All Chapters of Wildwood: The veins of the earth : Chapter 61 - Chapter 68

The fire had burned low by the time Elias returned with a satchel of charred herbs and broken relics from the ruins outside Hollow Hill. His shoulders were tense, his expression haunted. Clara was seated in the corner of the hollowed-out chamber, her fingers tracing the old markings carved into the stone—half-erased warnings left by the Yanuwah elders. Emily stood near the threshold, her back to the others, watching the horizon through the gnarled roots that veined the cave walls. “They’re coming,” Elias said quietly, dropping the satchel beside the fire. “Not the forest things. Something worse.” Clara looked up. “You saw them?” “Not with my eyes,” he murmured. “But I felt the tide shift.” Emily turned slowly. “The coastal cult.” Elias nodded. “They know what we’re doing. And they’ll do anything to stop us.” Clara rose, her voice tight. “Then we have to act now. The longer we wait, the more the Seed frays. The more Varethkaal feeds.” Emily took a step forward, her eyes shadowed

Mahrun had always believed in the sea. Not as a force of nature, not just as water and tide, but as a presence—endless, cold, and watching. From his earliest memory, it had whispered to him in ways the elders called sacred. His mother, a salt-priestess of the inner circle, said he was “born during a rift,” when the tide had pulled so far out it revealed bones no one had seen in generations. He hadn’t cried when they cut his umbilical cord with a coral blade. He hadn’t blinked when they pressed the stingray sigil into his shoulder at age six. But he had dreamed—terrible dreams of things buried in silt, of forests drowned beneath black waves, of names that pulsed in his skull like heartbeat drums. Varethkaal. Yanuwah. Oth-Ka’al. Clara. Now, standing before the altar of driftbone and whale flesh, those same dreams twisted against his spine like blades. The girl lay trembling on the slab, her breath shallow, lips moving in a half-conscious chant. A ward of kelp-twine looped around he

The stairs groaned beneath their feet—worn, soft stone layered in moss and moisture. Water dripped from unseen cracks in the ceiling. It smelled not of the sea, but of something older: deep earth, blood, and bone long turned to dust. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the rhythmic sound of footsteps and the distant hiss of wind threading through hollow tunnels. Clara walked first, her blade drawn, its bone handle warm in her hand. She didn’t speak. Her senses were wide open, tuned to every shift in the darkness. She’d been in ruins before—WildWood had taught her that sacred places were never truly empty—but this was something else. Hollow Ridge was not dead. It was sleeping. And it was beginning to stir. Behind her, Elias carried the scroll pouch close to his chest. He muttered to himself in the Yanuwah tongue, tracing glyphs on the walls as they passed. The marks glowed faintly beneath his touch—brief flares of blue and silver that disappeared a moment later. Each one marke

The light behind them dimmed until it was nothing but a distant pulse—like a dying heartbeat echoing through ancient stone. The tunnel before them sloped downward into the earth, the walls carved with unfamiliar script—part Yanuwah, part something older. Each glyph shimmered faintly when passed, as if responding to Clara’s touch, or the key Elias held. The deeper they went, the more the air changed. It was no longer stale but humid, heavy with the scent of moss, wet stone, and something sweet and metallic—sap, maybe, or blood that remembered sunlight. The ground shifted beneath their feet—no longer stone but root. Interwoven tendrils stretched out like veins in a sleeping beast. None of them spoke much. The weight of what they’d seen—the visions of the past, the unraveling of the pact between human and forest, and the twisted legacy of the Yanuwah—lingered like a film on their skin. Clara led, one hand on the tunnel’s side, her mind caught between the present and something larger