Everything.
The seed in her hands began to glow, pulsing with ancient magic. And where my corruption met her Root marks, where rot and purity touched…
Reality screamed.
Elle’s eyes opened, glowing with light that hurt to look at. When she spoke, her voice echoed from every possible moment at once:
“Find me in the spaces between seconds. I’ll be in all the moments we should have had.”
Then she squeezed the seed, and the world shattered.
38
Elle
The seed opens.
That’s too simple a description for what actually happens, but human language wasn’t designed to describe the moment when ancient Root magic—older than the mistake that broke everything—floods into a person who’s simultaneously pulling corruption through a bond that transcends physical space.
It’s like reality itself is a flower and someone’s peeling back petals to reveal what exists beneath the world we think we know.
Light pours out—golden and green and threaded with black from Kaelren’s corruption that I’m pulling through our bond. The three forces meet in my marks, in my blood, in my very essence, and they do what all other iterations have insisted is impossible:
They coexist.
Root and rot, purity and corruption, growth and decay—all occupying the same space, the same moment, the same body.
The moment they touch—Root and rot meeting in the architecture of my cells—I understand why it’s supposed to be impossible. They’re not just opposite forces. They’re thesameforce, expressed in different directions. Like time flowing forward and backward simultaneously, like a heart beating and being still in the same instant.
My marks ignite with the contradiction. The flowering vines that spiral upmy arms split open, and instead of blood, something else pours out—power made visible, gold and green and black braiding together like rope being woven from opposite ends. The corruption I’m pulling from Kaelren doesn’t destroy the Root magic. Itcompletesit.
Two halves of a circle that were broken so long ago that everyone forgot they were ever whole.
I can feel the exact moment my body realizes what I’m asking it to hold. Every cell recoils, trying to reject one force or the other, trying to choose a side because that’s what living things do—specialize, commit, become one thing and not another.
But I don’t let them choose. I force them to embrace both.
The paradox should tear me apart. Every law of magic, every rule that governs how power works in this realm, says this can’t happen.
But I’ve never been good at following rules.
The pain doesn’t come all at once.
It begins in my marrow—deep in the hollow spaces inside my bones. At first, it’s just pressure, then friction, then something worse. Not heat. Not cold. Justwrong.Like my skeleton is being rewritten, and every word burns going in.
My bones don’t break. Theyreshape.One by one, they twist and reform, molecule by screaming molecule, into something that can bear two opposing truths without splintering. I can feel the structure shift—patterns that shouldn’t exist, sharp and precise, until my joints ache under the weight of whatever new rule the universe just forced on me.
Each bone has its own voice in the chorus of pain. Femur. Tibia. Every vertebra straining to hold its place. My ribs close around a heart that beats both forward and backward, time itself uncertain which way to move.
Then my blood catches it. Not fire, not fever—something stranger. Each drop splits and tries to exist twice, Root and rot fighting to share the same space. I feel the battle in every vein, every fragile capillary, as my body decides whether it’s growing or dying.
Apparently, it chooses both.
My skin follows last. It doesn’t tear; itunfolds.The lines of my marksbloom open like creases in paper, revealing what was always written beneath. Petals force their way through—neither living nor dead, but both. They shimmer between green and gray, beauty and ruin, as if the world can’t decide what I’ve become.
They bloom and die and bloom again, but not in sequence. All of it happening together, all of itnow.
“Elle!” Kaelren’s voice, and I can hear it from seventeen different moments at once. The first time he said my name in my grandmother’s garden. The way he screams it now. Every iteration in between. They’re all happening simultaneously, layered like music becoming harmony.
