Mother Village -finished- - Version- - Ch. 1 Fina...

"No more tithes," Fina said.

Fina looked at the crack in the tree. The amber light beckoned like a hearth on a winter night.

"But now you're back," the woman continued, rising to her feet. Her joints cracked like breaking branches. "And the village is dead, Fina. All of them. Every family that fed me, I fed on in return. Only the children remain—trapped inside me, not alive, not dead. Waiting for a mother who never came." Mother Village -Finished- - Version- Ch. 1 Fina...

Not cooking smoke. Not ceremonial incense. The thick, wet smoke of something burning alive .

Fina shook her head.

Fina spun. A woman sat on a low stone at the base of the tree. She was old—older than the Council, older than the village itself, it seemed. Her skin was bark-brown and cracked like dry earth. Her eyes were two hollows with tiny flames flickering inside.

She had been fifteen when the soil turned bitter. The cassava grew knotted and black at the roots, and the river shrank to a muddy thread. The Council of Roots—three old women with moss growing in their braids—declared a tithe: one child from every family to the Mother Tree, so the village might live. "No more tithes," Fina said

Fina's name was drawn from the clay bowl.