Chapter Seventeen
“Asha, wake up!”
“Asha, you’re okay, wake up!”
My eyes jerk open and jolt awake, the panic still clinging to my lungs with every staggered breath.
“It’s okay.” Nala’s hands are gently rubbing the small of my back whilst Ryder and River’s eyes loom over me, concerned. “You’re okay.”
My mind slowly unfolds the depths of my imagination. It was a dream. A realistic and traumatic one at that, but it was a dream, and Ryder’s okay.
“Thank you,” I say softly, my brow thick with sweat. She flashes me a small smile, one that calms my nerves.
“Did you have a nightmare again?” She questions, and though I don’t respond, my eyes say enough.
“You’ve been having nightmares?” Ryder interrupts, crouching down to my level, and Nala backs a way a little. “When were you going to tell me about this?”
“It’s nothing really, I didn’t want you to worry.”
“It didn’t seem like nothing.” He assesses, his dark eyes tracing mine. I didn’t realise before, but it’s daylight now, and the sun makes a better attempt at piercing through the forest than the moon did. “Are they always the same?”
“Most of the time,” I answer, averting my eyes from his.
“What are they about?” He asks, the tone of his voice much gentler than the one he used in my dreams, though it still sends a cold shiver down my spine.
I can’t tell him that it’s he who plagues my sleep, his eyes, his hands, always the same.
Alright, the locations may change, but he is always there, draining the life from me as he did that day.
“The mountain,” I mutter the words, the ground looking overly interesting in this moment. I feel it. The silence that follows after those two words, as if they hold as much weight as an avalanche—thick and unnerving.
A flicker of recognition ignites in his eyes, a twist of guilt and pain pulsing like the ink through his veins. A muscle in his jaw jumps, and he looks away for a brief moment as if he knows he haunts my dreams.
“You should have told me.” He stretches his arm out and pulls me to my feet when I take it. Though I know, he knows why I didn’t.
***
The forest is a warning around us. Even when it isn’t plunged in darkness.
Every subtle noise is large enough to manipulate my heartbeat, upping its tempo.
Moss clings to everything—roots, stones, even the air feels heavy with it—its damp scent filling my lungs with every breath.
The trees stand impossibly tall, their trunks swollen with age, their bark carved by time into deep grooves that look almost like teeth marks.
The ground softens underfoot, each step sinking slightly into layers of rotting leaves.
Strange fungi glow faintly along fallen logs, pulsing like dying embers.
The low mist is still thick and curling at our ankles, shifting with every blow of the wind, as if the forest itself is watching us breathe.
Birdsong is nonexistent. Even insects have gone silent.
Only the creak of branches follows us.
As the path widens, the trees pull back in uneven intervals, leaving pockets of open space scattered amongst the dense undergrowth. It feels less like natural clearings and more like the forest is stepping aside… revealing things.
That’s when I see it.
A lone gravestone stands crooked beneath a skeletal oak, half-swallowed by vines. Its surface is cracked, the name faded into a shallow whisper of letters I can’t quite read. Moss blankets its edges like a shroud, and a single white flower, wilted and impossibly out of place, rests on its base.
“This is… different,” Nala exclaims, assessing the new surroundings. She’s right. In a forest where nothing innocent seems to grow, a grave feels far more sinister than comforting.
“What does it say?” River asks, crouching down in front of it.
“I’m not sure.” Nala says, “It’s written in Enchantra.”
She dusts the moss off the plaque and traces the grooves in the stone. Ryder doesn’t say much, just keeps his hand pressed tightly on the hilt of his sword, as if he is waiting for danger to snatch us.
“Let me have a look,” I say, lowering myself to the gravestone’s level. The moss parts under my fingers, revealing a word I recognise instantly—one that appears far too often in the Paldonian law texts.
“Trial.”
Below it, a single carved stroke.
“First trial,” I breathe, the translation slipping out effortlessly… and only then does the weight of what I’ve just said hit me.
Just then, the ground shudders—and the gravestone sinks.
Not gradually.
Not naturally.
It’s dragged down, swallowed whole until nothing remains but moss and disturbed soil.
I jerk backwards, heart lurching, but the earth reacts faster. Vines burst through the dirt like striking serpents, coiling around my ankles, my wrists, tightening before I can even scream.
Ryder lunges forward, his blade already drawn. One clean, vicious slice and the vines snap, recoiling with a hiss. He grabs my arm, pulling me toward him—
—but the forest isn’t finished.
More vines drop from the branches above, thick and knotted, as if the trees themselves are reaching down. They ignore me entirely, instead whipping toward Ryder with terrifying precision. One wraps around his wrist, then another around his chest, slamming him back against the nearest trunk.
“Ryder!” I shout, but the vines multiply, weaving across him until he’s pinned in place, sword trapped at his side.
Nala and River don’t even get a chance to fight. Tendrils lash out, snaring them by the waist and hauling them off their feet, pinning them to separate trees like insects caught in a web.
The forest goes still.
Too still.
The kind of stillness that comes right before the trial begins.
My hands clamber at the vines restricting Ryder, but they recoil like they are alive; every touch of my fingers sends them squeezing him tighter.
I look to the others, panic controlling my breathing.
A noise thuds behind me, and I spin on my heels quickly to confront it.
The gravestone has reappeared, but now it drips red with blood.
“Asha… Be careful.” Ryder says in a staggered breath before the vines claim his mouth, along with the others.
I approach it with hesitant footsteps—the writing. The writing has changed. My hands disturb the blood-caked plaque as my mind tries to decipher the new words.
‘To save your friends from strangling vines,
The rot will creep and intertwine.
To cure the sickness stalking life,
Seek out the root and kill it twice.’
“One root, I’m supposed to seek out a single root in a forest full of trees,” I complain aloud as if the grave could speak. Nala fidgets between the vines, each movement constricting her further.
I need to figure this out.
The root, it must be the vines—my hands race along the length of them, trying not to tug too hard and cause them to constrict tighter. I just need to work out where they start from and sever them.
I continue to follow them, my heart racing dramatically with each step. There, just as I suspected, they all feed together like rivers joining a lake. The root stares at me, one vine threading into several like a vein.
The reason my friends are trapped—I need to cut it—fast.
The dagger unsheathes from my thigh in one swift movement as I work through the stem.
It fights my blade as it saws against it, my arm beginning to ache with every movement, though with a last push, it finally breaks free; the vine is severed like a cut wire, but its tendrils replenish in an instant, the severed vines clutching each other and fusing again.
Kill it twice.
I work my blade into its flesh again until it eventually breaks away, and Nala gasps for air.
The hands wrapping around my lungs release for a moment as I turn to see if the vines have relaxed.
No.
This can’t be.
I thought I did everything right.
I destroyed the root.
Somehow, the vines have reclaimed their prey, tighter. The colour in their skin is fading, and I know I don’t have long left.
Think Asha.
Think.
Seek the root. Seek the root. What if it means the root of it all… the reason we seek out the gem, not the roots themselves? The decay of the world outside this forest. The rot in the greenhouse, the sun slowly dying—
Death.
It’s all death.
The grave stares back at me.
I run as fast as I can, my fingers sifting through the dirt in a heartbeat.
The helpless groans of my friends are driving me faster—deeper—until my nails are black with dirt and my wrists ache.
Finally, I feel something. A cool, waxy surface; stiff and soft all at the same time.
The more the dirt is sieved away, the more evident it becomes.
A body.
But whose?
The familiar texture of skin is still there, but the warmth, the spark, the tiny subtleties of a living being are missing. It’s unsettling, as if my hand is expecting a response that will never come, and the silence of that stillness presses on my chest.
Hands—dig—fast, and soon the face is clear as day. An image that I never thought I would see staring back at me; mouth open, flesh blue, worms eating at the skin. My skin.
The same mismatched eyes, the same unmistakable auburn hair and dusty freckles. Everything is the same…except for the dark purple and blue bruises that tarnish the pale skin on my neck, as though someone had squeezed the life out of it.
Ryder.
The mountain
My hand trembles on the hilt of my blade, the realisation taking my breath away.
Kill it twice.
Kill me twice.
Before I can process what’s happening, a cold hand clamps around my wrist—my hand—as if life is suddenly breathed back into it.
The jolt snaps me into motion. I squeeze my eyes shut and, acting on pure instinct, drive the dagger into my chest—once, then again for good measure.
It cracks as my knife fights through muscle and bone.
I hold my breath as I glance back at my body impaled, a twisted vision.
The wound bleeds a black goo, and then… then the body disappears.
My knife thuds on the ground below as the vines relinquish their deathly grip. Nala, River and Ryder drop to the floor, gasping for the air they lost.
I run to them, relief and nausea colliding in one scattered feeling. They’re okay. Thank the Gods they’re okay. The grave disappears again as if the sick trial was nothing but a fable.
But I lived it.
I died with it.
Bile creeps up my throat as I stare unblinking at Ryder.
“Who was it in the grave?” he asks, between breaths, his eyebrows knit in concern.
“I-It was me.” The air around us stills.
The trial is done, the forest seemingly sleeping. Though I don’t fall for its slumber, for I know it is awake… plotting its next move.
A thought settles like stones in my stomach, a hope that what just unfolded was not
a subtle foreshadowing of what’s to come.
The Hollow’s sadistic game