“Today we test your resonance,” Malachar said, producing a crystal blade from their robes. It pulsed with sickly light. “Every marked one resonates at a specific frequency. Finding it is usually a delicate process, requiring patience and precision.” Their smile was vicious. “But the prince has given me permission to be… less delicate. After all, we have so little time, and I have so much pain to repay.”
“This seems personal for you.”
“Oh, it’s very personal.” Malachar pressed the crystal blade against my sternum, and my marks erupted with burning pain. “I’m going to enjoy this immensely.”
The blade cut through the connection between my marks and my soul. The pain was indescribable, like being flayed from the inside out, every nerve ending catching fire simultaneously.
The dancers’ humming rose to a wail, and their movements became frantic. Power poured from them into Malachar, who channeled it through the crystal blade into me. My marks responded violently, spreading faster, growing three-dimensional, turning from gold to something darker, something wrong.
I screamed.
“There we go,” Malachar crooned, twisting the blade. “Let it out. Scream for me the way I screamed because of him. Play me that pretty little sound.”
Through the bond—muffled but there—I felt Kaelren’s fury spike. He could feel my agony, and somewhere far away, his corruption was spreading in response, consuming everything around him.
“Yes,” Malachar breathed, feeling the bond’s reaction through their magic. “He can feel this. Perfect. Every cut I make, every ounce of pain I inflict on you, he experiences as well. A two-for-one special.”
The blade cut deeper. The pain increased. The dancers wailed. And I fell down, down, down into darkness.
But it wasn’t empty darkness.
I sawher—the First Elle, though she hadn’t been called that yet. Just a girl from a village near the wild forest, drawn to a clearing where something impossible had happened.
The Seed had bloomed.
Not a flower, not exactly. Something more fundamental—the Root’s first great flowering, bursting from the ground in spirals of light and growth. The Bloom, raw and untamed, a miracle no one had summoned or controlled. Just… nature, expressing itself in radiant excess.
She’d found it by accident, following a feeling she couldn’t name. And when she touched it, the Bloom recognized something in her—somecompatibility, some openness. It marked her. Golden vines spread across her skin, not forced butinvited.
For weeks, she lived in harmony with it. The Bloom grew. She grew. The forest sang.
Then others came.
I watched as the powerful arrived—those who would become the first Crown, the first Petal Court. They didn’t approach the Bloom with wonder. They approached withhunger. They saw power to be claimed, controlled, contained.
The First Elle tried to explain: “It’s not meant to be owned. It’s meant to grow.”
They didn’t listen.
I watched them build the Heartspire around the Bloom—first as protection, they claimed, then as temple, then as throne. I watched them etch Rootlight into their skin in crude imitation of her natural marks, binding themselves to the Bloom through ritual and relic instead of recognition.
I watched them create the Petal Court, biologically fusing themselves to garden relics, becoming more magic than mortal,dependenton the Bloom’s power to survive.
And I watched the First Elle realize what she’d done—by being the first to bond with the Bloom, she’d shown them it was possible. She’d become the template for their control.
“I have to stop this,”she thought. “I have to make them understand.”
But they’d already built their hierarchy. Already created their bloodlines. Already turned a wild miracle into a weapon of stagnation.
The vision shifted, accelerating through years. The First Elle fought them—tried to free the Bloom, tried to let it grow naturally again. The Crown and Petal Court saw this as treason. As corruption.
They hunted her.
I felt her desperation as she fled into the deep forest, her marks spreading not from torture but from the Bloom itself crying out,too contained, too controlled, can’t breathe—
And then I saw the moment she failed.
They caught her at the forest’s heart, where the Root ran deepest. The Crown’s soldiers surrounded her, weapons drawn. She knew she was going to die. But worse—she knew the cycle would continue. They would find another marked one, another girl to use as their template. Another attempt to control what should be wild.
