I first heard the word Agleth in a dream, spoken by something I could not see, under a sky that had no stars—only holes. I awoke with dirt under my fingernails and the taste of iron on my tongue.
Three days later, my sister Claire called.
"You remember the orchard behind Grandpa's old house?" she asked, voice thin over the static.
"It's full of teeth," she said.
I didn't ask her what she meant. I bought a bus ticket that night.
---
Grandpa's house sat on a forgotten stretch of land between Pennsylvania and nowhere, crumbling into the bones of itself. The orchard behind it had long since been devoured by vines and rot. We hadn't been back since the funeral five years ago—Claire said the land had "changed" after he died.
The air was wrong when I stepped off the bus. Heavier. Like something enormous was buried just below the surface, breathing slowly.
Claire met me at the gate. She hadn't slept in days. Her eyes were sunken, her lips chapped. She looked like something the earth had partially swallowed.
"I tried digging them up," she said as we walked.
"Wh—what?"
"The teeth. In the orchard. But they're... too deep. Like they're growing."
---
The orchard was no longer an orchard. The trees were still there, gnarled and blackened like fingers clawing at the sky. But their bark was soft, almost fleshy. And the ground? Pockmarked with hundreds of small holes.
Each hole held a single, human tooth.
Molars. Incisors. Baby teeth. Yellowed and rotten, or polished and perfect. Some sat in neat little sockets in the soil, as if waiting for a jaw to close around them.
Claire pointed at one tree near the center of the grove. "That one hums when you touch it."
She placed her hand on its bark. I leaned closer—and yes, there was a hum. Faint. Vibrating just beneath the wood. A low, wet resonance, like something alive, dreaming.
---
That night, I dreamt of a mouth that stretched across the sky. No lips. No face. Just teeth, layered and turning like gears. Beneath them was a tongue that writhed like a whale, dotted with small figures. One looked like Claire. One looked like me.
The mouth spoke:
"Agleth. The Root God. The Father of All Chewing."
I woke to the sound of rustling leaves and the dull chime of teeth clacking together.
---
Claire grew obsessed. She stopped eating. Said she didn't need to anymore—that the orchard was feeding her. She spent her nights digging, placing small offerings between the roots: nail clippings, skin, once a rabbit's foot.
"I think it's growing a new jaw," she whispered one morning, eyes wide with awe.
"It needs us to bloom."
I planned to leave the next day. I should have already left. But something about the orchard—it pulls. It asks. Not with words, but with want. I stood among the trees and felt it pressing against my bones, urging them to bend inward.
I told myself it was just fatigue. Stress. The dirt-scented breath of grief still hanging in the old house. But then I saw the tree in the center. It had changed.
Its trunk had split. Inside was a tongue.
Not bark shaped like a tongue. A real, wet, glistening tongue, slowly unfurling like a fern.
---
Claire sang to it.
I found her kneeling before the opened tree, humming a lullaby we barely remembered from childhood. She wept as she sang. The tongue quivered, then curled toward her, gently stroking her cheek.
I ran.
I made it as far as the fence before I vomited blood and teeth—my own. Three of them. Clean, whole, with roots far longer than should be possible. They wriggled on the ground like worms before sinking into the soil.
I fell unconscious.
---
I awoke in the orchard.
The trees had grown closer. Their branches curled toward me like limbs, and the soil was pulsing faintly—like breathing.
Claire sat nearby, her arms covered in tooth-shaped scars.
"You belong here now," she said.
"Agleth accepts your gift."
I tried to stand. Something beneath the soil resisted. Like roots had coiled around my legs in my sleep. I tore myself free. My skin came off in sheets.
Claire didn't stop me when I fled. She only whispered:
"You'll be back. You've been planted."
---
The bus driver didn't look at me when I boarded, half-covered in dried blood and spit and dirt. The other passengers pretended I wasn't there.
Back in the city, I tried to forget.
I kept my mouth closed. Ate soft food. Avoided mirrors. But the dreams continued.
I dreamt of orchards that spanned galaxies, each tree a tooth in the jaw of something too large to see.
I dreamt of chewing sounds from underground.
Of being ground down into pulp between molars the size of moons.
And in the morning, there were always more teeth. On my floor. On my pillow. Growing from the grout in the shower.
---
I went to a dentist.
He looked in my mouth and screamed.
I ran.
I don't know what he saw. I only know that my gums itch constantly, and sometimes I feel pressure from beneath—like something is trying to push out, to open.
Last week, a package arrived with no return address.
Inside was a small wooden box.
I knew what it was before I opened it.
One of Claire's molars. Still warm. Still bleeding.
Under it, a note:
"Bloom soon. We miss you."
There are new trees on my street now.
They weren't there before.
Black bark. Curling limbs.
The air around them hums faintly when I pass.
I swear I saw a tongue between their roots.
Tonight, I dream again.
The sky is a jaw.
The stars are molars.
And I am falling, softly, into the gullet of the orchard.
I will stop running.
Agleth is patient.
He does not bite.
He chews.