Time moved differently after the silence.
No more pulsing roots beneath the stone. No more whispered chants beneath breath. The Garden was dead—or buried—but Solarae remained, cracked and coughing smoke, a city built over something it never understood. Now, it simply waited.
Kael stayed for a while.
He didn't rebuild. Didn't lead. Didn't speak much. He just walked the ruins with ash in his boots and quiet in his blood, watching the world breathe for the first time without sap in its lungs.
Eris lingered too.
But not with him—not always.
She slept under broken archways, alone, and sometimes disappeared for days beyond the walls. When she came back, she carried water from far-off wells, or dried root samples, or news: scavenger groups approaching, weather turning, dead ground slowly greening.
Her brand was gone. But some part of her still wore it in the way she looked at trees, in the way she touched her wrist when she thought no one was watching.
One morning, she found Kael sitting beside the sprout.
It had grown.
Only slightly. Its black stem now reached mid-palm height, its tip unfurled into a single narrow leaf. Not wide like a blade, not soft like a petal. Something in-between. A line of faint silver traced its edge like a memory.
Eris crouched, brushing a finger over the soil. "You think it remembers?"
"I don't know," Kael said.
"But you think about it."
He didn't answer.
Instead, he touched his side—the place where Mercy once hung. He still felt its absence like phantom weight. Sometimes, when the wind rose, he imagined it humming at the edge of hearing. A sound just out of reach.
He didn't miss it.
But he hadn't forgotten it, either.
They never decided to leave.
There was no plan, no route. Just a morning when Kael stood at the southern gate with a pack and a waterskin, and Eris appeared behind him with a nod and a cloak slung over one shoulder.
They walked.
Through ash, then scrub, then the edges of green.
On the third day, Eris said, "I want to see the ocean."
Kael looked at her. "Why?"
"Because I need to know not everything turned silver."
He nodded. "I'll head east after."
She didn't ask why. Didn't press. They knew each other too well for that.
By the end of the second week, they found a watchtower overtaken by birds. Someone had left a message carved in its stone foundation:
"We are not roots. We are wind."
Eris laughed for the first time in weeks.
"You think they meant that, or just wanted to sound wise?"
Kael shrugged. "Either way, they're gone."
But the tower still stood. And the sky beyond it was clean.
A few days later, they reached a settlement where wildflowers had started blooming in old irrigation lines.
Children played in cracked canals filled with clear rainwater. An old man sat carving birds into a broken table leg, humming to himself. His tune sounded faintly familiar—like an Order lullaby, stretched and softened.
Eris watched them in silence. Kael stood beside her.
"I don't think I know how to live in peace," he said quietly.
"You will," she answered. "But maybe not all at once."
In a different part of the world—weeks later—Kael dreamed.
He sat beside a black field where everything had been cut low. The stalks bled silver, but the soil below them pulsed gold. Mercy lay in his lap, clean, calm, unburied.
"Was I ever yours?" it asked.
"No," Kael whispered. "But I buried you anyway."
The blade smiled—not with a mouth, but with a tremble of light.
"Then maybe something will grow."
He woke cold.
And alone.
Back in Solarae, something moved beneath the soil.
Not far from the reliquary's sealed gate, where a single sprout had grown into a slender stalk with curling tendrils, a small group approached. Five figures. Two carried shovels. One held a small crate of seeds. Another bore a rusted map of the outer districts. The last—barefoot, draped in scavenged cloaks—held a polished bone dagger.
They said nothing at first. Just stood near the crater.
Then the girl with the dagger knelt and whispered something in a language none of the others knew.
When she stood, the sprout leaned toward her.
No one noticed.
In a half-collapsed library outside the southern ruins, a boy searching for firewood uncovered a half-burned blade hilt buried beneath soot. Its handle was wrapped in old bandage. A single rune marked its side: not Syndicate, not Order.
He showed it to his brother.
"What's this?"
The older boy frowned. "Just trash."
But the younger ran his fingers over the rune. "It feels like it's humming."
Eris reached the coast a month later.
The sea was blue.
Not bright, not clean—but blue. Not silver.
She stood barefoot in the surf, eyes closed, the tide lapping at her calves. Behind her, the sky cracked open just enough to let the sun slip through. The wind was cold.
For the first time, her joints didn't ache.
She smiled.
Then turned inland.
Kael found a village days later. Small. Newly settled. Survivors of the collapse.
They didn't know his name.
But when one of them—an old woman with roots tattooed down her arms—saw the way he looked at the horizon, she asked:
"You carry a story, don't you?"
Kael paused.
"I buried a sword," he said.
She nodded once. "That's a good start."
In Solarae, the sprout bloomed.
Not loudly.
Not with color or poison or pulse.
Just a single black blossom, no wider than a coin. Its center held a ripple of pale green. A crow landed beside it, head tilted. It did not peck. It only watched.
The air stirred.
The ground did not tremble.
But somewhere—far from roots, far from thrones, far from order and ruin—something in the wind whispered:
"Witness."