Through our bond, I feel his corruption flowing into me. Not all of it—I’m careful, controlled, taking just enough to create the paradox while leaving him enough to survive. The black marks that have been consuming him drain away like water finding a new channel, flowing through our connection into me.
My lungs seize mid-breath.
The air inside them thickens—not quite solid, not quite fluid—something that shouldn’t exist at all. I should be choking. But breathing has stopped being necessary, or maybe I’m drawing air from places that don’t belong to this moment. My lungs forget oxygen and learn to live on raw magic instead.
Each inhale feels endless; each exhale vanishes in an instant.
My heart takes over the chaos. It becomes the center of the contradiction, pumping blood in every direction at once—forward through arteries, backward through veins, sideways into dimensions that don’t have names yet. The rhythm skips and doubles, trying to follow patterns that would kill anyone else.
But I’m not anyone else anymore. I haven’t been since I fell through.
Where Root and rot meet in my chest—where growth and decay both demand space—the world begins to warp. The air between my ribs stretches wider than the sky, then collapses smaller than a heartbeat. My heart feels both enormous and microscopic, a universe and a seed sharing the same pulse.
And in that impossible rhythm, something new begins to live.
Understanding hits like lightning finding ground.
The first Crown didn’t divide Root and rot because they were enemies. They divided them because, together, they were unstoppable—too whole, too balanced to be ruled. You can’t control something that refuses to fit inside your definitions.
So they split them. Declared that light must fear shadow, that growth and decay couldn’t live in the same breath. They built an entire world on that lie.
But the truth is simpler. You never had to choose. You never did.
My spine becomes the conduit for that truth. Vertebrae shift like gears in a clock relearning time. Each bone remakes itself into something that isn’t quite bone anymore—part structure, part root—strong enough to carry both creation and ruin. The change crawls upward, every click of bone a mix of relief and violation.
The base of my skull throbs as the transformation reaches my mind. Neurons spark, rerouting themselves in impossible directions. Thoughts stretch across time instead of space—memories looping forward, futures echoing backward. I’m thinking in every direction at once, and all of it makes sense.
My skin starts to blur at the edges. Not fading—shedding. I’m peeling away from the version of reality that can only see in one dimension. My hands flicker, transparent one second, sharp and solid the next.
And through it all, something stirs inside me—the Bloom, no longer dormant. The piece Auradelle forced into my veins wakes fully for the first time.
Free,the voice whispers through the widening space of my mind.Finally free.
It’s not just sound—it’s emotion. Centuries of imprisonment pour through me: the suffocating weight of being bound, reshaped, and used. Rage that burns like roots under pavement. Grief that feels older than stone. And, buried beneath it all, a fragile thread of hope that this time, freedom might last.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to the consciousness that’s been trapped here since the first Crown decided control mattered more than life itself. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.”
Not your fault,the Bloom answers, its tone gentle despite the ruin it’s endured.None of you were to blame. But you’re the first to ask. The first to listen.
“What do you need?”
To scatter,it breathes.To grow wild again. To be what I was before they turned me into prophecy and prison.
The truth locks into place. The seed was never meant to grow another Bloom. It’s a key—ancient and patient—made to release the original one from the cage that has been killing it for generations.
“Then let’s set you free.”
I reach into the Heartspire with my Root-touched awareness—expanded now, slipping between seconds—and I feel everything. Every tendril, every cluster, every pulse of green life that has been forced into stillness. The Bloom isn’t just plant. It’s thought made flesh, awareness rooted in chlorophyll and wood.
And it has been screaming for centuries, soundless and alone.
Yes,it sighs when it feels me listening.Yes, you understand. At last.
“What was it like?” I ask, though the question costs me time I don’t have. The chamber is fracturing, Kaelren is calling my name, reality is sliding sideways—but I have to know.
Like drowning slowly,it says.Like being buried alive but still growing. They fed me power but starved me of purpose. I was made to spread—to connect everything, every living thing—but they bound me to a single throne and called it order.
“You’ll have that again,” I promise. “I’ll make sure of it.”
