The Ginseng Witness

The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the forest still wept. Droplets clung to the moss like small, trembling pearls, and the air was so thick with pine and wet earth that you could taste it—sharp, green, alive. You crouched low behind the fallen trunk, your knees sinking into the duff, your breath held so tight your ribs ached.

They hadn't seen you. Not yet.

Beyond the clearing, the elders stood in a loose circle around the Ginseng Root—a gnarled, ancient thing that seemed to pulse with a light of its own, faint and sickly, like a heartbeat trapped beneath the skin of the earth. Elder Maeve's voice rose in a low chant, words you didn't recognize, and in the center of the circle, a child knelt.

Lark. You knew the name from Bram's whisper, from the way he'd looked away when you'd asked about them.

Maeve reached out and placed her palm against the child's forehead. Lark's eyes fluttered, then went still—too still, too empty—and a thin, silvery thread of light seemed to rise from their brow, curling like smoke into the waiting root.

The root drank. It swelled. It glowed.

And you understood, with a cold, horrible certainty, what you were witnessing.