Chapter 7 The First Garden

Detective Vex hadn't slept in over 48 hours. The infection inside him had advanced, he could feel it pulsing under his skin, tightening around his organs like a fist of thorned roots. He couldn't go back to the city hospital. The CDC would quarantine him, maybe dissect him. The only thing left was the trail of whispers he'd uncovered in Lang's suicide letter.

The road to Hollow Mile was almost gone, devoured by years of decay. What was once gravel was now mud and blackened leaves. As he drove, red ivy coiled up around the edges of the forest, almost guiding him forward like veins into a beating heart.

St. Elira's Chapel was little more than a skeleton of stone and ash, its bell tower caved in, crucifix split by lightning. Yet the smell of rot wasn't old, it was fresh, warm, alive.

Inside, the air was thick, humming with something unholy.

The pews had been carved into by knife or claw. Words like "Vessel" and "Birth Root" repeated over and over. On the altar, what looked like an open Bible was made of bark and human skin, stitched at the spine. Vex opened it carefully. The ink bled with moisture, the words shifting beneath his eyes.

From the journal of Father Tobias Lang, dated March 3rd, 1946:

"We prayed not for salvation, but for permanence. We offered them the dead. They gave us eternity. The First Garden grows beneath us, always hungry. Elira's womb was the first seed. She did not die. She transformed."

The hairs on Vex's neck rose.

As he turned the last page, something moved behind the altar. Slow, methodical.

Twelve figures entered through the rear vestibule. Their vestments were patchworks of decayed skin and prayer shawls grown with moss. No eyes. No tongues. Just silence and the sound of dragging limbs.

One of them was still fresh. The wound where her scalp had been torn away was leaking sap.

A low chant began. Not with mouths, but through the roots that had grown into the chapel floor. The entire church vibrated.

From the shadows, a man in priest robes stepped forward.

But it wasn't a man.

It wore one.

Its face was wrong, almost human, but stretched too far across the bone. Its eyes were full of green flame. Its voice echoed with a chorus of others, old and newborn all at once.

"You carry the Bloom, Vex. And yet you run from your roots."

He raised a staff carved from femurs.

From it bloomed a rose, the same flower he'd pulled from Bella's throat.

The congregation dropped to their knees. From their mouths sewn shut as they were poured vines, hundreds of them, slithering toward Vex like hunting snakes.

He opened fire.

The first body exploded into pulp and petals.

But the vines kept coming.

He dove out a broken window, rolled down an embankment, and sprinted into the forest.

Behind him, the chapel roared to life. A tree burst through its floorboards. Ivy cracked the bell tower. The building screamed.

The forest changed.

Trees bent toward him. Roots snagged his boots. Bark split to reveal grinning faces of those he'd buried. Bella. His father. Min.

They whispered in unison, "Feed it."

He fell into a clearing where the earth pulsed with warmth.

A massive circle of stones, ancient and etched with red glyphs, sat half-sunken in the soil.

As he stepped inside it, the pain in his chest went still.

The roots underfoot relaxed.

The infection inside him purred.

He was home.

Deep beneath him, something stirred. Vast. Hungering. Awake.

And it knew his name.