I channel Root magic through my palm into his chest. Instead of attacking the vine matter, I encourage it. I coax it. I do what I did to the Root construct in the Thornwood, what I did to the dead soil in the iterations, what I do to every broken thing I touch.
I grow something.
Flowers bloom. Small at first, barely visible, pushing through the seams where vine meets corrupted skin. White petals with gold centers. They grow outward, spreading across his chest, down his arms, along the vine connections. Wherever they touch, the dead matter softens. The rigid, locked architecture of the Cathedral's core loosens. Not collapsing. Transforming. The vine structure shifts from armor to trellis, from prison to garden, the same material repurposed into something that supports growth instead of preventing it.
The man in the center closes his eyes.
"There you are," he whispers, and his voice is clearer now, less layered, more present. "I knew you'd come. I always knew you'd come."
"I'm here," I say. "And I'm growing you a way out."
I push harder. The flowers spread faster. They climb the walls of the cavity, filling the vine connections, transforming the cables that bound him into living garlands.
Behind me, Thalia holds the anchor. Kaelren holds Thalia. And the locket blazes white at our daughter's chest, tethering her to the timeline, keeping the door open while I walk through it.
The flowers reach the man's face. They grow gentle petals brushing his cheeks, vines loosening their grip on his jaw and neck. His eyes open one more time. Silver. Clear. Focused on me with an expression I've seen on one face across every timeline, every cycle, every version of this story.
Love. Tired and battered and fused with despair, but love. The kind that survives being turned into a building.
"Let go," I say. "You can let go now. I'll grow you something better than this."
He looks at me. Then past me, to where Kaelren kneels beside Thalia.
To the man who is him and isn’t him. The one who made different choices at the point where the paths diverged.
"Take care of her," he says. Not to me. To Kaelren.
And then he lets go.
Ifeel her begin.
Not through sight. Through the Rootline, through my corruption, through the shared architecture that connects every version of me to the consciousness driving this Cathedral. I feel Elle press her palm against the core, and the contact reverberates through the entire locked structure, a vibration that runs from the center outward through every vine and root and thorn until it reaches the floor where my hands cover Thalia's.
She's growing.
I can't see it from here. But I feel it. The growth. Root magic pushing into dead wood, into collapsed reality, into the consciousness of a man who forgot how to be anything but a weapon.
It doesn't feel like destruction. It feels like spring. Like something frozen beginning to thaw, cracks spreading through ice, the first green shoots pushing through.
The Cathedral shudders. Not the violent convulsion from when Thalia first activated the anchor. Something gentler. A shift, as if the structure is taking a breath it hasn't taken in years.
Thalia's hands are steady beneath mine. The locket blazes white at her chest, its pulse matching the Heartwood's rhythm back in the Verdance, a tether that runs from here to there and holds her in the present with the grip of a grandmother's love preserved in silver. She's solid. She's holding. The cost is visible in the lines around her mouth and the sweat tracking down her temples, but she is not flickering, and the anchor is not failing.
"Something's changing," she says. Her eyes are closed, reading the anchor from the inside. "The Cathedral's internal structure is transforming."
"She's doing it," I say.
I hold Thalia's hands and I wait. The hardest discipline I have ever practiced. Every instinct demands I go to Elle, stand between her and the core, put my body in front of whatever happens next. I have spent my life being the thing that goes first, that takes the blow, that holds the line between the people I love and the world that wants to take them.
I stay. I hold. I let her work.
The Cathedral shudders again. Stronger this time. The vine walls of the cavity are changing. I can see it now. White flowers are growing through the walls.
I watch them push through the vine matter in slow, steady blooms. Small at first, barely visible, then larger, spreadingoutward in waves that travel the length of the cavity. White petals with gold centers.
She is filling the Cathedral with herself.
The vine connections running from the core to the walls go slack. One by one, the cables of living tissue that bound the Iteration Fourteen Kaelren to the structure loosen, fray, and transform. Where they were dark and pulsing with distributed consciousness, they become garlands of white flowers, the same material repurposed, the same power redirected.
