The chains were warm under my hands, almost pulsing like veins. Behind me the Strays were shouting, their voices echoing off the cavern walls:“Don’t do it!”
“You’ll doom us all!”
But their cries were drowned out by the whisper from behind the gate. It was no longer soft. It was inside me now, speaking with my own voice, using my memories, my guilt.
“They are gone because of you. Open. Let me give them back.”
Images flooded my mind — my parents’ faces before the smiles, my home before the smell of sulphur, laughter on Main Street. For a heartbeat I saw Ashbrook as it once was: a town of sunlit porches and clean air, of neighbours who cared.
My fingers tightened on the chain.
The leader of the Strays lunged forward, grabbing my wrist. “Listen to me,” they hissed, their amber eyes blazing. “The Heart is a parasite. But what’s behind this door is older. It isn’t a cure. It’s hunger. Endless hunger. If you open it, the world above will be nothing but another Ashbrook.”
The whisper turned to a roar. “Lies! They want you weak. Only I can break the Heart. Only I can make you whole.”
I closed my eyes. For the first time since I’d returned, I tried to listen beyond the voices — to the hum, to the pulse of the Heart far above. It was slowing. The children’s chanting was dimmer now, faltering as if they too were waiting.
And beneath it all, I felt something else: a faint thread of my own heartbeat. My own choice.
I wrenched my hands from the chains.
“No,” I said. “Not yours. Not theirs. Not anyone’s.”
The cavern trembled. The whisper shrieked, not in rage but in something like panic. The chains writhed, trying to wrap themselves around my wrists, but the Strays pulled me back, their bony hands surprisingly strong.
Above us the Heart throbbed erratically. Veins ruptured. A thin rain of glowing liquid dripped from the ceiling. The Strays began to chant in a language I didn’t know, their voices rising in counterpoint to the whisper. The black stone door pulsed once, twice, and then the whisper fell silent.
For a moment, everything stopped. The hum. The pulsing. The glow.
Then the cavern began to collapse.
One of the Strays shoved me toward a narrow crack in the wall. “Go!” they barked. “Find the old road and don’t look back. If the Heart dies with the seal intact, maybe the town dies with it.”
I stumbled through the crack as the cavern tore itself apart behind me. The last thing I saw before the darkness swallowed it all was the Heart rupturing, spilling white fire into the tunnels. The Strays stood before the gate, chanting, their eyes bright as embers.
And then the earth swallowed Ashbrook whole.
Epilogue: Ashbrook No More
The road out of the forest was silent. Mist clung to the trees, but there was no hum, no chanting, no shifting shadows. For the first time in years, I felt the air in my lungs without it tasting of sulphur or ash.
I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Ashbrook was gone, buried under its own corruption, its Heart extinguished—or so I told myself. The Strays had vanished with the collapse, leaving only the faintest trace of warmth in my memory, a reminder that they had kept the darkness contained.
When I reached the edge of town, sunlight broke through the fog. Birds sang. A breeze carried the scent of pine and rain. It felt almost… normal. Almost safe.
Yet, sometimes, when the night is quiet, I can still hear it—a faint thrum beneath the earth, so soft I can barely notice it. My own heartbeat, or the echo of Ashbrook’s? I don’t know.
I keep moving, keep driving, keep putting miles between me and that cursed place. But deep down, I know the truth: Ashbrook doesn’t forget. And it never truly dies.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see those pale faces in the fog. The children. My parents. And I remember the whisper:
“You are the seed.”
And I pray I never hear it again.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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