The chapel's newly grown wings groaned like ancient trees in a storm as they stretched outward, the rib-bone rafters extending like waking arms reaching for the first light of dawn. Eleanor stood frozen at the pulpit, her bark-skinned fingers trembling as they traced the countless names carved into the altar's surface - each groove representing a child she had failed to save, a life cut short by the house's endless hunger. The crow shifted its weight on her shoulder, its obsidian beak clicking in perfect synchronization with the chapel's deep, resonant heartbeat that thrummed through the floorboards beneath her feet.
Mira was changing in ways that made Eleanor's stomach clench with dread.
The girl knelt at the center of the nave, her slight frame wracked by tremors as dark vines erupted from her skin in a grotesque blossoming. They pushed through the corners of her mouth like questing serpents, split the delicate skin of her wrists with wet tearing sounds, and curled from the hollows behind her knees to weave themselves into the chapel's expanding walls. What chilled Eleanor most wasn't the transformation itself, but the serene expression on Mira's face as it happened - and the haunting hymn spilling from her lips in a voice that no longer sounded entirely human. The melody resonated through the sacred space with unnatural clarity, making the teeth embedded in the stained-glass windows vibrate in their leaden frames.
The weight of the gardener's shears in Eleanor's hand felt heavier than ever before, the blades humming with barely restrained power. She knew with terrible certainty what needed to be cut, though the knowledge settled in her chest like a shard of ice.
Beyond the chapel doors, the transformed orchard pulsed with unnatural life. Where villagers had once stood now grew grotesque roses, their petals stitched with half-remembered faces that twitched and mouthed silent pleas. The massive oak that had once been the butcher wept thick ropes of sap that congealed like blood in the morning light. And beneath it all, deep in the black earth, something vast and ancient stirred in its slumber, sending tremors through the ground that made the chapel's bone chandeliers sway ominously.
The crow leaned in close, its beak brushing the whorls of Eleanor's ear as it whispered words that smelled of turned earth and old graves:
"Time to prune the roots."
Her hands shook as she raised the gleaming shears -
and when the first cut came, it wasn't the vines that screamed, but the chapel itself, its walls shaking as centuries of buried memories came flooding back in a torrent of anguish and fire. The sound tore through Eleanor's body like lightning, rattling her teeth and sending cracks spiderwebbing through her hardening skin as she realized with dawning horror that the roots she needed to sever weren't in the orchard at all - they were inside her, threaded through every memory, every breath, every beat of her traitorous heart.
The crow's laughter echoed in her skull as the second cut revealed the terrible truth - she wasn't just the gardener now. She was becoming part of the very soil she tended, her body the fertile ground where new lies would take root and grow. Somewhere in the distance, Mira's hymn rose to a crescendo, the notes twisting into words that hadn't been spoken since the first child fell:
"Welcome home, mother of thorns."
Darkness bloomed at the edges of Eleanor's vision as the shears moved again, this time of their own volition, and she finally understood the crow's cruelest joke - the pruning never ended. It only ever began anew. The chapel's walls leaned in closer, whispering the names of all the gardeners who came before as Eleanor's fingers closed around another vine, its thorns biting deep into her palm like a lover's final kiss.
Somewhere beneath the symphony of screams - hers, the chapel's, the forgotten children's - the crow kept counting the cuts in a voice like rustling grave dirt.
One for the lies we tell ourselves.
Two for the secrets we bury.
Three for the children who remember.
And as the last snip of the shears echoed through the hollowed halls, Eleanor's tears watered the first seeds of the next cycle's horrors, their pale shoots already curling toward the light.