Mother Village - -finished- - Version- Ch. 1 Fina...

Not cooking smoke. Not ceremonial incense. The thick, wet smoke of something burning alive .

"But now you're back," the woman continued, rising to her feet. Her joints cracked like breaking branches. "And the village is dead, Fina. All of them. Every family that fed me, I fed on in return. Only the children remain—trapped inside me, not alive, not dead. Waiting for a mother who never came."

"I become what I was always meant to be," she said. "A village without a mother is just a graveyard. But a mother without a village?" She laughed, low and hollow. "That's just a woman who forgot how to love." Mother Village -Finished- - Version- Ch. 1 Fina...

Fina's stomach turned. The tithe. It hadn't stopped after she fled. The village had kept feeding the tree. And the tree had kept taking .

Its trunk, once wide as a granary, was now split open like a pod. From the crack pulsed a soft, amber light—warm, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. And wrapped around its roots, as if the tree had grown around them, were the skeletons of children. Not cooking smoke

The path down was overgrown with thornvines that hadn't been there before. She cut through them with a rusted machete, the blade singing against the thorns. Every step felt like wading through mud made of memory.

"No more children."

That was seven rains ago. Now, standing at the edge of the ravine with a crooked walking stick in her hand, she wasn't sure if the tree was dead or simply waiting.