Chapter 7: The Hungry Earth

Opening Scene

The match trembled in Charlie’s hand, its tiny flame casting jagged shadows across the Bone Tree’s gnarled bark. Jenna’s ghost hovered beside her, translucent and flickering like a dying candle.

“Do it,” she urged, her voice a hollow echo. “Burn it all.”

But the tree’s roots were already moving.

The Mother’s Betrayal

“Charlie, stop!” Her mother’s scream tore through the night. She lunged from the tree line, her face wild, a kitchen knife glinting in her hand. “You’ll kill us all!”

Charlie stumbled back as the first root snapped around her ankle—cold, wet, and alive. The match fell.

The Fire Spreads

The flame caught a dry patch of moss and raced up the trunk. The tree shrieked, a sound like splintering bone, and the ground beneath Charlie’s feet began to heave.

“It’s waking the dead!” Mia yelled, dragging Jake away from a fissure splitting the earth.

Hands—skeletal, rotting, some still trailing scraps of burial shrouds—clawed out of the soil.

The cemetery’s oldest graves yawned open, disgorging corpses with hollow eyes and jaws unhinged.

The Ghosts’ Revenge

Jenna’s spirit surged forward, her form solidifying into something feral. She tore into the nearest corpse, her spectral hands ripping through decayed flesh. 

“Run!” she snarled, her voice warping into Sarah’s, then Lana’s, then a chorus of voices Charlie didn’t recognize. The tree’s victims, united in fury.

Charlie’s mother slashed at the roots binding her daughter. “The ribbons!” she gasped. “Cut the ribbons!”

The Ritual Unraveled

Charlie fumbled for the scissors in her pocket, the ones she’d stolen from her mother’s sewing kit. She hacked at the red ribbon around her wrist—her ribbon, the one threaded with her hair.

The earth stilled. The corpses froze mid-lurch.

Then the Bone Tree exploded.

The Heart of the Curse

A pulsing, blackened core tumbled from the burning trunk—a heart, veined with rot and writhing with maggots. Jenna’s ghost dove for it, but Charlie was faster.

She slammed the scissors into the heart.

It burst like a rotten fruit, spraying bile and ash. The corpses collapsed.

The roots withered. And the whispers—the awful, hungry whispers—stopped.

The Aftermath

Dawn found them huddled in the scorched clearing, the tree reduced to smoldering splinters. Charlie’s mother cradled Lana’s ribbon, her sobs raw and guttural. “I’m sorry,” she kept repeating. “I’m so sorry.”

Jenna’s ghost flickered one last time, her noose replaced by a faint smile. 

“It’s done,” she whispered, fading into the sunrise.

A New Threat

But as they trudged back to town, Charlie felt the soil shift underfoot. She glanced down. A single root, thin and white as a finger-bone, curled around her shoe.

When she blinked, it was gone.

Teaser for Chapter 8

That night, Charlie dreamt of a field of bone-white saplings stretching to the horizon. At its center stood a shadow with her mother’s face, planting a ribbon in the soil. 

“You can’t kill a curse,” it crooned. “You can only pass it on.”

When she woke, her wrists were stained with dirt… and her hair was streaked with white.

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