The others follow behind me. I can hear their footsteps, careful and quiet, but it feels like they're watching a movie and I'm the one inside it.
We walk into what must have been a garden once.
The trees are massive—older than anything I've ever seen, with bark that has silver veins running through it like lightning frozen mid-strike. Their leaves are purple, falling slow like they're underwater. Pretty in a way that makes my chest tight.
But what stops me cold isn't the trees.
It's the daisies.
They're scattered in clusters, white petals catching the light like glass. Just like the ones I planted back home. Only… more. Larger. Sharper. Their crystalline stems hum with that same soft chime—but louder now. Brighter. Like they've been waiting for me to find them again.
The sight hits me harder than it should. These impossible flowers that started as seeds by a door I couldn't open, that grew in my backyard and chimed like music. Now they're here, in this ancient place, blooming like they belong.
Like they've always belonged.
"Are those...?" Rhett's voice trails off.
"The ones from home," I whisper, because there's no mistaking them. The same perfect white petals, the same glass-like stems. But transformed. Elevated.
As I watch, more flowers bloom around them. Just like that. Buds opening into white and silver petals. Paths straightening into perfect lines. Garden beds clearing of weeds, organizing into neat rows.
It's beautiful.
It's also completely wrong.
I stop in the middle of it all, skin prickling with wrongness. It's too clean. Too organized. Like someone took a song and forced it into the wrong key.
"No," I say out loud, surprising myself. "That's not right."
The mist around me goes still, like it's waiting for instructions.
I think about how the garden looked when we walked in. Wild, sure. Overgrown, definitely. But alive in a way that felt honest. The ivy wasn't destroying the stones—it was holding them together. The scattered flowers weren't messy—they were scattered like someone had thrown confetti at a party.
Even the daisies looked better when they were growing wild, nestled among the weeds and broken stones like secrets.
I liked it better before.
The thought is barely finished when everything changes.
The neat lines soften. Petals spill out of their perfect arrangements, scattering across the ground in patterns that look random but feel right. The ivy creeps back, but gently this time. Like it's hugging instead of strangling.
The daisies settle back into their natural clusters, their crystalline stems chiming softly as they adjust. Content now. Home.
The garden breathes again.
"Did she just... undo a week of restoration by thinking about it?" Jace asks, and he sounds like he's trying not to laugh.
I turn around to look at them. Rhett looks stunned. Wes is watching me with that quiet intensity that makes my stomach flip. Theo's eyes are wide like he's seeing something that rewrites everything he thought he knew.
"I have no idea how I did that," I admit, because it's true.
That's when Thane makes a sound like someone punched him.
He's standing next to what was definitely a pile of rubble when we walked past it five minutes ago. Now there's a wall. A whole, complete, perfectly intact wall that looks like it was built yesterday.
"This wasn't here," he says, and his voice is strange. Shaky.
Stellan walks over and runs his hand along the new stone. For once, he's not smirking. "Of course it wasn't," he says quietly. "It wasn't meant for us."
