Not cooking smoke. Not ceremonial incense. The thick, wet smoke of something burning alive .
Fina shook her head.
She remembered her mother's hands. Calloused, warm, smelling of yam flour and smoke. Her mother had not cried. Instead, she had pressed a seed into Fina's palm and whispered, "If the tree asks for your life, give it this instead. It won't know the difference until you're gone."
"What do you want from me?" she asked.
"That's what you came back to see?" a voice said.
"Agreed."
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. Mother Village -Finished- - Version- Ch. 1 Fina...
"The hundred children I swallowed. Your brothers. Your sisters. The ones your running left behind."
"Lead who?"
Fina spun. A woman sat on a low stone at the base of the tree. She was old—older than the Council, older than the village itself, it seemed. Her skin was bark-brown and cracked like dry earth. Her eyes were two hollows with tiny flames flickering inside. Not cooking smoke
"I want you to finish what you started," she said. "I want you to come inside. And I want you to lead them out."
"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."
Fina looked at the skeletons. Then at the glowing crack in the tree. Fina shook her head
Fina stepped forward, placed her palm against the warm, pulsing crack. The bark gave way like skin. And as she stepped inside the Mother Tree, she heard, for the first time in seven years, the sound of a hundred small voices whispering her name.
