🌿 Chapter V — The Silent Watchers 🌿

"They don't speak. They remember."

After the wooden hut, the river narrows, and the first roots emerge from the water like gnarled fingers. The birds' songs fade, their multitudes dissolve into the thickening silence. Once they cross the river, there is no longer the peaceful rhythm of the river, but a deeper, slower breathing, that of the swamp itself.

The marsh never sleeps.

Since their arrival, Elias and Maëra had learned to live with its rhythms. The mists rose and fell like breathing. The waters lapped without wind. The trees seemed to lean forward, listening, waiting. But what they hadn't yet understood was that something was watching them.

It began with signs.

Footprints in the mud, too large to be human, but too precise to be animal. Patterns in the reeds, geometric, almost ritualistic. Stones moved during the night, forming circles, spirals, arrows pointing toward the heart of the marsh.

Maëra drew them. Elias connected them. And little by little, an invisible map took shape.

Then came the shadows.

They appeared at the edge of their camp, between the trees, in the reflections of the water. Tall, thin, motionless. Sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. They never approached. But they were there. Present. Constant. Like sentinels.

Elias called them the Watchers.

He said they weren't dead. Nor alive. That they were something else. Fragments of memory. Guardians of an ancient balance. They didn't speak, but they communicated. Through roots. Through spores. Through dreams.

And it was in dreams that Maëra encountered them. She dreamed of an immense tree, whose branches formed a vault over a black lake. At the foot of the tree, the Watchers were waiting for her. They didn't move. But she felt their gaze. Their silence. Their judgment. And in the center of the lake, a beat. Slow. Deep. Alive.

She woke up in tears.

Elias, however, no longer dreamed. He kept watch. He spoke to the lantern. He wrote in a notebook he showed to no one. He said the swamp spoke to him. That it showed him memories that weren't his own. Faces. Names. Children.

One evening, when the mist was thicker than ever, the Watchers approached.

They made no sound. They left no trace. But Elias and Maëra saw them. Up close. Their bodies were made of bark, moss, ancient flesh. Their eyes shone with a green light, both soft and terrible. They did nothing. They stood there. Watching them.

Then they disappeared.

And in the silence that followed, Elias said simply:

"They know."

"Know what?" asked Maëra.

He turned his eyes toward her.

"That you're carrying something. Someone. And that it's no coincidence."

Maëra placed her hand on her stomach. She said nothing. But she understood.