By dawn, the black tree stands like an ancient witness to everything they lost and everything they clawed back. Its bark still weeps in places — dark sap, thick and slow, bleeding from the deep scorched veins where the hush once pulsed.
Rafi drags his fingertips along a crack in the trunk. The sap stains him dark, sticky, smelling faintly of the old rot that once whispered to him when he was small and alone. Now it's just sap. Nothing more.
The braid girl kneels at the base where roots split the earth like old bones. She's gathered stones from the ruined shrine, arranged them in a circle around the tree's core. Inside it, she sets one of her braids — a lock she cut herself this dawn, laid gentle like a relic.
No hush left to devour it — only the forest listening, silent and watchful.
Rafi joins her inside the stone ring. For a moment they are both quiet, shoulders brushing. They look like children praying over a grave, but there's no prayer here — only promise.
They don't have a parent to make them swear right from wrong. No priest to bind them in sacred words. So they bind each other.
Rafi unsheathes a small blade — scavenged once from a half-buried camp locker, polished on nights when he couldn't sleep. He presses it to his palm and winces when the skin parts. Red spills over the old hush wounds, drips into the dirt and sap.
He hands the blade to the braid girl. She hesitates, then mirrors him. A thin line across her own palm, pain barely flickering across her face. She grips his hand hard enough that their cuts smear together, that the forest root drinks what they offer.
Together they speak — no rehearsed vow, just truth, bare and jagged:
Never again.
Never again a hush feeding on lonely children. Never again roots to strangle lost dreams. Never again voices in the dark promising forever for a price no child should pay.
Their mixed blood seeps into the black tree's cracked roots. The forest accepts it without voice, without threat. Around them, dawn strengthens — birds rustle branches overhead, and somewhere deeper in the trees, something wild but harmless shivers awake.
They sit there until the bleeding stops and scabs crust over. Two feral survivors, bound not by fear but by a pact forged in the ruin of all they once feared.
When they stand, the braid girl leaves the lock of hair tucked in the ring of stones. Rafi lays a bit of his bloodied cloth beside it. A marker, a warning, a blessing.
Behind them, the black tree drips sap like tears. But when the wind breathes through its charred crown, it makes no whisper at all. Just the sigh of old bark, sleeping at last.
Together they turn away, hands clasped. The hush has roots no more — but they have each other.