The chapel doors sealed with a finality that shuddered through Eleanor's bones. The air thickened, pressing against her eardrums like deep water, muffling the sound of Mira's choked gasps as the small, skeletal fingers forced her mouth wider. The child inside her was climbing out not through her throat, but through the spaces between her teeth, its bones unfolding like a grotesque origami.
Eleanor grabbed Mira's face, her bark-skinned thumbs pressing into the girl's cheeks. She could feel the movement beneath the scrape of tiny joints, the wet squelch of rearranging flesh.
"Bite down," Eleanor hissed.
Mira's black eyes rolled toward her, wide with terror but she obeyed.
The crack of breaking bone echoed through the chapel. A high, keening wail split the air as the child inside Mira recoiled, its fingers snapping like twigs. The taste of old blood and rotting roses flooded Mira's mouth as she spat out fragments of tiny phalanges, their surfaces etched with half-formed names.
The crow shrieked in fury, its subcutaneous faces contorting. "You ruin everything!" it screamed, its voice fracturing into a dozen dissonant tones. It launched itself at Eleanor, beak gaping and impaled itself on the broken shears.
Eleanor hadn't seen Mira move. But the girl stood now, trembling, the jagged metal shaft buried deep in the crow's breast. Black fluid bubbled from the wound, hissing as it hit the ground. The faces beneath its skin melted, their features sloughing away like wet clay.
For a heartbeat, silence.
Then the chapel exploded.
The walls burst outward in a storm of teeth and bone, revealing the nightmare beneath not an orchard, but a garden of flesh. The trees were spines, their branches rib bones. The flowers were hands, petals splayed like grasping fingers. And at its center, where the altar had been, stood the first gardener a towering figure woven from thorns and old scars, its face a hollow where the crow had once perched.
It reached for them with hands made of rusted shears.
Mira grabbed Eleanor's arm. "Run."
But the ground beneath them was already opening, not to swallow them but to speak.
A voice rose from the soil, soft and familiar.
"You promised you'd stay."
Emily's voice.
And the garden breathed in.