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Until eventually, it became this.

I look at the thing Ward Farm created.

“Starve.”

The word leaves me quietly.

The creature shrieks.

I step closer.

“STARVE.”

The command tears across the field.

Roots rip free from the creature’s body.

The mass begins to come apart.

Not rot.

Release.

Bones separate from roots. Hands pull free from flesh and become hands again. Faces emerge from the collapsing nightmare, no longer stretched across something monstrous.

One figure rises.

Then another.

Then hundreds.

Pale forms climb from the ruin until the field is filled with the dead.

People.

Offerings.

Men and women who were fed to this place and forgotten.

Mercy sobs behind me.

I turn.

She recognizes them.

The dead Brides move among the others, but there are no stitches holding their mouths closed now. No burlap. No wooden limbs or bodies twisted into scarecrows.

They’re women.

Just women.

One of them stops in front of Mercy.

Mercy goes completely still.

The woman lifts a hand and touches her cheek.

Mercy breaks. “Mother?”