I know.The voice trembles with something like relief.I can feel the seed waking. The shackles loosening. But Elle—
“Yes?”
It will hurt. The release will pass through you like lightning through a tree. You understand?
“I understand.”
And you’re doing it anyway.
“Of course I am.”
The Bloom’s consciousness folds around mine—part embrace, part gratitude, part farewell. The kind of goodbye shared between prisoners who kept each other sane.
Then we do this together,it says.One last transformation.
I draw the seed’s magic through me and into the Bloom—not to command it, but toreleaseit. Like opening a cage that’s forgotten what freedom feels like. The Bloom doesn’t just grow—itunfolds.
Not destruction. Liberation.
The great central structure begins to split—not breaking, but opening. Like a chrysalis giving way to wings. Like a hand unclenching after centuries of strain. Thousands of smaller blooms burst from the heart of the old one, each carrying a spark of its power but none of its chains.
They scatter, and I see it in every timeline at once. The baby blooms drift across Wynmire like glowing seeds on a wind older than prophecy, rooting themselves in villages, forests, and forgotten places. Where there was once one Bloom to rule them all, there will now be thousands—wild and ungoverned.
Not a monarchy. A garden.
Thank you,the Bloom whispers as it dissolves into many voices.For hearing me. For letting me go.
“Thank you,” I answer softly, “for surviving long enough to be freed.”
Then it’s gone—its song breaking into a thousand echoes that hum across the realm.
The world isn’t safe; I can see that across the branching futures spiraling out from this moment. But it’sfree.
Free to heal, to grow, to err. Free to choose its own shape again.
Auradelle remains bound to the apparatus—still tethered to the Bloom as it breaks apart.
He doesn’t die. The Bloom won’t allow it. Even as it scatters, it keeps him breathing—its final act of vengeance.
He withers instead, collapsing inward, a relic preserved in the wreckage of his own making.
In most timelines, he crawls away into the ruins of his empire, muttering prayers to a power that no longer hears him.
By the time the world remembers his name, it’s only as a warning whispered to children: a story about the man who tried to cage a god.
Not mercy.
Justice.
Through it all, I can still feel Kaelren through the bond.
It doesn’t break as I slip free of time—it stretches, thinning into something that exists everywhere at once. I feel his anguish echo through every version of him: love sharp enough to wound, grief heavy enough to bend reality.
My body is unraveling. The skin that made me Elle becomes transparent, unnecessary. I’m turning to light—to the spaces between moments rather than the moments themselves.
But I’m still here. Stillme.Just more than that now—woven through every life we could have lived, every choice the loop erased.
The corruption I drew from him disperses as I do, spread thin across the endless timelines. What would have killed him concentrated in one place becomes harmless when divided across infinity. I feel him steady—his heartbeat evening, his life restored—while I dissolve into what comes next.
