It happened fast because if it hadn't, they'd have lost their nerve.
Rafi braced the boy's shoulders, pinning him gently to the mossy ledge. The braid girl drove her blade clean and quiet into the rootheart's softest swell — not too deep to kill it outright, but enough to make it bleed. Thick sap oozed down her wrist, warm as a living wound.
The hush moaned through the cavern's bones, a sound that rattled teeth and cracked stone. Roots shot out from the ceiling like blind worms, wrapping around the braid girl's arms, then Rafi's ankles, testing their weight, tasting the salt of their skin.
Rafi didn't fight them. He forced his eyes to stay open as the hush drank him in. It pushed memories to the front of his skull: his mother's cough in the last days, his father's cold hand on the table, the echo of his own voice when no one answered. The hush found those hollow places and fed there, purring deep inside his ribcage.
The boy beneath him twitched, limbs convulsing like a fish caught on a hook. A trickle of breath rattled in the boy's chest — in, out, ragged — then steadied. Roots curled around him too, lifting him off the stone like an offering. The hush drank deepest from him. It always had.
The wrong children gathered at the cavern edge, a living wall of grins and dirt-caked faces. They didn't cross the root line. They didn't need to. This was their feast too — watching their lost brother be devoured and reborn in the hush's belly.
The braid girl yanked her knife free. She pressed her palm to the rootheart's wound, smearing its sap down her cheek, marking herself. She turned to Rafi, eyes bright and wet.
He knew what she wanted. A promise.
The hush's mouth opened under their feet — not a real mouth, but a widening seam in the mossy ledge. Roots peeled back to reveal a pit darker than the tunnel, deeper than any grave Rafi could imagine. Breath from below brushed his face, sour-sweet like flowers rotting under snow.
He pressed his forehead to the boy's brow one last time. Whispered into skin that barely felt warm anymore.
Then he shoved the boy gently into the hush's mouth. The roots caught him — cradled him — then swallowed him down.
Silence fell like a rock. The wrong children whimpered in the shadows, starved now that their feast was gone. Some crawled away on bellies slick with sap. Some just curled into balls and slept.
The hush pulsed once, then settled into a slow heartbeat again. It was full. Satisfied. It spared Rafi and the braid girl — for now.
Rafi dropped to his knees, chest burning with the taste of what he'd given up. The braid girl knelt beside him, pressing her sticky palm to the back of his neck like he might float away if she didn't hold him there.
They didn't speak. Words were too thin for what was gone.
Above them, the hush purred. Beneath them, its mouth closed — hunger sated, secrets buried a little deeper in the roots that would outlive them all.