Chapter 4: The Midnight Soil
The tension reached a breaking point on the night before the scheduled delivery. The hospital was under lockdown, security increased due to the strange medical anomaly in Room 914. Ethan, feeling isolated and desperate, sat in the dark of the room. He whispered to Laura, "I know you're in there. I know you're fighting."
The boy returned. Not through the door, but seemingly from the shadows themselves. He wore the same yellow coat, but this time, the rain seemed to follow him, tiny droplets defying gravity and floating in the air around him.
"She’s almost at the surface," the boy said, placing a new jar—this one filled with what looked like white flower petals and moss—on the bedside table. "But the fog is thick. You have to tell her the way back."
Ethan looked at the boy, his fear replaced by a strange, ethereal clarity. "Why her? Why now?"
May you like
"The earth needs teachers," the boy said. "She was a teacher once. She must teach again."
Ethan didn't ask how the boy knew that. He realized the room had changed. The machines were silent, though they were still powered on. The pulse of the heart rate monitor wasn't a machine noise—it was a steady, rhythmic thrumming, like a heartbeat echoed from deep within the earth. Ethan closed his eyes and began to recount everything—the first day they met, the way the sunlight hit the chalkboard in her classroom, the sound of her laughter during their first spring together. He poured his memories into her, a tapestry of life meant to pull her out of the fog.
