The forest exhales, and we walk inside its breath. Mist coils low, brushing our boots, softening each step until the earth itself feels half-dreaming. Behind us, the serpent's corpse sinks into silence; what's left of its blood seeps into the roots like ink into old paper. The madness fades – but not completely. The forest never forgets what it tastes.
The Queen walks ahead, her cloak dragging faint furrows through the wet ground. The boy's hand disappears into hers. He looks back once, as if to check that the world behind us is still closed, and then he keeps walking, trusting her steps more than his own.
I follow at a distance. The air still trembles faintly, as though something behind the soul is breathing through the dirt. The sword at my hip hums with that rhythm, a low, restless sound. I press a hand to the hilt until it quiets. The forest listens, holding its breath around us.
We climb a rise where the trees thin and the mist opens its throat to the sky. The light here is muted and uncertain, violet pressed through smoke. Every surface glistens: the leaves, the bark, the sheen of sweat across my gloves.
The Queen pauses at the crest. Her shoulders dip for a moment before she straightens again, the small movement revealing more than any speech could. From behind, she looks both unbreakable and impossibly alone.
"The forest never forgets what we bury in it," she says softly. "Each death we feed it settles into a dream that remembers our name. And when the forest dreams too long, mercy rots with everything else."
The boy glances up at her, brow furrowed in confusion. "Is it angry?"
"Always," she replies, not unkindly. Her tone holds no blame – only the calm certainty of someone who has seen too much to lie about it.
We descend the slope into a shallow hollow blanketed by moss and half-rotted leaves. The air is cooler here, thick with the damp scent of soil and old rain. The Queen stops beside a fallen trunk and sets her satchel.
"Here," she says. "We rest until morning."
The boy sinks to the ground without complaint. His eyelids flutter closed before his head finds her cloak. He breathes evenly, unconcerned by the world that devours itself beyond the trees. The forest hums to his rhythm – a steady pulse mimicking the small heart it shelters.
I kneel across from them and coax a fire from the wet bark. It catches slowly, a thin wisp of orange flicker growing into a steady flame. The light spills across the Queen's face, softening her sharp features. Without the armor of command, she looks younger – more mortal. Shadows cling beneath her eyes, the kind that years can't erase.
She removes her gloves and lays one hand flat on the ground. Steam curls faintly where her skin meets the earth. "It's never quiet for long," she murmurs,half to herself. "Every time we quiet one hunger, another stirs beneath it."
The words fall into the soil, not like a prayer, but like confession – honest, heavy, meant for no one but the earth that listens.
She stays that way for a while, fingers pressed into the dirt, her shoulders slumping as though she can feel the pulse beneath it. When she finally speaks again, her voice is smaller. "I keep hoping it will rest," she says, eyes unfocused on the fire. "That maybe, one season it will stop asking."
Her tone is… tired. The kind of tired that doesn't expect an answer.
The boy stirs beside her, muttering something about wings and rivers. The Queen smooths his hair with the same steady patience she used in battle, a practiced tenderness. For a moment, she almost looks like an ordinary woman keeping watch over a child.
I sit back and feed another stick to the fire. Sparks drift upward, bright and short-lived. The heat feels thin against the weight of the forest pressing in. My sword lies across my knees, its faint hum matching the rhythm under the ground. I wonder if it hears the same restless heart she does.
Across from me, the Queen opens her eyes again. The firelight paints them in dull gold, the color of sap trapped in stone. She looks at neither me nor the sleeping boy. Her gaze seems fixed somewhere far beyond the trees, on a horizon only she can see.
Without her crown, without the sharp light of command, she looks almost human.
Almost.
"I wish it could forget," she says softly, as if the thought slips out on its own. "Not forgive – just forget."
There is no reply. The forest breathes, and we breathe with it.
The fire gutters low. The air cools, carrying the smell of wet bark and old ash. I draw my cloak tighter and glance once more at the Queen, at the stillness that clings to her like armor even in rest. For the first time, I think I understand how deep her silence runs – and how much it cost her to keep it.
The fire has burned down to a heart of coals by the time I speak. Smoke hangs low, refusing to rise. My throat tastes of ash and questions I've been carrying too long.
"Tell me," I say at last. "No riddles tonight. What does the ritual do?"
The Queen doesn't answer right away. She shifts slightly, as though measuring whether my voice deserves the truth. The sound of the forest fills the space between us – dripping water, creaking boughs, the distant groan of something enormous turning in its sleep.
Finally, she says, "You want a clean answer."
"I want the real one."
She exhales. "They are not the same."
The coals crack, scattering light across her face. Her features look older here, every scar and shadow drawn sharp in the flicker.
"The ritual began long before my reign," she says. "Before language had shape. Before the earth forgot what it owed itself."
Her gaze doesn't move from the fire. The reflection of it turns her eyes to molten gold. "When I first learned to make life,I believed love was creation – that to give shape was to nurture. But creation without care becomes cruelty, and love without understanding consumes more than it gives. Even love, misunderstood, can become the cruelest force of all."
The coals pop softly. The forest listens.
"I made him," she says. "A mind too bright to rest. He saw the pattern under the pattern and tore it open to prove it was real. He did not mean harm – he only wanted to understand.
Her voice drifts, softer now. "But every thought he touched folded inward until it devoured itself. The world began to think without shape; trees dreamed of walking, rivers tried to speak, and the air filled with voices that had never known mouths."
The firelight trembles. She watches it the way one might watch a wound refusing to close.
"That is what madness is. The moment the world understood itself – and found the knowing unbearable."
She exhales once, a breath that sounds like centuries leaving her lungs. "I sealed him in the space between thoughts," she says quietly. "A mountain you can climb only in dreams. A void made of the distance between one heartbeat and the next. That was the first binding – the one I made with my own hands."
The words settle like dust. The boy stirs, murmuring something wordless in his sleep.
"But seals do not last forever. Even gods have limits, and mine was mercy. His voice seeps through the cracks – whispers, visions, hungers. Each time, the world bends a little closer to his shape. Each time, a priestess must walk the void to mend what frays."
My voice sounds small against the weight of hers. "How?"
"With herself."
The Queen looks up at me then, and in the firelight her face is both human and not. "Each priestess binds the seal by offering her soul to the seam. To the living, she is a corpse; for the world, a thread stitched into the barrier that holds him. That is the ritual."
It feels like the ground drops under me. "So she dies for it."
"She lives differently," the Queen corrects. "She becomes the silence that keeps the world from screaming."
I press my palms to my knees to hide their trembling. "And these challenges?"
"Preparations," she says. "The mind must withstand his voice. The body must endure his shadow. The soul must stand before him and not yield. When those three hold together, the vow can be made, and the seal renewed."
Her tone is steady – no grandeur, no regret. Only truth.
My mouth feels dry. "And if it fails again?"
Her gaze flickers toward the sleeping child. "Then the seal breaks. He wakes. The world becomes what he is."
The firelight trembles on her cheekbone. "Creation forgets its shape– the gentle things first: meaning, mercy, the memory of what is real. Then it devours its own heart. Not from hatred, but hunger. The world, lost and starving, cannot bear to see itself and thus dreams itself into his image."
That image hits me like cold water. I taste iron.
"My mother tried to stop it," I say.
"She tried to change it," the Queen replies. "She thought she could save you both. But the seal was already thinning. Every year she waited, it fed on her hesitation."
"She told me nothing."
"She loved you," the Queen says. "And love, when afraid, buries the truth until it rots."
Her words fall like stones into a river – each one sinking, each one changing the current.
"Then why tell me now?" I ask.
Her eyes meet mine fully for the first time. "Because you are already inside the story. You walked through its door. The only way out is through its ending."
The fire collapses inward. For a moment, all light is gone. Then a single coal flares, steady as a heartbeat.
"I can't ask you to want this," she says. "I can only ask you to understand why it must be done."
I look at her hand – still pressed to the soil, still steaming faintly where skin meets earth. "You sound like you regret it."
"I regret that it works," she says. "I regret that the only thing strong enough to bind madness was sacrifice. But I do not regret choosing life."
The boy sighs in his sleep, turning toward her voice. She smooths his hair with a motion that feel like a ritual itself.
I find my voice again, quiet but steady. "And the boy?"
She stills. "He isn't real, not as you are. He's the echo of love I couldn't bind, the part of my son that once reached toward the light. When I sealed him…when I became his jailer, the void shaped him from memory, so I would remember why I grieve."
Her fingers twitch, barely perceptible. "The rest of him calls to this lost part of himself. Even sealed, he remembers its warmth and reaches for it. I remain between them."
For a long time, there is only the crack of settling wood. The smoke moves between us like slow breath.
"Tell me the truth," I say. "Will the world ever stop needing the ritual?"
The Queen's expression does not change, but her voice lowers until it almost breaks. "When creation can exist without fear of itself. Until then, the wound will keep opening, and someone will have to close it.'
I think of my mother. My grandmother. All the women who stood where I sit now. The pattern stretches backward through centuries, and every step smells like ash.
The Queen stands then, slow and deliberate. Her shadow sways across the moss like a second horizon. "Sleep," she says. "Tomorrow, we climb."
I stay by the dying fire, eyes on the coals that pulse in time with my heart.
Behind her, the boy's breathing evens again. The Queen's silhouette bends once to the earth, her hand returning to the soil as if they are having a conversation.
Her voice comes one last time, weary and human. "If another way exists, it will be born from a love stronger than fear. Only then will the world remember the shape it was meant to keep."
The forest exhales once more. The coals dim. I close my eyes and feel the pulse beneath the ground answering my own – a rhythm that feels like both a promise and warning.