Morning light crept through Annabelle's curtains — thin, watery, almost apologetic — the kind of sunlight that should have felt safe.
But safety had become a foreign language.
She woke slowly, as if surfacing from the bottom of a dark lake. Her limbs felt heavy, her breaths shallow. She wasn't sure whether she had slept or only drifted — suspended — between memory and nightmare. The boundary between the two had thinned ever since she returned.
The room greeted her with a stillness that felt unnatural.
Not peaceful. Not quiet. Just still.
Her breath fogged faintly in the air, a soft mist that vanished almost as soon as it formed — even though the heater hummed steadily against the wall.
A familiar coldness curled around her ankles first, gentle as a fingertip tracing her skin. It crawled slowly upward, sliding beneath her clothes, coiling around her spine like something claiming its place.
Her pulse stuttered.
She tried to steady her breathing.
Maybe last night hadn't been real.
The tapping on the window. The writing on the glass. The presence watching her from the dark.
Maybe it was trauma.
Stress.
Maybe the forest's curse had never left her mind — only her body.
She exhaled shakily and turned her head—
—and froze.
Right beside her cheek, nestled on her pillow like it had been placed there with care, lay a leaf.
Small.
Curled.
Pitch black.
Annabelle's heart kicked painfully against her ribs.
Leaves didn't grow this color. Leaves didn't shine like polished obsidian. Leaves didn't appear in locked bedrooms.
And leaves did not… breathe.
She stared at it, unable to look away.
Its surface glistened faintly, as though coated in something slick and alive. A smell drifted from it — not rot, but old earth, the scent of soil untouched by sunlight, older than the memory of trees.
Annabelle whispered, barely able to form the words:
"…No. No, no— not again."
Her fingers trembled as she reached for it.
She expected it to crumble like ash beneath her touch.
But it didn't.
The moment her skin brushed its surface—
It was warm.
Wrongly, disturbingly warm.
Like skin.
A breath — soft, echoing, ancient — slipped through the room.
Not a voice. Not quite sound.
A memory awakened.
A whisper dredged up from the deepest part of her.
"You promised."
Annabelle jerked her hand back as if burned.
The leaf pulsed once.
Just once.
A faint, subtle throb — like the heartbeat of something tiny and hidden inside it.
Her breath strangled against her throat.
She snatched the leaf, intending to throw it across the room, to hurl it away from her, from this house, from this life she was trying to rebuild—
But the instant her palm wrapped around it, heat shot through her arm, flooding her mind with images not her own—
A clearing.
A circle carved into the earth.
Her sister's trembling hands.
Her own voice crying.
Blood — warm, frighteningly bright — dripping between her fingers.
And the being rising from the well, its form shifting like roots twisting through the dark, whispering with a mouth that wasn't flesh—
"Two enter. One returns."
Annabelle stumbled backward, gasping.
The leaf slipped from her hand and fell silently onto the bedsheet.
Motionless again. Innocent again. A lie made from nature.
Annabelle pressed her back against the wall, sliding down until she was sitting on the floor. Her knees shook uncontrollably. Her fingers were cold to the bone.
She stared at the leaf, unable to look away.
Her voice came out cracked, almost childlike:
"…Why now?"
The room didn't answer.
But the silence did.
It wrapped around her gently, almost lovingly — the way someone touches a familiar face after years apart.
It didn't threaten her.
Not yet.
It simply existed.
Watching.
Waiting.
Because the woods weren't sending a warning.
Not anymore.
They were sending a summons.
And far beneath the forest floor — in the deep, living dark where roots tangled like veins and ancient things slept with one eye open —
Something had stirred.
Something that remembered her name.
Something that had been patient.
Too patient.
And now that she had returned…
it wanted what was owed.