“No,”she thought. “Not again. Never again.”
In her final moments, as they closed in, she didn’t fight them. Instead, she turned to the Root itself—not the Bloom they’d imprisoned, but the deep, ancient consciousness running beneath everything.
“I failed,”she told it. “But please—don’t let it end here. Don’t let them keep doing this forever. Send someone back. Send me back. However long it takes, however many tries we need—don’t stop until someone gets it right.”
The Root heard her.
And the Root, in its ancient, patient way, began toadapt.
I watched her body transform—not dying, butchanging. Shrinking. Reshaping. Her consciousness compressing down, down into something small enough to slip through time’s cracks. Her memories fragmenting, scattering across iterations like seeds.
She became something that could survive the cycle’s reset. Something that could remember—not clearly, not all at once, but in pieces. In feelings. In moments of déjà vu that stung like prophecy.
She became Peeble.
Not a beetle. Not originally. But the Root’s answer to her prayer—a guardian that would persist through every iteration, always there, always watching, always hoping thatthis timesomeone would break the pattern.
Sixteen times she’d watched it play out. Sixteen times she’d tried to guide, to hint, to nudge the marked one toward understanding instead of control. Sixteen times she’d failed in slightly different ways.
“But I remember,”Peeble’s voice echoed through the vision—young and ancient at once, weary and hopeful. “Every iteration, I remember a little more. Every cycle, I understand a bit better where we went wrong.”
“You’re me,”I realized, my consciousness bleeding into Peeble’s across time. “The First Elle—you’re trying to save yourself. You’re trying to save all ofus.”
“I’m trying to stop them from making the same mistake I made,”Peeble’s voice clarified. “I showed them the Bloom could be bonded to. I became their proof that power could be controlled. I didn’t understand—”
The vision showed me the truth: the rot wasn’t random decay. It was the Root’s recoil. Every time the Bloom was used to enforce hierarchy instead of growth, every time it was drained through relics instead of allowed to flower naturally, every time stagnation was enforced on something meant toevolve—the Root pulled back.
And that pulling back felt like disease.
The realm wasn’t dying because someone failed to control the power. It was dying because someone kepttryingto control the power.
“They’ve been solving the wrong problem for seventeen iterations,”I understood. “It’s not about finding the right ruler. It’s about—”
“Letting go,”Peeble finished. “Letting the Bloom be what it was meant to be. Wild. Free. Growing.”
“But how?”I asked the vision. “How do I break the cycle without just becoming another version of you? Another failure they’ll build a new hierarchy around?”
The vision showed me one more thing—a glimpse of the Seed, hidden beneath the Heartspire in chambers even Auradelle didn’t know existed. Not dormant.Growing. Quietly, secretly, preparing for its second flowering.
The Bloom had been the first attempt. The Seed was preparing to try again.
And this time, it didn’t need a throne.
It needed a spark.
“You’re different,”Peeble’s voice said, and I felt her hope like sunlight through storm clouds. “You didn’t come seeking the power. You didn’t try to control it. You came because you were pulled here, dragged here, forced here—and you’ve spent every moment since then just trying to survive. Just trying to save the people you love.”
“So what do I do?”
“What I should have done the first time,”Peeble said. “When the momentcomes—when they try to make you the bridge between Root and Bloom, the vessel for their Convergence—don’t be a bridge. Don’t be a vessel. Don’t let them channel the power through you to maintain their control.
“Be the Seed’s second flowering. Let it all burn. Let it all grow. Let everything wild and patient and ancient finally break free of the cage they built around it.
“Let the realm remember what it was before they tried to rule it.”
The vision released me, and I surfaced gasping from the darkness to find Thessian still cutting, still testing, still searching for my frequency.
But now I knew.
