She nods against my shoulder. She doesn't speak. She doesn't have to.
The festival begins at sundown.
The Verdance transforms. The golden veins in the root-paths flare to full brightness, turning every pathway into a ribbon of light. The flower garlands overhead burst open in synchronized waves, thousands of blooms opening at once, releasing clouds of luminous pollen that drift upward and hang in the air like golden dust. The effect is a city wrapped in a soft, shimmering haze, every surface glowing.
Flower lanterns rise from the plazas. Living flowers the size of dinner plates, their petals curled into cups that hold globes of trapped, glowing orbs. They float upward on stalks of heated air, hundreds of them, rising slowly through the canopy and clustering in the sky above the Heartwood like a second set ofstars. Each one was grown by someone in the city. Each one carries a wish, a memory, a name.
People fill the streets. Families move through the glowing pathways together, children riding on shoulders, couples holding hands. Everyone is dressed in fabrics of every color woven with the Verdance's living-plant fiber, each one unique, each one grown for the person wearing it. Greens and golds and deep purples and warm reds.
Tables line the plazas, long communal spreads full of food set on living wood surfaces, heaped with dishes the city has been preparing for days. The temperature-shifting pastries from the market are here, along with platters of glazed fruit and roasted root vegetables, and something that looks like bread but tastes like cake, sweet and dense and warm from the inside. People eat standing up, sitting on benches, or cross-legged on the root-paths. They pass plates to strangers. They pour drinks for people they've never met. The entire city is one table tonight.
Music pours from every plaza. The bodhrán-style drums I heard at the tavern are everywhere, keeping a pulse that matches the Heartwood's rhythm, and layered over them are stringed instruments, flutes carved from living wood, and voices. The singing starts soft, individual, someone humming a melody in a corridor. By the time it reaches the main plaza, it's a chorus. Hundreds of voices singing in a language I don't know, the melody rising and falling in patterns that feel old and certain and defiant.
They're singing because tomorrow might be the end.
Peeble lands on my shoulder as I step out of the residential corridor. They take in the lanterns, the singing, the golden haze, the thousands of people dressed in living color, and for once, they say nothing. They just sit there, their small weight warm against my neck.
"Peeble?"
"Give me a moment," they say quietly. "I'm memorizing this."
I give them the moment. I take one for myself, too.
The gratitude circle at the base of the Heartwood is already half-full with white blooms. People approach one or two at a time, kneel at the edge of the golden mandala, place their flower, and speak a name. Some of them whisper. Some of them say the name out loud, set the flower down, and stand, and the Heartwood's pulse brightens for a single beat in response.
Thalia finds me at the edge of the circle. She's carrying two white flowers, and she hands me one.
"Together," she says.
We kneel at the edge of the mandala. The sun is warm on my knees through the fabric of the dress. I set my flower down and I say the name.
"Jo."
Beside me, Thalia sets hers down and says two.
"Elle. Kaelren."
The Heartwood pulses. Bright, steady, warm. The golden veins carry the names into the roots, into the city, into the living architecture that has held this place together for longer than anyone alive can remember.
We stand. Thalia's hand finds mine and squeezes once, brief and firm, and then she lets go.
The first lights of the aurora appear on the horizon.
It starts as a thin line of violet above the treeline, barely visible through the canopy of the Heartwood. Then it spreads. The violet deepens, widens, bleeds upward through the sky in slow, rolling waves that shift from purple to blue to a pale, electric green. The aurora fills the sky above the Verdance, and the flower lanterns floating overhead, each one becoming a tiny mirror that multiplies the color until the whole city is bathed in it.
The singing gets louder. The drums pick up. The aurora pulses in time with the Heartwood's rhythm, or the Heartwood pulses in time with the aurora, and the boundary between the city and the sky dissolves into a single, living thing.
Somewhere behind us, Kaelren is watching. I can feel him.
I don't turn around. Not yet.
I reach for Thalia's hand again. She takes it. We stand there, mother and daughter, watching the city hum around us like a heartbeat that has no intention of stopping.
The suit fits like it was grown for me, which it was. Dark fabric that the Verdance shaped overnight, tailored through the shoulders and chest, the material warm and faintly luminous in the way everything in this city is. I adjust the collar as I walk the corridor toward the central plaza, the distant pulse of festival music filtering through the root-paths beneath my feet. The golden veins in the walls are running at full strength tonight, turning every surface into something that glows.
I step into the plaza. The Bloomfall Eve festival is in full swing around me, the air thick with pollen and the scent ofgarlands opening and closing in synchronized waves overhead. I catalogue none of it. My attention goes exactly where it always goes, with a precision that borders on involuntary, and it takes me approximately two-tenths of a second to find her.
The sight nearly brings me to my knees.
