The first thing they noticed about the child wasn't the black veins.
It was that she never blinked.
She stood barefoot at the edge of the crater where the reliquary once sealed shut around Mercy's grave. Her eyes, too wide and too still, glinted green in the morning light. She whispered something under her breath, not a prayer, not quite a song. Her voice rasped like wind through dead reeds.
"The sword remembers you."
The settlers who had come to repopulate the ruins of Solarae thought she was lost at first. But she wasn't. She had come alone, walked in from the southern hills without food, water, or fear. One of the guards tried to take her hand. She didn't flinch—only looked up, pupils like pinpricks.
She didn't blink.
Kael heard the story on the third day.
He was two towns east of Solarae, where the land sloped into red valleys filled with brittle bonegrass. News traveled slowly, but anything that hinted at the Garden drew whispers. People knew his face, though they no longer said his name out loud. They said things like:
"The man who buried the sword."
"The one the roots avoid."
He ignored most of it. But not this.
The story changed depending on who told it. In one version, the child spoke in hollow tongues and called lightning down from the crater. In another, her veins glowed like moonlight, and she offered a crown made of sap and bone.
The only consistent part: her eyes. Open. Unblinking. Whispering to the sprout that had bloomed where Mercy was buried.
Kael left the next morning.
The ruins of Solarae had changed.
The wind smelled like stone again, not sap. The ground held weight, not pulse. But the memory of roots still shaped the way people built. Homes stood far from trees. Fences curved around soil that remembered burning.
Kael arrived at dusk. No one stopped him. No one needed to. His presence moved through the camp like a rumor returning home.
He walked to the crater alone.
The child was still there.
She sat beside the sprout, now grown taller—its single black blossom wilted, replaced by a twisting stalk. Something in its curve resembled a blade hilt, but not quite. No thorns. No shimmer. Just stillness.
The child looked up as he approached.
Her voice was small but certain.
"You buried it."
Kael nodded.
"And now it's dreaming."
He crouched beside her. "How do you know?"
She touched the soil beside the sprout. "It told me."
Kael didn't flinch. "What did it say?"
She smiled—small, sharp. "It said, 'he'll come back.'"
They called her Ilya, though she never gave a name.
She didn't eat. Didn't sleep. She sat beside the sprout every hour of the day, whispering. Sometimes she hummed in a language no one recognized. Sometimes she spoke Mercy's last words back to Kael, word for word, in a voice that didn't belong to her.
She wasn't possessed. Not exactly. But the Garden had touched her. Or she had touched something it left behind.
On the fifth night, Kael saw her standing in the dark, palm outstretched, fingers splayed as if holding something invisible.
"Ilya?" he asked.
She didn't answer.
Then she said, "Do you want to feel it?"
Before he could answer, she reached out—too fast, too smooth—and pressed her fingertips to his chest.
No power surged. No root broke the earth. But Kael felt it.
Memory.
Not his.
The cold floor of a stone chapel. A sword humming with hunger. Eris screaming. Lyra turning, her eyes like polished metal—
Then it was gone.
He staggered back. The girl tilted her head.
"You remember differently," she said. "But the sword remembers truer."
Eris arrived three days later.
She had followed no trail, just instinct and Kael's last direction. Her cloak was salt-stained, the edges crusted with sea dust. Her eyes had seen too much sky.
She found Kael sitting alone near the reliquary crater, his knuckles white around a length of cloth once wrapped around Mercy's hilt.
Eris crouched. "Is it starting again?"
"I don't know," Kael said.
She looked past him at the sprout, now thicker, its stalk splitting into twin offshoots. One curled left. One curled right. Neither moved.
"She's not human," Eris said softly, watching Ilya from a distance.
"She's not inhuman either," Kael replied.
"Do you trust her?"
"I trust that something is watching through her. And it remembers."
That night, one of the settlers tried to burn the sprout.
He'd lost his son in the Garden's collapse. Said he'd seen the same kind of bloom twist through his boy's spine when the roots took him.
The settler didn't make it to the crater.
Ilya screamed.
Not words. Not sound.
Something inside the scream snapped in every witness. A high-pitched resonance that made teeth ache, blood buzz.
Kael ran to her.
The settler lay shaking in the dirt. Black veins had spidered up his arms. Not growing—fading. Like something had reached into him, found the rot, and pulled it to the surface.
He lived.
But his eyes never looked straight again.
Ilya never screamed again.
The morning after, the sprout bloomed again.
Three new shoots.
One curved like a hook. One split like antlers. One looked like a question mark.
Eris stood beside it.
"I don't think it's trying to become a tree."
Kael said nothing.
Eris crossed her arms. "You're thinking of letting it grow."
He looked at her. "Shouldn't we?"
She gestured at the withered man in the infirmary. "You saw what it did."
"I saw what he did. It defended itself."
"Did it?" Her voice lowered. "Or did something inside it just wake up?"
They said nothing more.
But that night, Kael slept with one hand in the dirt.
And the ground hummed.
In the eastern desert, far from Solarae, a warband unearthed a vault buried beneath a blackened orchard.
Inside was no sword.
Only a spine.
Bleached. Twisted. Singing.
The one who touched it first stopped feeling anything.
Not heat. Not pain. Not hunger.
He smiled for the first time in years.
They named it the Pale Root.
Back at Solarae, a wandering chronicler arrived. She'd been collecting stories from the ruined provinces—tales of the "sword-burier," of the girl who didn't blink, of silver veins running under new growth.
She sat with Kael beside the crater.
"What do you want remembered?" she asked him.
Kael stared at the sprout. It had begun to coil upward now—slow, spiral-like, forming something akin to a grip.
He didn't answer.
The chronicler nodded. "Then I'll write it like this: 'He did not speak. But the sword did.'"
Ilya began drawing.
Circles. Lines. Veins.
One image she drew repeatedly: a spiral that ended in a sharp point.
When Eris asked what it was, Ilya replied: "The mouth of the next garden."
The final moment came in silence.
A young man—barely more than a boy—reached out to touch Ilya's hand.
He'd come from the edge of the ruined kingdoms, walking alone. He'd lost his name, his past, his voice. But when he saw her, he knelt.
Ilya took his hand.
Their fingers locked.
And his veins turned silver.