.

Awe.

"The fire that doesn't break," he whispered, and the other children took up the phrase like prayer.

I fled before I could hear more.

Found myself at the edge of our hollow as dusk painted everything the color of old blood. My hands had started digging before thought caught up—scooping earth, making depth, shaping what could only be a grave.

For what? For who?

The shard hummed against my ribs, patient as stone. It knew. Had always known. Was just waiting for me to catch up to inevitability.

My fingers found something in the earth. Smooth, white, wrong. I pulled it free—a shard of bone, carved with symbols that hurt to perceive. Old. Older than the forest. Older than the names we wore like ill-fitting clothes.

Behind me, I heard the children gathering. Heard Dorian's careful step. Felt the weight of eyes that expected me to make sense of a world gone silver at the edges.

But all I could do was dig. Shape this hollow that waited for purpose. For the sacrifice I didn't want to name but felt coming like storm-pressure in my bones.

The bone shard pulsed once in my palm, and for a moment I saw—

Fire. Crowns. Children who weren't children anymore. A man with gold eyes fading to gray as something larger than love devoured what we'd almost built.

Then nothing. Just me and the dirt and the grave that wasn't yet but would be.

Always would be.

The shard sang its patience against my ribs, and I dug deeper. As if I could bury what was coming. As if earthwork could hold back divine hunger.

As if anything could stop me from becoming what I'd always been beneath the names, beneath the skin, beneath the girl who'd once thought rejection was the worst thing that could happen.

I dug until my fingers bled silver.

And still, it wasn't deep enough.

Footsteps. Soft, deliberate. Dorian lowered himself beside the grave, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. Almost. The space between us hummed with everything we couldn't say.

He didn't speak. Didn't reach for the bone shard or question the hole I was carving from earth and inevitability. Just sat there, breathing the same air, sharing the same terrible quiet.

The shard pulsed against my ribs—hot, possessive, jealous of even this nothing-touch. I felt it coil tighter, felt it taste the mortal warmth of him and find it wanting. Find it temporary. Find it small.

My fingers kept digging, silver blood mixing with dirt. His stayed still on his knees.

The distance between our shoulders might as well have been continents. Might as well have been the space between mortal and divine, between what we'd almost been and what I was becoming.

Something was dying in that silence. We both felt it. Both let it.

Because what else was there to do but dig, and bleed, and pretend the grave wasn't already named?