“Together,” they echoed.
I gathered every bit of sonic energy I had left, Kevin adding his harmony to mine. The others prepared their weapons, their magic, their desperate hope.
“For Elle,” I whispered.
Then we hit the doors with everything we had.
36
Elle
The pain had evolved.
That’s the only way to describe it—evolution, transformation, becoming something that regular words like ‘agony’ or ‘torment’ couldn’t quite capture. Every nerve ending had become a small sun, burning with its own unique frequency of torture. The Bloom’s conduits pulsed with my heartbeat, or maybe my heart was pulsing with them. It was getting hard to tell where I ended and the apparatus began.
With that merger came knowledge—not learned, but inherited. The Heartspire had stood for centuries, and every marked one who’d been strapped into this apparatus before me had left pieces of themselves behind. Their understanding soaked into the wood and stone like blood into fabric, and now I was absorbing it all. Memories that weren’t mine flooded in: the first Crown binding the Bloom, generations of rulers forcing it to serve, countless attempts to control what should have been wild.
The Bloom wasn’t meant to be caged like this. It was supposed to grow freely, touch everything it wanted without walls or control or someone’s hand guiding every tendril. Auradelle had built a prison and called it preservation. He’d taken something that needed to run and chained it in place, then wondered why it was dying.
And the Root… the Root had known. Had felt the corruption from the beginning. Had been trying for generations to fix what the first Crown had broken.
Break it apart, the Root-knowledge whispered through my expanding awareness. Let it scatter. Let it grow as it was meant to grow. Free it.
But how?The thought slipped away as another wave of pain hit, dragging me back to my body, to the conduits piercing my skin, to Auradelle’s voice droning on about Convergence and destiny and sacrifice.
Stay anchored, I told myself. Don’t let it take you.
“Fascinating,” Auradelle murmured, circling the Bloom like an artist admiring his work. “The flowers are unexpected. Your marks are actually producing them—real, physical flowers. The texts mentioned this possibility but dismissed it as metaphorical.”
“Maybe your texts are shit,” I managed to gasp out, though speaking felt like gargling glass mixed with fire. Each word had to fight its way past the apparatus trying to claim my throat.
He backhanded me, casual as breathing. My lip split further, blood running down my chin to drip on the flowers blooming from my marks. Where the blood touched them, they bloomed brighter, more vibrant, like they were feeding on my pain. The petals shifted from gold to deep crimson at the edges.
“Such defiance,” he mused, studying the blood-fed flowers with scientific interest. “Your mother had that too. Right until the end, when the sickness took her. Even as she lay dying, weakened by what we told her was cancer, she kept fighting.” He leaned close, breath cold against my ear, smelling of preservation and wrong choices. “Do you want to know what her last words were?”
“Probably ‘go fuck yourself,’ knowing my family.”
He laughed, actually laughed, the sound echoing through the chamber like breaking bells. “Close. She said, ‘My daughter will end you.’ Rather prophetic, don’t you think? Except you’re not ending me. You’re completing my work. She died for nothing.”
“Your mother could have lived, could have been magnificent. All she had to do was return. Instead, she chose to rot away in that Earth hospital, telling herself it was ordinary illness.”
The horror of it washed over me. Mom’s illness that no treatment could touch. The way she’d stare at her hands like they belonged to someone else. Her dying wish that I never come here, never find out what we were.
She’d known. Known what would happen if I came back. And she’d died trying to keep me away from exactly this moment.
“Nothing to say?” Auradelle asked, leaning closer. “No defiant words about your mother’s sacrifice?”
I wanted to spit in his face. Wanted to scream. But the Bloom was pulling so hard now that I could barely remember how to form words, let alone use them as weapons.
Then, through the haze of pain and the dissolution of my thoughts, I heard something. Distant at first, then growing louder. Fighting, somewhere above us. Explosions that shook dust from the ceiling, shouts that sounded like chaos, like violence, like something going terribly wrong for someone.
Auradelle growled in frustration at the sound, irritation flickering across his face. He began yelling at people in the room to take care of it.
I could hear guards rushing past the chamber, their footsteps frantic, shouting about rebels at the gates, about an army that couldn’t possibly exist.
“Hey there, gorgeous,”Peeble’s voice suddenly echoed in my mind, clear as a bell despite the chaos. “Miss me?”
“Peeble? How—”
