Chapter 2: The Stomach's Rules

Chapter 2: The Stomach's Rules

The silence that followed was worse than the shrieking. It was a listening silence, heavy and intelligent, pressing in from the other side of the fractured door. The silvery light from the woven threads had faded back to a dull, mundane white, but the memory of its cold fire was seared into Juniper's mind. She knelt by her grandmother, her hands working on autopilot, fetching the splint and bandages from the medicine chest.

Her mind was a chaotic storm. The world had tilted on its axis, and the superstitions she'd spent years politely tolerating had just grown teeth and tried to batter down their door.

"Hold still," she murmured, her voice tight, as she began to bind Elara's swollen leg. Her grandmother didn't seem to notice the pain. Her gaze was distant, lost in a landscape of old fears.

"It knows," Elara whispered, her voice a dry rustle of leaves. "The pact is broken. It knows the house is not forbidden tonight."

Juniper finished tying the last knot on the splint and sat back on her heels. The adrenaline had ebbed, leaving behind a cold, sharp clarity. She looked from her grandmother's terrified face to the gouged and splintered door, the bent iron skillet lying uselessly on the floor.

"No more stories, Gran," she said, her voice quiet but unyielding. "No more talk of pacts and circles as if they're weather warnings. You're going to tell me what that was. You're going to tell me everything."

For a moment, she thought the old woman would refuse. A lifetime of secrecy was a hard habit to break. Elara's jaw tightened, her wrinkled lips pressing into a thin line. But then she looked at Juniper, truly looked at her—not as the child to be protected, but as the young woman who had just faced down a nightmare—and the dam of her silence finally crumbled.

"The Deepwood," Gran began, her voice gaining a strange, formal cadence, like a priestess reciting a catechism. "It's not a place, Juniper. Not really. It's a thing. A single, living, hungry thing."

Juniper waited, the cold knot in her stomach tightening.

"Think of it... think of it as a stomach," Elara said, her eyes finding a point in the shadows of the rafters. "Vast and ancient, and mostly asleep. It digests slowly. But it always gets hungry. And when it wakes, it needs to be fed."

The simple, grotesque metaphor landed with the force of a physical blow. The forest floor she’d walked her whole life, the trees she’d climbed, the streams she’d fished in—all parts of some colossal, slumbering digestive tract.

"Our family," Gran continued, "the first settlers who were foolish enough to build on its edge... they learned the hard way. They became the first Keepers. Not keepers of the woods, child. Keepers of the rules. Wardens. We don't protect it. We appease it."

"The rituals," Juniper breathed, the word tasting different now, heavier.

"They're not wards to keep things out," Elara confirmed, a bitter irony in her voice. "They're a schedule. A dinner bell. The nine circles of salt and ash are the placemat, a line that says 'not here.' The chants tell it where the meal can be found—the deer, the wolves, anything that dies within its borders. And the nightshade on the hearth..." She trailed off, a shudder running through her frail frame. "That is the final signal. It tells the stomach the meal is over. Go back to sleep."

Juniper's mind reeled. "So tonight... by not putting it there..."

"We ripped up the placemat. We told the hungry beast that the one place that has always been forbidden is now open for dinner."

A dozen fragmented memories suddenly clicked into place: Gran's frantic insistence on being home by dusk, her panic over a misplaced bundle of herbs, the strange, almost prayer-like way she would whisper to the trees. It wasn't eccentricity. It was survival.

"But the threads on the door," Juniper insisted, needing to understand the one thing that had saved them. "They glowed. They stopped it."

"Ah," Elara sighed, a sound of profound weariness. She pointed a trembling finger toward a small, carved wooden box on the mantelpiece, a box Juniper had never been allowed to touch. "Bring it here."

Juniper retrieved the box. It was cool to the touch, carved with swirling, root-like patterns. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was a small glass vial filled with a liquid as black and thick as tar, shimmering with a faint, oily iridescence.

"Sap," Gran said. "From a Void Tree. Like the one I fell from."

Juniper looked at the deep gash on her grandmother's arm, suddenly understanding that the fall wasn't the only thing that had happened out there.

"The woods, the stomach... it can't digest everything," Elara explained, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "This sap... it's poison to it. Not enough to harm the great beast, no. But it makes anything that bears its scent unpalatable. Bitter. Wrong."

She gestured to the vial. "For generations, we have lived here by making ourselves taste like poison. We drink a drop in our tea each morning. We rub it into the wood of the cabin, the soles of our boots. The threads on the door... they were woven from your baby clothes, Juniper. Clothes you wore after I had anointed your skin with the sap for the first time. They hold a trace of you, a trace of the poison. It's the only reason the door held. You saved us."

The revelation was dizzying. She wasn't just a girl in a cabin; she was a creature marked as inedible, living inside a shell coated in poison, all to avoid being devoured by the very ground she stood on.

"Open it," Gran commanded. "My arm..."

Juniper uncorked the vial. The scent that wafted out was sharp and bitter, like burnt pine and rich soil. As her grandmother instructed, she let a single, thick drop of the black sap fall onto the gash. Elara hissed as it made contact, and to Juniper’s astonishment, the edges of the wound seemed to knit together, the bleeding stopping almost instantly, leaving behind a dark, ugly stain.

She stared at the nearly empty vial in her hand. There was perhaps one dose left.

"Gran," she said, a new, more practical fear taking root. "There's almost none left."

Elara’s face, already pale, seemed to drain of its remaining color. "The tree," she whispered, her eyes wide with the memory of her accident. "The one by the creek. I went to harvest more. But it was dry. Bled white, its bark stripped away. Something else has been feeding on it. That's why I fell. The roots... they shifted. Threw me."

The listening silence outside the cabin suddenly felt different. It wasn't just waiting anymore. It was hungry. And now, they were almost out of the one thing that kept them off the menu.

Juniper stood up, her jaw set. Her old life, the one of skepticism and dreams of a world beyond the woods, had been devoured in the space of an hour. A new life had begun, with new, terrifying rules. She looked at the splintered door, then back at the precious, near-empty vial. Her new goal was simple, stark, and unavoidable.

She had to go back out there. Into the stomach.

"I'll go at first light," she said, the words feeling like stones in her mouth.

Her grandmother simply nodded, her eyes closing. "The stomach's rules are cruel," she murmured, already drifting into an exhausted sleep. "But the cruelest rule is this, child: it never stays full for long."