The Forest Beneath
Cuco traveled alone.
Not to escape, but to listen.
The forest had changed since the ritual—grown older, somehow. Wiser. The trees leaned together in secret conversations. Moss shimmered with faint, bioluminescent threads that only showed themselves when he looked without blinking.
The blade still rested beneath the Circle tree.
But the Tome followed him.
Not physically.
He felt it in his blood now. In his bones. It didn't whisper like it used to—not temptation, not commands. Just a low, steady murmur.
A heartbeat.
Something is waking. Walk deeper.
And so he did.
He passed the old watchgroves—the ruins of the first Dreamer camps, overgrown with vines and memories. He saw carvings etched into bark that no one had touched in a century. Names he didn't recognize. Symbols that burned faintly when he stared too long.
At the edge of a ravine, the air changed.
Not colder.
Hollow.
But not the enemy's Hollow.
This was older.
Primordial.
A silence that had never been broken—not by blade, not by song, not even by dreams.
Cuco descended slowly, boots slipping on wet stone. The trees grew upside down here—roots stretching toward the sky above, branches burrowed into the ground.
And in the center of the hollow glade: a pool.
Still. Black.
Reflective like a mirror that remembered too much.
He knelt at the water's edge.
Not a ripple stirred.
He touched the surface—
And his reflection did not match him.
It wore his face.
But its eyes were bark, its veins full of root-light.
And it smiled.
> "You're not the first, Cuco," the reflection said.
"Just the first to survive."
The forest behind him stirred. Leaves rustled without wind.
Cuco stood slowly, heart racing.
"Who are you?" he asked the thing in the water.
The reflection tilted its head.
> "I am the seed left behind. The memory that grew teeth.
The forest remembers what the Dreamers forgot."
The pool shimmered—and images surfaced:
—A Dreamer binding a living Tome to their chest.
—A forest devouring a city of gold.
—A Circle, older than the current one, kneeling before a masked figure whose shadow bled vines.
Cuco staggered back.
"No… that's not history. That's—"
> "Truth," said the reflection.
"You carry the blade, but not the burden.
Come deeper. Learn what they buried."
Cuco hesitated.
The wind picked up above.
Far in the distance, he felt the Circle call—Echo stirring, the others watching, the storm returning.
But down here…
There were answers.
He took a breath.
And stepped into the pool.
The water swallowed him in silence.
And the forest blinked.