The fog had thinned.
Not gone. Just… resting.
Thornwick Hollow exhaled like a creature in sleep—shutters no longer rattling, streetlamps glowing steady. The Hollow was quiet now. Quiet in a way that felt wrong.
Noa sat on the edge of her bed, watching her reflection in the window glass. Her journal lay in her lap, untouched for days. Its pages were bare, but sometimes, when she blinked, she could swear she saw faint scribbles appear—loops and symbols she didn't recognize.
She hadn't dreamed since the ritual.
Not in color, anyway.
Only in fog.
When she awoke that morning, a smear of black ink—or was it blood?—stained her pillow. She hadn't told anyone.
Down the street, Riven walked past the edge of the woods without glancing toward them. The Ashwood Tree stood bare, gnarled and brittle. She hadn't seen the others in days. They were drifting, untethered, frayed at the edges.
She didn't speak of the things she heard when she walked alone:
Her name whispered in the breeze.
A voice from beneath the roots saying, "You were never meant to leave."
She kept walking.
Mavis had taken to spending long hours in front of the mirror. She didn't know why. She'd catch herself moving… just a breath behind her reflection. Sometimes, the girl in the glass blinked first.
That night, she pressed a palm to the cool surface and whispered, "We didn't finish it."
The mirror stayed silent.
But when she stepped away, a single crack split the glass—like something inside was trying to crawl out.
Astra painted in circles now. Spirals and moons, twisting trees with bleeding bark. Every painting felt like a door. Each one showed something new: a cloaked figure, the outline of the Hollow, a girl with no face.
She never painted the others. Not since the night of the blood moon.
Celeste sat cross-legged beneath the floorboards of the school library, where no one was allowed to go. She'd followed the hum one afternoon—a soft melody drifting from the vents. A lullaby, old and aching.
She knew the words.
She didn't know how.
And somewhere in that quiet hour, between a breath and a blink, the oath book opened itself.
No hands touched it. No wind moved its pages.
Still, it turned. One. Two. Three.
A fresh page.
A single word written in trembling black ink:
"Begin."
Outside, the wind carried fog back into the streets, thin as lace and twice as cold.
Underneath Thornwick Hollow, something turned in its sleep—
and smiled.
The Hollow sleeps, but sleep is not silence.