And I could feel the Root itself. Ancient, patient, waiting.
Choose,it said without words.
“I don’t know how,” I said to the green.
Then learn.
The power flooded through me, and suddenly I understood. The marks weren’t trying to control me. They were trying to connect me. To make me part of something larger, older, more necessary than individual consciousness.
But I could choose how that connection worked. I could be a conduit or a participant. A tool or a partner.
I chose partner.
The pain receded, replaced by something else. Awareness. Connection. Purpose.
I opened eyes I didn’t remember closing and found myself standing in a grove that had been transformed. Where there had been moss, there were now impossible-looking flowers, growing in patterns that told stories in a language older than words. Where there had been fungi, there were now trees—saplings, but growing visibly, reaching toward light that shouldn’t exist this deep in the hollow.
And where I stood, there was a garden. Small, wild, but undeniably mine.
“Interesting,” the Sage said, and they sounded genuinely surprised. “You didn’t choose control or chaos.”
“I chose both,” I said, and my voice had harmonics now, like wind through leaves.
“That’s not possible.”
“A lot of impossible things are happening lately.”
I looked at my hands. The marks had spread to my fingertips, but they weren’t just glowing anymore. Now they reflected the full spectrum of plant life—green of new growth, brown of fertile earth, red of autumn leaves, white of winter bark. They shifted and changed, never quite settling on one pattern.
“How do you feel?” Eltrien asked, healer’s concern in his voice.
“Different. But still me. Mostly me, anyway.” I flexed my fingers, watching the marks shift through their color changes. “Everything feelsmore alive. Like I can hear the plants breathing.”
“The first threshold is the easiest,” the Sage warned. “There will be others, each one taking more of your humanity.”
“How many?”
“As many as it takes to become what you’re meant to be.”
“And what am I meant to be?”
“That remains to be seen.”
Kaelren approached slowly, like I might explode. With the power humming through me, it wasn’t an unreasonable concern.
“Your eyes,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless.
“What about them?”
“They’re changing. Gold with green, like sunset through leaves.” He studied me with clinical detachment. “The transformation is accelerating.”
“Thanks for sugar-coating it.”
“Would you prefer pretty lies?”
“I’d prefer not being turned into a plant zombie.”
“Then you should have stayed on Earth.” His silver eyes were cold as winter. “But you’re here now, wearing marks that should have been mine, so we’ll make do with what we have.”
