Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Skylia reaches the bleeding tree and finds her own name carved into the bark, alongside Maya's. Sheriff Brody confronts her in the woods, revealing his role as a guardian who sacrifices the sensitive to keep the shadows contained. A shadow moves behind him, and he fires his shotgun—not at her, but at the darkness.
The road ended half a mile before the ridge, which was the universe's way of telling me I should have thought this through. I parked on the shoulder where the asphalt crumbled into gravel and the gravel dissolved into dirt and the dirt surrendered to roots and moss and the general indifference of the forest. The iron hung cold against my chest. The notebook was in my bag. The journal page was folded inside it, Gerald Vreeland's cramped handwriting telling me what he'd seen in 1961, what he'd carried, what he'd survived.
I got out of the car and the silence hit me like a wall. Not the normal woods silence, the one where you hear birds and insects and the distant hum of a road you just left. This was the silence of a room where someone has stopped talking because they know you're listening. The kind of silence that has weight.
I'd grown up with that silence. I'd just never admitted what it was.
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