BOUND BENEATH ROOTS AND SOUL

Chapter 12

Ember woke up late again today. The sun was already high, carving sharp lines of light across the floorboards that seemed to mock the heavy, leaden exhaustion pinning her to the mattress. Her head throbbed with the rhythmic pulse of a child playing kickball with an iron ball—a lovely parting gift from a night spent shivering on the edge of half a nightmare. She lay there for a moment longer than she meant to, staring at the ceiling and tracing the intricate grain of the wood, feeling the weight of the day waiting for her.

She already knew what she had to do.

That knowledge sat in her chest, steady and exhausting. She had to make a decision—a real one. She couldn't just keep drifting through the days like a ghost haunting someone else’s life. She needed a plan to get back to that place, and fast. Her world.

She refused to call it "home." Even in the privacy of her own mind, that word felt like a lie that tasted like ash. Home was supposed to be a sanctuary, not a cage of expectations and the quiet, crushing realization that she was a disappointment to people who only valued her for what she could provide. She hated it there. She hated the grey skies and the quiet hum of the small town she grew up in—a town that sounded like a dying machine—and the crushing loneliness of being surrounded by people who didn't actually see her.

But as much as she loathed that existence, she was beginning to realize that staying here was worse. Here, she wasn't just lonely; she was an intruder. An unwelcome extra

Slowly, she sat up. The room looked the same as always—soft light, the faint scent of wood and herbs, and the gentle creak of the living tree around her. Everything here felt alive in a way she still hadn’t fully grown used to; even now, after days on end of sleeping beneath this roof, it unsettled her how the house seemed to breathe with her. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, noting that her body felt… fine. Stronger than she expected, actually. It was too strong, considering how little real rest she’d had and considering she had grown up known for being sickly. She ignored the thought, as she had been doing for days now. Ignoring things had become second nature to her.

She slipped out of bed and caught a glimpse of herself in the small, polished silver mirror on the wall. Her skin looked perfect and polished; she looked so beautiful that she felt like her suffering was just a pretense. There were no signs of stress or exhaustion. She looked like a person who was glowing from the inside out. Radiating life.

When she dressed, her movements were careful and deliberate. She smoothed the fabric of her clothes as though doing so could smooth the rest of her thoughts, too. She avoided looking at the dress folded neatly nearby—one of the dresses Elara had given her, which still bore faint signs of last night unintentioned stroll. She didn’t want to think about it.

———

The tree-house was always beautiful, a feat of living architecture that felt more like a lung than a building, but to Ember, it was becoming a gilded prison. Elara had refused to let her leave the house since the "incident" with the Abomination, and while she phrased it as protection, it felt an awful lot like house arrest. Ember felt the weight of it every time she moved. She was a guest who was about to overstay her welcome.

"Every time I touch a piece of their furniture or use one of their hand-carved bowls," she thought, "I feel the jarring contrast of my presence against the ancient, silver-threaded history of this place." She was a smudge of grease on a silk painting. She could see it in the way Ashthorne looked at her, not with malice, but with a weary sort of pity. It was something she couldn't name; it felt weirdly as if she were a wounded animal he hadn't decided whether to heal or put out of its misery.

As she descended the stairs, voices drifted up from below. Elara and Ashthorne were speaking softly in hushed, urgent tones. Ember paused at the top step, listening without meaning to. She didn't need to hear the words to know the subject: her. She’d bet anything that before she fell into their lives, their home was a place of peace. They probably spent their mornings in comfortable silence or speaking of things that didn't involve the life-and-death stakes of a human girl who didn't belong. Now, they were always whispering, always planning, and always looking over their shoulders. She had turned their sanctuary into an unsafe space.

When she finally entered, the large kitchen felt suffocatingly small. Elara was by the hearth, the light catching the beautiful iridescent shimmer of her hair. She looked up and gestured toward a chair, her eyes searching Ember’s with that piercing, ancient intensity that always made her feel like an open book.

"You are awake," Elara said, her voice soft but layered with something Ember couldn't quite place. Was it concern? Or just tiredness? She moved toward the counter to prepare something. "Sit, Ember. I have fresh bread and honey."

"I'm not hungry, Elara. Thank you," Ember said, her voice sounding thin even to her own ears. She shyly declined the gesture, shifting back toward the edge of her seat. Her stomach was a knot of nerves; the very idea of eating their food felt like taking another loan she could never repay.

Elara turned back, slowly, and really looked at Ember with quiet attention. Her gaze softened, and something unreadable passed through her expression. She came back to the table and sat beside Ember, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. She took Ember’s hand gently, as though asking permission rather than assuming it. She didn't look offended; instead, she looked deeply, uncomfortably sad. Her skin was unnervingly smooth and cool, like polished river stone.

"There is no need to worry, little one," she said, her thumb tracing small, rhythmic circles on Ember’s palm. It was a mother’s gesture, or perhaps a healer’s. "I have always loved to cook. It is not a chore to care for you. Let me do this."

Elara held her hand firmly, as if trying to ground her to the floor of the house to keep her from drifting away again. But as Ember looked at her, all she could think about was the thirteen days she had spent here. Aside from those first few confusing hours, her time here had been a blur of terror. She had almost died three times. THREE TIMES! Between the unicorn, the rot, and the sheer hostility of a world that wanted to reject her like a virus, she was exhausted. But the worst part—the part that made her want to scream—was the freaking sleepwalking.

She had tried everything. She had used the craft-ropes Elara taught her to weave to tie herself to the bedposts, only to wake up miles away in the woods, the ropes untied by hands she didn't remember controlling. She had tried to sleep even more deeply by exhausting herself, but it didn't work. She had tried to stay awake until her eyes bled, only to still pass out from exhaustion and wake up at the obsidian shore. She felt like a passenger in her own body, being dragged by a heart-tether toward that lake, night after night after night.

And then there was the man. The Black Shadow Man.

She didn't know his name, and her mind still refused to let her see his face clearly, but his presence was burned into her memory. After she had broken through the barrier again the next night, the rules of the dream or the walking nightmare had changed. The fourth time she appeared there, he hadn't just dismissed her. He had stood over me, his silhouette blotting out the stars, his presence heavy and cold enough to make the moisture in the air turn to ice. He hadn't been smirking that time. He had looked down at her, tall and intimidating, and his voice had vibrated through the ground like the grinding of steel plates.

“If you step one more foot inside this barrier,” he had warned, “Make no mistake. I will kill you.”

He wasn't lying. She knew it by the way he looked at her. He was a shadow that saw her as nothing more than a gnat to be swatted if she became too annoying. Well, at least now she knew his eyes were golden.

So, for the last few nights, she had done the only thing she could. She had sat on the cold, damp earth just inches outside that emerald light. She sat there for hours, her back against a tree—different from the rotted trees from last time—watching him through the veil. She was barely resting, her mind suspended in a state of hyper-vigilance, watching the massive shadow move on the other side. It was a stalemate of the most frustrating kind. She was being pulled to him by a force she couldn't control, only to be met with a death threat she couldn't ignore.

"Ember?" Elara’s voice broke through her thoughts. She was still holding Ember's hand, her brow furrowed.

Ember looked at her, then at Ashthorne, who was standing by the door, preparing to head out into the forest. In her hazy mind, he looked like a freaking ten.

"I need to say something," she started, her voice wavering. She forced herself to meet their eyes. "It’s been a week and a few days... almost two weeks since I fell into this world. And I know I’ve been... a lot. I know this might be hard, but please. I need you to help me go back."

The silence that followed was heavy. She could feel the invisible walls of the tree-house closing in.

"I can't stay here," she said, the words spilling out now, fueled by the sheer desperation of the nights spent in the dirt. "I'm a prisoner in this house day by day. I’ve almost died three times, Elara. Three times!"

She looked down at her hands. In the last few days, Elara had been teaching her crafts—weaving, carving, working with the strange, reactive materials of this world. To her surprise, and Elara's, she was talented at it. She could feel the flow of the wood, the tension of the thread. And for a few hours a day, when she was focused on the work, the fear receded. She was good at something for the first time in her life. It was a beautiful, shimmering craft that she actually enjoyed.

But talent didn't fix the fact that she was an intruder. It didn't fix the fact that she was terrified of her own sleep.

"I appreciate everything you’ve done," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "The house is beautiful. The crafts are literally... they’re the only thing that keep me sane. But there is only so much I can take. There is only so much Ashthorne’s face can make me ignore." She threw a joke in for good measure.

She saw Ashthorne flinch in surprise slightly at that, a small, grim smile tugging at the corner of her mouth before it vanished.

"I...I need to return to my life," she continued, though the word 'life' felt like a stretch. "And while it’s an ugly sham of a life, and althoughhh I know that I don't have a family that’s waiting with open arms and...I...I don't have a 'home' that feels like this but I don't want to die here. I don't want to be the thing that breaks your world just because I was too clumsy and stupid to stay in mine."

She looked at Elara, her eyes pleading. "I feel like a ghost Elara. Every time you look at me, I see the problem I’ve become and your concern for me. Please. If there is a way, any way to send me back to where I belong, you have to tell me."

Elara’s grip on her hand tightened. She didn't look at Ashthorne. She kept her eyes on Ember’s, and for a moment, the mask of the serene Fae elder slipped. Ember saw the conflict there—the knowledge she was hiding, the secrets she couldn't understand.

"Ember," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "It is not as simple as walking through a door."

"Then make it simple," Ember snapped, the frustration finally boiling over. "Because if I continue to stay here, I'm either going to end up as fertilizer in the woods or a prisoner in this home. And I don't know which one is worse."

She felt so lost. She was a girl with no home to go back to and no place to stay. She was caught between a world that didn't want her and a world that was trying to kill her, and the only thing she had left was the desperate, thinning hope that she could find a way to exist without being a burden to everyone she touched. And the constant sadness and pain in her chest had started to become palpable.