She was there, knife in hand, blood on her clothes that wasn’t all hers, looking like she’d walked through hell to get here. Her hair was wild, her face set with determination that belonged on someone much older. Behind them, rebels poured in—thirty, maybe more, all looking like they’d rather die than retreat.
“Sorry we’re late,” Bryx called out cheerfully, though his voice shook with exhaustion and pain. “Traffic was murder. Literally. There were murders. Kevin murdered several people. I may have murdered a few. Mora definitely murdered at least one. It’s been a very murder-y day.”
“Impossible,” Auradelle breathed, his composure cracking further. “The guards—”
“Are dealing with about three hundred bees and sonic echoes that makeus sound like the entire rebellion,” Bryx interrupted, his compound eyes glittering with manic energy. “Also, your captain’s dead. Mora killed him. It was magnificent. You should be proud—you trained her in your kitchens, after all. All that knowledge about joints really paid off.”
Through my Root-touched awareness, spread thin across the Heartspire’s foundations, I felt something stir. Deep below this chamber, far beneath even the oldest stones, something pulsed with ancient magic.
The seed. I couldn’t see it clearly through the pain and transformation, couldn’t understand its full purpose. But I felt its intention like a heartbeat in the earth:freedom. Release. The chance to try again.
Something for this exact moment, I realized. Something the Root made for when everything went wrong.
Mora moved toward me, but guards stepped in her way—five of them, fully armored, weapons gleaming with some sort of sick-looking mixture. She looked so small against them, but there was something in her eyes I recognized. The same thing I’d felt when I first stood up to Auradelle. The moment when fear transformed into fury.
“Let her through,” I said, my voice carrying through every wall, making the guards step back instinctively. The Heartspire spoke with my voice now, and even they couldn’t ignore it entirely.
But Auradelle was already moving, fingers dancing over his controls with desperate precision. “It doesn’t matter. The Convergence is peaking. The merger is almost complete. A few rebels change nothing.”
“We’re not just a few rebels,” a new voice said, deep and rough as gravel.
A man stepped through the ruined doorway, and even through my dissolving consciousness, I could see the history written across him. Scars twisted across half his face, one eye milky and dead, the other blazing with the kind of purpose that came from years of suffering. He moved like someone who’d been built for war.
“We’re everyone you’ve wronged,” he continued, his scarred face grim. “Everyone you’ve hurt. Everyone who’s tired of your shit.”
More rebels poured in—veterans of years of resistance, people who’d lost homes and families to Auradelle’s vision of order, fighters who’d beenwaiting for exactly this moment.
“Eloquent,” Auradelle sneered, but I could see the fear in his eyes now. “Kill them all.”
The battle erupted instantly. Guards versus rebels, blood and steel and magic. The chamber became a whirlwind of violence. But I could barely focus on it because the Bloom was pulling harder now, the Convergence seconds away, and I could feel myself dissolving, becoming nothing, becoming everything.
My thoughts were scattering like leaves in a hurricane. I was Elle, but I was also stone and wood and corrupted magic. I could feel every death in the chamber as it happened, each life ending like a small light going out in my awareness. I was losing myself, drowning in the building’s consciousness.
Then Mora was there, somehow having fought through the chaos. She pressed against the Bloom’s thorns, ignoring how they cut her, and gripped my free hand.
“I’m here,” she whispered, tears streaming down her face. “I’m here, Elle. Hold on.”
“Can’t…”
“Yes, you can. You’re the one who stood up to Lord Auradelle. Who survived the transformation. Who’s made it this far against impossible odds. You’re Elle, and you don’t give up.”
Her touch was an anchor. A lifeline. A reminder that I was still me, despite everything trying to make me otherwise.
The knowledge of the ancient seed faded as Auradelle adjusted another control and fresh agony ripped through me, but the awareness lingered. Down there. Waiting. A key I didn’t yet know how to use.
Through the chaos of battle, I saw Kaelren moving through the chamber like the Grim Reaper himself, and guards fell before him like wheat before a scythe. He wasn’t coming to the apparatus yet—he wasclearing a path,making sure nothing would stop him when he finally reached me.
Our eyes met across the chamber.
“Together,”I thought at him, pushing the thought through our bond despite the agony it caused.
“Always,”he responded, and I felt our bond flare to life. The thing that had been growing between us since that first day. The thing that defied patterns and iterations and everything that said we were doomed.
“No,” Auradelle said, realizing what was happening. “No, you can’t—”
But we could.
And we were about to.
