Ren Hadrien walked alone.
Beyond cities. Beyond silence. Beyond storm.
Past the reach of the new sanctuary. Past the last echoes of human voices.
He followed no map.
Only memory.
The path unfolded with each step—not on ground, but in vision. In the flickers at the edge of awareness. In the hum that resonated deep in his bones.
It was not a road.
It was a return.
The sky changed first.
Colors shifted, impossible and vast. Stars blinked in strange configurations, as though they remembered a different cosmos.
Then the land transformed.
What had once been scorched and dead turned glasslike—smooth, dark, reflective. The air thickened with energy so dense it felt alive. Each breath Ren took was not just air—it was invitation.
He had reached the edge.
The boundary between what was left of the world he knew, and something older.
Something sacred.
The Garden.
It was nothing like the stories.
There were no flowers.
No trees.
No rivers.
Only stillness.
And light.
Endless waves of bioluminescent grass, swaying in a wind that didn't exist. Hills that rose and fell like breath. Above, a canopy of stars so close they looked touchable. And at the center—far in the distance—a monolith of radiant white stone. Towering. Waiting.
The Garden of Echoes.
Where all things return.
Where all things begin.
Ren walked.
As he approached the monolith, he began to hear them.
Not voices.
Not speech.
But presence.
Souls.
Memories.
Truths.
They circled him like old friends and old fears—each one tethered to him by threads of possibility. Some he recognized. Some he feared. All were real.
The Archive had shown him the past.
The Garden welcomed it.
At the foot of the monolith, he stopped.
The stone was impossibly smooth—yet covered in faint etchings, like scars that had healed over time. When he touched it, the Garden shifted.
The sky went black.
The wind died.
The stars froze.
And the monolith opened.
Not with force.
With breath.
Inside, he found a chamber carved from silence.
Walls that glowed with soft memory. A floor that rippled like water beneath his steps.
And in the center—one final echo.
A chair.
Simple. Dark. Made of something between metal and bone.
He sat.
And the Garden spoke.
Not with words.
With everything.
He relived it all.
His birth—engineered, chosen, destined.
His work—driven by questions planted long before he asked them.
The breach—the opening, the tearing.
The city of light and memory.
The Council.
The Eye.
The Seed.
And the girl—eyes glowing like dawn, walking with the future in her steps.
Everything.
Not just as memories.
But as truths.
Not one life.
But many.
Not one failure.
But all.
He understood, finally, what the Garden was.
Not a place.
A mirror.
Not of what he had done.
But of what remained.
A voice echoed in the stillness.
Not external.
His own.
"You were the bridge."
"You were the rupture."
"You were the wound."
"Now—be the healing."
He closed his eyes.
And breathed.
When he opened them, the chamber was gone.
The Garden remained.
But it had changed.
Trees now rose from the hills—tall, spiraling, glowing.
Waters shimmered in streams that hadn't been there before.
The sky was warm.
The stars smiled.
He had not planted anything.
Yet the garden bloomed.
It had responded not to his power.
But to his acceptance.
He was no longer the Last Master.
He was the First Witness.
Of what could come next.
He turned from the monolith.
Walked back across the Garden.
The wind followed him, soft and sure.
He did not look back.
He did not need to.
The Garden would remember him.
Because he remembered himself.