The fire had stopped, but the forest still smoldered.Ash drifted through the air like snow as Sophie sat beside Nathan beneath the canopy of twisted trees. His breathing had steadied, shallow but rhythmic. Elliot was a few feet away, pacing with the same nervous energy that had clung to them since they’d escaped the shrine.For a long time, none of them spoke.The forest, once thick with whispers, had gone eerily quiet—too quiet. Even the insects held their breath.Sophie couldn’t shake the image of the Hollow God’s face—the writhing form, the sewn-shut mouth, the way it looked at her when she recited the ritual. Not in anger. In recognition.It knew me.Nathan stirred. His eyes blinked open slowly, glazed with confusion. He stared up at the canopy, then at Sophie.“Sophie?” His voice was cracked, weak.She gripped his hand. “I’m here. You’re safe.”He tried to sit up, grimaced, and collapsed back against the ground. “Where… where are we?”“In the forest. Near Sanctum Root,” Elliot s

The storm had returned.Thunder rumbled through the skies like a final warning. The wind howled around Cedar Hollow, bending trees as though the very earth were groaning in pain. Sophie stood at the edge of the town, staring into the heart of the Hollow, her breath steady despite the weight of everything she was about to do. The town had already begun to change. In the time it took her to drive back from the woods, the air had shifted, thick with the scent of something ancient, something hungry. She could feel it in her bones—the curse wasn’t just breaking; it was fighting to survive.The old journal was clutched tightly in her hand, the ritual still fresh in her mind. There was no turning back now.“Are you sure?” Elliot asked, his voice small against the howl of the wind. He stood beside her, his face pale, but resolute.Sophie turned to him, her gaze fierce. “There’s no other way. If we don’t do this, the Hollow will never let go. It’ll keep feeding, keep growing. It’s the only way

The storm had left Cedar Hollow in ruins, but it was the silence that followed that unsettled Sophie the most. The town had always carried a certain heaviness, but now it was a stifling pressure, as though the very air was soaked with years of secrets that refused to be told.Sophie walked alongside Elliot, their footsteps the only sound breaking the stillness. They had spent hours at the town’s archive, sorting through brittle pages and ancient documents, but the answers they sought were as elusive as the mist hanging over the town. Every piece of history seemed to lead to another dead end. The town’s founders—those who had made the cursed pact—had left little behind, as though they’d been determined to erase their sins from memory.But Sophie could feel it, creeping up behind them like an old wound. The curse hadn’t just been a thing of rituals and gods. It had been a curse of silence, of keeping truths hidden in the dark for so long that no one could remember what light felt like a

The days after the confrontation with Abel were filled with uneasy silence. Sophie could still hear his voice in her head, each word a lingering echo that gnawed at her thoughts. She hadn’t told Elliot the full extent of what Abel had said—how the curse was far from broken and how the town itself might fight back against their efforts to undo it.But she felt it. A creeping sensation that something was changing, something far more insidious than she had imagined.It started with Nathan.After the ritual at the shrine, Sophie had thought that Nathan’s life would return to normal. But he hadn’t been the same. He was quieter now, his eyes often distant, his movements slower, as if he were dragging himself through a thick fog. At times, Sophie caught him staring at the woods, his face contorted in quiet anguish.“What’s wrong?” she asked him one evening as they sat in the dimly lit living room of the Caldwell house, the storm still raging outside.Nathan blinked, as though her voice had p

The woods had never been quiet, but now they whispered louder than ever.Sophie could hear it even when she wasn’t in the trees—the rustle of unseen things, the low moans beneath the wind, the occasional crack of branches where no one walked. Cedar Hollow had always held secrets, but now the town seemed to breathe them, exhaling centuries of buried truth with every passing day.Nathan had barely spoken since his rescue from the underground shrine. He moved like a ghost through the Caldwell house, staring out windows, flinching at thunder, whispering names in his sleep—names that didn’t belong to anyone Sophie recognized. Elliot tried to reason it away as trauma, residual effects from being under the Hollow God’s influence, but Sophie wasn’t so sure.Because sometimes, when Nathan looked at her, it didn’t feel like her brother was the one staring back.One night, just after midnight, she found him sitting on the porch, unmoving in the cold drizzle.“Nathan?” she asked gently, approachi