Her eyes focused on mine, barely recognizing me through the transformation trying to claim her completely. “Kaelren,” she whispered.
“I’m here. I’m getting you out.”
“Together,” she said, and I felt our bond surge with recognition, with purpose, with the love that had been growing between us since that first moment in her grandmother’s garden.
“Always.”
I pulled at the conduits with my corruption while Elle pushed from within with her Root-touched power. The apparatus, caught between opposing forces it was never designed to handle, began to rupture. Conduits snapped free with sounds like breaking bones, spraying that sick Root-Bloom mixture across the floor where it hissed and bubbled. The Bloom itself recoiled, seeking another host, desperate to maintain its connection to consciousness.
It found Auradelle.
He’d stepped too close, hands still outstretched toward the controls, still trying to regain dominance of his creation even as it collapsed around him. The Bloom recognized him—all the years he’d been connected to it, feeding it, shaping it, controlling it with iron will and ruthless purpose.
And now it was hungry for a more willing host.
Roots erupted from his chest, as if they’d been dormant inside him all along, just waiting for permission to bloom. His scream was magnificent in its horror, in the perfect irony of the thing he’d used to control others now claiming him.
“No! This isn’t—I was supposed to—” His words choked off as flowers bloomed from his throat, petals the color of old blood forcing their way past his teeth. His skin became bark, rough and twisted. His eyes became dark roses that bloomed and wilted and bloomed again in endless cycles, trapped in eternal transformation.
The conduits that had held Elle withdrew completely, seeking him instead with eager hunger, burrowing into his transforming flesh like worms into soil. Within moments, he wasn’t Auradelle anymore—just another part of the apparatus, twisted into the machinery of his own creation. His face remained visible in the bark, eyes wide with eternal awareness, mouth open in a scream that would never end.
The Bloom would keep him alive forever, feeding on his consciousness,using him as its new conduit while he experienced every moment of his transformation in perfect, eternal clarity.
Not death. Something worse. Something earned.
Elle collapsed the moment the last conduit released her. I caught her before she hit the ground, and for a heartbeat I just held her. Solid. Real. Alive. Blood-soaked and trembling buthere,in my arms, where she belonged.
The flowers on her skin were fading back to normal Root marks, but something fundamental had changed. I could feel it through our bond—she was different now, transformed in ways that went deeper than marks or magic.
“It’s over,” I said, holding her close enough to feel her heartbeat against mine. “We did it. You’re free.”
Around us, the battle was ending. With Auradelle transformed and the apparatus claiming him, the guards had lost their purpose. They were surrendering, fleeing, or dying under rebel blades. Victory, blood-soaked and brutal, but victory nonetheless.
Elle looked up at me, and I saw something in her expression that made my chest tighten. Not relief. Not exhaustion. Something else. Something that looked like understanding mixed with devastation.
“Not yet,” she said quietly. “It’s not over yet.”
Before I could ask what she meant, a small form scuttled forward through the carnage, moving with surprising agility over fallen bodies and broken stone.
“Special delivery,” Peeble said, their voice unusually gentle, lacking their typical snark. “It called to me,” Peeble said, their voice unusually subdued. “The convergence cracked the seals, and I felt it—pulling at me, demanding I bring it here. Now.”
They climbed up to where Elle sat in my arms and deposited something in her palm—the seed, ancient and pulsing with power that made the air shimmer around it. The moment it touched her skin, her entire body went rigid.
Through our bond, I felt the flood of information pouring into her. Notwords—pure understanding, compressed knowledge from something that had been waiting centuries for exactly this moment. Elle’s eyes widened, pupils dilating as the seed showed her what sixteen other iterations had failed to see.
“Oh,” she whispered, and the single syllable carried the weight of revelation and devastation combined. “Oh, gods.”
“Elle? What is it?”
She looked at the seed with something between wonder and horror, tears already forming. “It’s been waiting. The Root made it wait until the Convergence peaked, until the conditions were exactly right. Until someone strong enough—desperate enough—” Her voice broke. “Until me.”
“The failsafe,” she said, but the word carried meaning beyond a simple backup plan. “The key to everything.”
Dread curled in my gut, cold and certain. “What are you talking about?”
She looked at me with eyes that held too much knowledge, knowledge she clearly wished she didn’t have. “Sixteen iterations, Kaelren. Sixteen times we’ve tried to break this cycle. Root or Bloom. Victory or defeat. Together or apart. But always, always within the pattern’s parameters.”
“Elle—”
