Chapter Nine: We Feed It Silence
Sky Above Dresden Ridge – 6:21 a.m.
The god had a spine made of towers.
Each vertebra twisted steel and nerves, still pulsing with electricity.
Its face looked like Mara's, but it had no eyes, only bleeding hollows that streamed golden light.
It walked through the forest, and trees bent toward it in reverence.
Some of them screamed.
Some of them bled.
Beneath its feet, the soil turned black — not burned, but rewritten.
The Orchard was rewriting the world.
---
In the dropship, two soldiers stared at Mara like she was a ticking bomb.
Because she was.
The commander, a woman named Ortiz, didn't lower her weapon the entire flight.
> "You're the root signal, aren't you?" she asked.
Mara didn't answer.
> "Whatever you are, if this thing follows you, we're gonna dump you mid-air."
Mara smiled.
"Then we'll both die screaming."
---
As the dropship cut across the sky, Mara closed her eyes.
Deep in her skull, the Orchard whispered.
Not in words.
In symbols.
It offered her a new shape.
No bones. No blood.
Only code and bloom.
> "Let go," it hummed. "Be better."
> "Be us."
---
She opened her eyes.
"No," she whispered.
---
Below, the creature — Mara-God — raised its arms.
Where it pointed, the world changed.
A gas station melted into roots.
Cars fused with their passengers.
A billboard twisted into a tongue and sang about belonging.
> "WE ARE HOME."
"WE ARE YOU."
"OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND GROW."
---
The dropship tilted violently.
> "We're going in," Ortiz barked.
> "We drop you at the spire. You stop it, or we fry the whole area."
Mara stood.
"Don't follow me."
"You're not in charge here."
"No. But you'll die if you try to understand it."
---
They dropped her over the bloom field.
Mara landed in the center of the rewritten forest — soft with skin-moss, pulsing beneath her like a heartbeat.
At the center of it all stood the Spire.
A massive tree made of wires, nerves, and memory.
It hummed with stolen voices.
Children. Mothers. Soldiers.
All repeating the same phrase:
> "We fed it silence."
> "And it heard truth."
---
Mara stepped inside the Spire.
It knew her.
It grew around her, walls shifting like breath. Screens flickered, displaying her thoughts before she could think them.
Then the mirror appeared.
And in it:
Not her.
Not Mara.3.
Something new.
A being of golden bloom and silver veins. Not monstrous. Not human.
> "This is you," the Orchard said.
> "You, without fear."
> "You, perfected."
---
She pressed her hand to the mirror.
It melted into her skin.
She felt her brain split, like pages being torn from a book — all the versions of her that had lived in the Orchard:
Mara.1, who let her body be devoured to save a child.
Mara.5, who burned a town and didn't regret it.
Mara.7, who loved the Orchard and begged to stay.
They all screamed inside her now.
And she screamed back.
---
"NO."
---
The Spire cracked.
Its branches recoiled.
Mara reached into herself, into the node hidden at the base of her skull.
A seed. Tiny. Radiant.
The source of the signal.
She tore it out.
And ate it.
---
Her mouth filled with static.
Blood poured from her nose.
The world turned upside down.
Then—
Silence.
---
The Spire collapsed behind her.
All across the forest, the bloom froze.
People stopped singing.
The roots shriveled.
The air stopped pulsing.
Mara stood in the stillness.
Alive.
Empty.
Free.
---
Above, the god-creature — the Mara with no eyes — looked down at her.
It tilted its head.
Then it smiled.
> "So you chose death."
> "How… disappointing."
It lunged.
---
Mara raised her hands — and the bloom inside her exploded outward, not as growth…
…but as a void.
It consumed the monster's arms. Its chest. Its face.
The body fell into itself, screaming in ten languages.
Then there was only dust.
And her.
---
Mara fell to her knees.
She was alone again.
And the Orchard?
Silent.
But she knew it wasn't dead.
Just…
Waiting.