Chapter 16: When the Earth Breathes
The ground did not stop trembling.
It breathed.
Snow slipped from the branches above, sliding in soft sheets to the earth. The cracks in the soil widened, glowing red like veins beneath pale skin. The watchers stood unmoving, their silhouettes haloed by the light below, as though they were not warriors but sentinels awaiting their master's rise.
Carrow's command still hung in the air, but no man moved to obey. Our shields felt like paper, our spears like twigs, our courage like smoke. What wall could we build against the earth itself?
Joran's hand gripped my shoulder, his knuckles white. "We can't hold them. We shouldn't." His voice broke on the last word, a sound too human for this place.
The children had gone silent, but the weight of their hush was worse than the song. Their eyes—those pale, unblinking orbs—shimmered faintly with reflected rune-light. Not with fear. Not with confusion. With knowledge. A knowledge that did not belong to them, could never belong to children.
The girl in my arms—smaller than the spear I carried, fragile as frost—clutched at my cloak. "It is almost through," she whispered, as though speaking to me alone. "The skin is thin here. Soon it will breathe with us."
Her words hollowed my chest.
The earth groaned again. The cracks split wider, and heat spilled upward, though no fire burned. Instead, a darkness pushed through—darker than night, darker than smoke. It oozed like blood from a wound, filling the air with the stench of iron and rot.
The watchers moved at last. Not to strike, but to kneel. Their blades rested point-first in the snow, their heads bowed toward the widening wound. The sight of such abominations bent in reverence nearly broke me. For if they prayed, what god was it that answered?
Carrow stepped forward, his sword black with gore and shadow. His voice was steady, but the tremor in his hand betrayed him.
"Whatever comes, we cut it down."
None answered him. Not because we doubted his will, but because the words were ash in our mouths. The girl's gaze pinned me again.
"It cannot be cut," she said. "Only chosen. Only carried."
Her tone was not warning but pronouncement. As though she recited something older than the stones beneath us.
And then the sound returned—not the horn, not the children's song. Something deeper, more primal. A pulse, steady as a heartbeat, rising from the pit itself. Each throb shook my bones, until I no longer knew whether it came from the ground or from within me.
Joran doubled over, gagging as if the rhythm twisted his insides. Men dropped their shields, clawing at their ears though the sound was not in the air. Horses screamed and tore their reins, bolting into the trees, but even their flight seemed slow against the crawling tide of dread.
I felt it too—like my chest had been split open, ribs wrenched aside, my heart seized by unseen hands and forced to beat in time with the pit. With every pulse, the world narrowed. The snow lost its whiteness, the trees their shape. There was only the rhythm, the hunger beneath it.
Carrow raised his sword high. "Stand!" he roared, voice ragged, desperate. "Stand, damn you!"
But when the next heartbeat came, his knees buckled. His sword dipped, the steel quivering as though it too feared to be drawn against what waited below.
The children did not move. They waited, patient as stone, as if they had always known this moment would come.
The watchers lifted their heads as one. Their burning eyes turned to us—not with hunger, not with rage, but with expectation. Their stillness was worse than any charge. It was the stillness of witnesses awaiting judgment.
Something had chosen.
Something had named.
And in the moment that realization struck, the girl's lips brushed my ear again.
"It is not coming," she said. Her voice was soft, almost kind.
"It is already here."
The earth heaved. The light flared. The heartbeat swallowed the world.
I thought the sky would shatter. The snow whirled upward, as though dragged toward the unseen maw beneath us. Branches bowed, trunks groaned, and even the wind seemed to kneel.
And I—I who had survived war and famine, who had buried comrades and kin—found my knees bending too, not from choice but from the weight pressing upon my soul. For in that moment, I understood the terrible truth the children bore so easily.
This was not an ending.
It was a birth.
And we were already inside the body that labored.
The snow, the trees, the sky itself seemed to bow.
"— To Be Continued —"
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