Panic scattered the crowd. Cropsy moved through the streets with terrifying purpose, smoke and embers clinging to him like a second skin. Where fire had burned him, something darker showed through, a network of roots and sinew that pulsed with each step.Elaine faced him in the square, driven by a certainty she did not fully understand. She called his name, the old one and the new. Cropsy stopped. Up close, she saw fragments of faces in his own, impressions left behind by those he had taken. Her uncle’s eyes looked back at her, pleading and furious all at once.
She realised Cropsy was bound to the land by more than ritual. He was tied by memory and blood. Burning the fields was killing him, but it was also killing what little humanity he had learned.
Elaine did the only thing she could think of. She led him back to the barn where he had been made. As flames consumed the last of the corn, she reopened the circle carved into the floor decades earlier. She spoke the words her father had never dared repeat, not as a command, but as an apology.
Cropsy collapsed into the soil, his form sagging, features dissolving. The screaming stopped. The fire died down, starved without the fields to feed it.
By morning, Alder Bend was silent. Where Cropsy had fallen, there was only rich, dark earth.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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