The boy sat in the dust near the sprout and did not move.
Did not blink.
Did not breathe—at least not the way most understood it.
His veins, still threaded in liquid silver, pulsed gently beneath the skin like quiet tides. He did not speak. He simply stared, unblinking, at Ilya. She, in turn, stared at the sprout, her posture calm but taut. Like a question coiled.
Around them, the settlers kept their distance.
No one approached the boy since the moment he touched Ilya's hand. They watched from a widening perimeter now, like villagers gathered around the lip of a silent crater. Not sure if it would smoke, or scream.
Kael sat nearby, silent as well.
It had been two days since the boy changed. He hadn't eaten. He hadn't asked. But he was not wasting. His skin didn't wither. The silver in his veins hadn't spread, nor shrunk. It had begun to…throb, faintly. In rhythm.
With the sprout.
Whispers moved through camp.
He was an orphan, some said. Mute since the Garden's fall. He'd survived alone, buried in a rootless cellar while the world above him bloomed and burned.
"He spoke once," an older settler muttered near the fire. "After they pulled him out. Just one sentence. 'It's still hungry.'"
Eris paced near the boundary markers, salt flakes in her palm.
She knelt, sprinkled the coarse sea salt along a crescent of soil beside the black stalk. The sprout didn't react at first. Then—
It shifted. Just barely. A turn toward the boy. A curl away from the salt. And then, with disturbing patience, it began to weave a fine sheath along its base—a crystalized coat of salt-dusted bark, as if adapting.
"Gods," Eris muttered.
Kael watched from his place beside the boy. "You saw that."
"I did more than see it. It learned." She stood slowly. "Salt used to keep things clean. This thing swallows it."
Kael touched the boy's wrist gently. For a second, something vibrated through him. A sound he hadn't felt since burying Mercy.
A hum.
That night, the boy began to mirror the sprout.
When the stalk tilted, he leaned with it. When it trembled, so did he.
By dawn, someone had left a bundle of fruit and wild roots at the sprout's base. By midday, others had followed. Trinkets. Food. Even cut hair wrapped in linen — offerings, perhaps.
Not everyone approved.
A hunter named Selin sharpened his blade loudly by the fire and muttered, "They call it peace, but it's just another root waiting to dig in."
"They're calling the girl a seer," someone whispered.
"No," another replied. "They're calling her the Whispered One."
Two factions formed in shadow. Some knelt at the edge of the crater and left gifts: rusted blades, Aetherium shards, thorn-pricked fingertips. Others, called the Cutclean, marked their arms with knives to "sever memory." One man tried to burn his silver-touched hand in the forge after watching the boy breathe.
Eris collected a small vial of the boy's blood that night.
She did it quietly, without asking. Mixed a single drop with seawater.
The fluid didn't dissolve. It curled, thickened—coagulated into a clear, viscous gel that shimmered faintly blue. She dabbed it on a scar above her hip.
The ache disappeared.
"It doesn't heal," she murmured. "It just… forgets wounds exist."
She said nothing to Kael.
Ilya didn't speak often. But when she did, people listened.
Children came to her first. She answered them in riddles.
To the boy with a broken hand: "It will heal like a bent branch — crooked, but stronger."
To the girl whose sister died in the bloom: "Not all roots are cruel. Some just don't know how to stop growing."
To Kael: "You didn't bury a sword. You planted a memory."
When Eris pressed her for meaning, she replied only, "The truth's not gone. Just sideways."
Eris hated that.
One night, Kael found Ilya sleepwalking.
Barefoot. Eyes open. Her hands dug into the soil near the sprout.
He moved toward her, slowly. She was cradling something—half-buried, glowing faintly. A core of Aetherium, dim and crusted with dirt, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
He did not wake her.
The chronicler returned with a new scroll.
"This came from a trader's camp outside the eastern fractures," she said. "They're building weapons. Cold ones."
She rolled the parchment open.
It showed a sketch: a spine, twisted and bone-white, notched like vertebrae, but carved with inverted runes. The same pattern once etched into Mercy's blade — only reversed, as if pulled through frost instead of flame.
"They call it the Pale Root," the chronicler said.
Kael studied the image.
"It sings," she added. "Not like Mercy. No hunger. Just… silence. Deep. Like standing under ice and hearing your breath stop."
She showed him another scroll—ancient, nearly torn through the fold.
"The First Scythe," she whispered. The illustration was crude, but unmistakable: a figure with Mercy's hilt in one hand, and Seth's eyes staring out from its carved face.
Later, Eris and Kael walked to the far edge of camp.
"You're thinking about it," she said.
"I'm thinking about a lot of things."
She stopped beside a scorched stone, its surface still etched with the remnants of a root-brand. Her old one used to glow like that.
"You said it yourself," she murmured. "Mercy was hunger. The Pale Root? Numbness. That's worse. At least pain reminds you you're alive."
Kael turned to her. "What if the sprout isn't either?"
"Then what is it?"
He hesitated. "A witness. Like Mercy wanted to be. Not a weapon."
She laughed, bitter. "You sound like the chronicler."
"She might not be wrong."
Eris stepped closer, voice low. "You're watching this thing adapt to salt. You felt it hum. Kael—this isn't over. We buried one Garden. Now something new's growing. And I don't think we're ready for it."
He said nothing.
She looked at him hard. "Don't make me choose between burning it and burying you."
They stood there a while longer. Neither moved. The sky above them turned orange with a bleeding dusk.
That night, Kael dreamed.
Seth's voice echoed in the dark, soft and scalding.
"You buried Mercy," it said. "But you left me in the ground."
Kael awoke gasping, sweat cold on his back.
His veins, for a breathless second, shimmered silver.
Then it was gone.
The boy spoke that night.
It was a whisper. Barely audible. But every soul near the reliquary heard it.
"It's… collecting," he said.
His voice was not his own.
It was Mercy's.
Not the sword's physical echo — but the tone, the cadence, the feel.
Kael felt it like frost on the back of his neck.
Eris turned. "What did he just say?"
Ilya answered from her place beside the sprout. "He said the root remembers."
At that moment—miles away, in the eastern fractures—
A pale-eyed soldier training with the Pale Root looked up from his stance, suddenly alert.
He turned to his commander. "I felt something."
The commander frowned. "The sword?"
The soldier nodded.
"No," he whispered.
"Something older."
A younger warrior in the warband clutched their frostbitten arm. Their breath fogged even in warm air. "The Frostbloom comes," the leader said, touching the Pale Root's hilt reverently. "We will be its thorns."
Kael sat at the edge of camp, watching the fire eat its own tail.
Eris joined him, silent for a long while.
Then: "If the boy is collecting rot…"
Kael didn't turn.
"…what's the sprout collecting?"
By dawn, a second child had touched the sprout.
Willingly.
Her veins didn't turn silver.
They glowed faintly blue.
And when she opened her mouth, she spoke in rhymes no one had ever taught her.
Kael found Ilya crouched at the crater's edge.
She was humming.
The sprout had changed. Again. Its "grip" had twisted—grown thinner, longer.
Like fingers.
A skeletal hand curled upward from its base, bone-pale, palm open.
Pointing east.
The boy looked at Kael with silvered eyes and whispered,
"It's not a garden anymore."
A pause. A smile that didn't reach his mouth.
"It's a gallery."