The Garden had once been bound by memory.
By scars.
By what was.
But now it remembered what it had never dared to become.
Imagination bled into root and leaf. Not chaotic, not wild—intentional.
New trees grew, not from history, but from maybes.
Not what had happened, but what might have.
And with each bloom, the Garden whispered a name:
Jevan.
A name once pruned from the archive, now flowering across time.
He stepped forward through the breach, Mira at his side.
The ink still clung to her fingers.
Living.
Breathing.
Knowing.
Jevan had walked far—from half-truths, from fractures, from the silent pact of unasked questions. And now he stood again in the place where the old story had ended.
Except…
It hadn't.
Elowen met him at the base of the Hollow Spire, the wind bending around her like a reluctant footnote. Her eyes, always sharp, were wide with something between awe and dread.
"You shouldn't be here," she said.
"I was never really gone," Jevan replied.
