Years drift past like wind through pine boughs.
Rafi grows taller than he ever thought his bones would allow. His shoulders broaden, his voice deepens, but the hollows under his eyes never quite vanish — faint moons carved there by nights in the hush's cradle and the forest's cold mouth.
People around him, when they hear even scraps of what he and the braid girl survived, say words like miracle, survivor, tragedy. He nods politely, lets them pat his arm or offer soft food or hush their own children when he passes. But they do not understand.
How could they? They were never swallowed whole by a whisper that promised to mother them forever, if only they stayed lost enough to need it.
Sometimes he wakes tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, the forest pressing in through the window of whatever small room he calls home. He listens hard — waiting for roots to stir beneath the floorboards. But the hush never comes back. There is only the hush of ordinary silence.
He works odd jobs. Learns how to hold tools, stack bricks, fix the broken hinges on people's doors. On bad days, he drifts off mid-hammer swing, caught by memories so deep they feel like a second spine. On good days, he remembers how it felt to choose pain and hunger instead of an easy lie — and the good days come more often now.
As for the braid girl — she stays sometimes, leaves sometimes. She has her own wilderness inside her, something he never dared name. Some evenings they share a meal, quiet and messy, two people who know how to keep breathing when the world tries to swallow them whole. Other times she disappears for months, rumored to drift through shelters and edges of towns like a myth kids whisper about when they run away.
He lets her go, because she always comes back when she needs him — and because needing him is not the same as being owned. They taught each other that, deep under the hush's belly.
Today, the sky is a washed-out spring blue. Rafi stands at the treeline where old dirt roads fracture into pine and bramble. He carries nothing but a battered canvas satchel, empty but for a few crumbs, a penknife, and a battered photograph of kids who once slept back to back on pine needles to keep the dark from eating them.
The forest still looks like a mouth ready to chew him up again. But he smiles at it anyway. He steps a little closer — far enough that needles brush his boots, sap smell sticky in his lungs.
He closes his eyes. Listens.
No voice rises to greet him. No promise of warmth without cost. The hush is gone. What's left is just the forest's honest breath and the old hum of wind through branches.
Rafi opens his eyes.
He turns his back on the trees — on the hollow buried somewhere deep where roots drink old secrets — and walks toward the thin ribbon of dirt road where people live and fight and break and choose, again and again, to stand in the sun.
He does not flinch when the wind rattles the pines behind him. He carries the hush in his bones now, but on his terms: a reminder of what it means to belong to no voice but your own.
Somewhere, maybe close, maybe far, the braid girl laughs — wild and alive, louder than any whisper the forest could ever conjure.
Rafi keeps walking, shoulders straight, steps quiet but sure.
He is his own boy. His own story. And he is not afraid anymore.
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THE END