Cassian Vale had forgotten how Hollowgrave smelled. The town carried its own kind of rot — not sharp like carrion, nor sweet like decay, but heavy, coppery, clinging. Like damp iron. Like blood that would not wash from your skin.
It welcomed him back the moment the gates shut behind him.
He hadn't slept in days. Couldn't. Whenever he closed his eyes, something watched. Not from his room. Not from the street. From below. He felt it in his bones, in his dreams — like a pressure pushing upward, as if the soil itself was alive and aware.
And waiting.
The chapel smelled of old wax and older dust. Its windows bled sunlight in crooked shafts, catching the air thick with motes that never seemed to fall.
Cassian found Brother Thorne in the scriptorium.
The mute monk sat hunched at his desk, fingers torn and ink-stained, scrawling the same phrase again and again onto brittle parchment:
"She is learning the shapes of thought."
Over and over, until the words blurred. When the parchment ran out, he scratched it into the wood. When the wood splintered, he scored it into his own skin.
"Brother Thorne," Cassian murmured, voice hoarse. "What does it mean?"
The monk didn't look up. His head twitched, once, twice — like a marionette on broken strings. Then he slid a folded page across the table.
Cassian opened it.
The sketch was rough but unmistakable: a figure too tall, too thin, with arms dragging long as branches. No face. Yet eyes — dozens of them — stitched across its body, staring in every direction.
Beneath, scrawled in a frantic hand:
"THE WATCHER IN THE ROOTS".
Before Cassian could breathe, the page ignited in his hands. Silent fire. Ash in seconds.
Brother Thorne smiled. His teeth were red.
On the far edge of Hollowgrave, little Auren Clay leaned over his family's well. His mother called for him, but he didn't answer. He was listening.
The voice from the well was soft. Kind. Almost playful. It had been whispering to him since the bells rang. Telling him stories about the orchard, about the bones beneath the roots, about the people who lived in the dark where no light dared fall.
But tonight, it told him something new:
"Tell the one with the burned hands… the tree is not a door. It is a mirror."
Auren didn't understand. But he repeated it carefully, word for word, and scratched it into the cellar wall with a nail.
Then he smiled. A strange, glassy-eyed smile no child should wear.
And the well whispered his name back to him.
Cassian descended into the chapel's cellar, where the Red Ledger lay chained to its altar. The book groaned when opened — not paper groaning, but breath, escaping from something that resented being disturbed.
Inside, each page held a name. Written in blood. Each death spaced exactly thirty-three years apart. Until now.
Cassian turned back, scanning the list. Then he froze.
There was a blank space. A name missing. A rectangle of stitched leather, raw, waiting.
Still warm.
That night, Cassian tried to work at the desk of his rented room. Tried to trace patterns in the ledger's cycle, to understand why Marla had come early. But the lamp flickered too often. The shadows lengthened unnaturally, stretching toward the window.
And when Cassian finally looked, he saw it.
Across the street. In the dark. A figure.
Tall. Thin. Still.
No face.
He blinked.
It was closer now — across the courtyard. No footsteps. No sound.
Cassian backed away, but the figure remained, impossibly still, impossibly near.
He lifted the lamp toward it.
And it was gone.
Only the creaking of tree limbs, though no wind stirred outside.
Desperate, Cassian went to the mortuary. He needed to see Marla. To prove to himself she was dead.
Eula Bramble sat by the slab, hands folded, blind eyes unblinking. "She's not resting," she said, voice soft as a prayer.
Cassian pulled back the shroud.
Marla's mouth was still packed with soil. But her eyes — her eyes were gone.
In their place, small black seeds twitched, pulsing as though alive.
Near midnight, Cassian returned to the orchard. Drawn by a hunger he didn't understand, as though the tree itself called for him.
The Old Willow stood silent. Waiting.
And beneath it stood a woman in white. Her skin too pale, her eyes too black, her smile too wide.
She opened her mouth. The soil hissed inside her throat.
"You've entered the ledger."
Then she grinned wider, jaw unhinging, as though she were no longer made of bone.
Cassian stumbled back, heart pounding.
The branches above creaked. Something heavy fell — nothing he could see, but the soil at his feet rippled like water.
He looked back at the tree.
And carved freshly into its bark: