The court had gone silent, listening.
“She died last year. Left me the house, the garden, everything. I went to settle the estate, to sell it all and move on with my neat, controlled life. But the garden was dead. Everything withered and brown.” Elle’s marks pulsed gently. “I sat in that dead garden and cried for the first time since finding my fiancé in bed with my best friend. Cried because the garden was honest—it showed exactly what happened when no one cared for something. When you assumed it would just keep growing without attention or love.”
She looked directly at Merithra. “That’s when the storm came. When the lightning struck. When I fell through to Wynmire. I think… I think maybe I was meant to. Because I finally understood that nothing grows without being tended. Not plants. Not love. Not even yourself.”
The silence that followed was complete.
My entire body went rigid. My carved marks flared with sudden violence, corruption spreading across the table before I caught it.
I’d known about the ex-fiancé. She’d mentioned him in passing—an explanation for why she’d been at her grandmother’s house, why she’d been vulnerable enough for the portal to take her. But she’d never told me this. Never said he’d been in bed with her best friend. Never explained the full scope of the betrayal that had broken her.
The rage that filled me was absolute and consuming. This wasn’t just an ended relationship—it was a double betrayal. Two people she’d trusted most, destroying her in the same moment. Making her feel like she wasn’t enough when the truth was they hadn’t deserved her at all.
I wanted to find this man, this pathetic excuse for a partner. Wanted to show him what real betrayal felt like. What real pain could be. The corruption in my marks responded to the violence of my thoughts, spreading further before I caught it and forced it back.
My hand clenched on the table, wood beginning to transform under my touch.
Then Merithra began to clap, slow and deliberate. “A perfect story. Honest and raw and human.” She smiled, and for once it seemed genuine. “So let me tell you about the convergence. What it really is, not the sanitized version the Crown would have you believe.”
Elle sat back down slowly, still catching her breath from the vulnerability of her story.
“The convergence isn’t Root and Bloom reuniting,” Merithra continued. “It’s the realm trying to reset itself. To return to a state before the split.”
“What split?” Elle asked.
“Root and Bloom were one once. A single force of growth and preservation in perfect balance. But something broke them apart. Something that required them to become opposites instead of complements.”
“What?” I demanded, still fighting the urge to destroy something in honor of Elle’s piece of shit ex.
Merithra’s eyes found mine. “You really don’t know the full story? Or have you just accepted the sanitized version they teach in the Crown’s histories?” She laughed, bitter and ancient. “Humans. Humans broke them apart. The first one to fall through, specifically. They made a choice that forced the split, and the realm has been trying to heal itself ever since.”
I went still. I’d heard whispers, fragments of old stories that suggested humans were involved in the original schism. But the Crown had always dismissed them as myth, propaganda from the early wars. “That’s not possible. The split happened before recorded history.”
“Before official history,” Merithra corrected. “The Crown has spent millennia burying the truth. Easier to blame natural forces than admit a human unmade the realm’s fundamental nature.”
Elle went very still. “Are you saying…?”
“I’m saying every human who falls through is an echo of that first breaking. And you, my dear, with your unprecedented marks and your impossible transformation—you might be the echo that finally shatters everything completely.” Merithra leaned forward. “Or the one that finallyheals it. The convergence will force you to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Whether to maintain the split or merge the forces back together. But here’s what the Crown doesn’t want you to know—both choices have been made before. Multiple times. And both have failed.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “The convergence is supposed to be a singular event.”
“Is it?” Merithra’s smile was sharp. “Or is that just what you’ve been told?”
The great hall went very still.
“How many times?” Elle’s voice was barely a whisper.
I noticed Eltrien tense across the table, his hands stilling on his wine glass. He knew something—had known something all along. His eyes met mine briefly, a warning there I couldn’t interpret.
“Who can say? The memories blur, fade, get overwritten. But sometimes they bleed through. In dreams. In moments of déjà vu. In the sense that you’ve done this before.”
Elle’s marks were glowing brighter now, pulsing with distress. I wanted to reach for her, to offer comfort, but my corruption would only hurt her.
“So I’m trapped?” she asked. “Doomed to make the same choice over and over?”
