It began with a smell.
Sweet, at first like damp moss and honeysuckle but underneath it was something sharper, coppery. Chizzy woke in the middle of the night, the scent clinging to her lungs, drawing her upright in bed. Her window was cracked, letting in cold air and the thick, metallic perfume that didn't belong.
She rose, lit the lantern, and stepped outside.
The village was asleep, cloaked in mist, and the moon hung low, swollen and red. The scent grew stronger as she approached the eastern tree line the place where her mother had once forbidden her to wander.
Now she walked there without hesitation.
Ezra joined her minutes later, summoned by her note at his window. He said nothing as they hiked, only watched her with concern etched into his features. He could smell it too.
"Something's opened," he murmured. "Something old."
They reached the grove beyond the forgotten path—a place they'd never seen marked on any village map. What they found there made both of them freeze.
The roots of the largest tree a towering ash with bark blackened by age were slick with crimson.
Blood.
It oozed from between cracks in the soil, thick and slow, like sap.
Chizzy stepped forward cautiously. The lantern's light trembled, casting shadows that danced unnaturally along the forest floor.
"It's bleeding," she whispered.
Ezra knelt, touching the fluid with his fingers. "Still warm."
And then they heard it.
A voice, muffled, as if coming from beneath the earth.
It was a woman's voice calling out, not in pain, but in warning.
"You've sealed the wrong wound."
The ground beneath them shifted.
Roots twisted upward, curling like fingers through the soil. The earth pulsed beneath their feet, and suddenly, the lantern's flame shot high, flickering wildly.
Chizzy turned in a slow circle. "This isn't just a crack in the forest," she said. "It's a gate."
Ezra looked at her, eyes wide. "To what?"
She didn't answer.
Because suddenly, she remembered.
A bedtime story her mother used to tell her one she had always dismissed as fiction. The Tree That Could Bleed. It had been about a gate hidden beneath a sacred tree, sealed by bloodlines long forgotten.
And now, that gate was weeping.
"I think…" she began slowly, "this is where the Hollow Man was born."
Ezra paled. "Then that means "
"He wasn't the end. He was only the first."
The soil trembled again.
A crack formed near the tree's base, and a whisper spilled out low, hungry, familiar.
"Chizzy."
The black-eyed boy's voice.
Ezra gripped her arm. "We need to go."
But Chizzy didn't move.
She felt the pull again that strange pull in her chest, as if something buried was trying to surface.
"I think I'm tied to this," she said softly. "Not just through my mother. Through something deeper."
Ezra's grip tightened. "We face it together. But not now. Not without a plan."
She nodded reluctantly, backing away from the bleeding roots, the voices, the earth that beat like a heart beneath their feet.
As they retreated into the trees, the lantern dimmed but didn't die.
The light was holding.
For now.