From the center of the cavity, I hear Elle's voice. Clear, steady, carrying through the softening structure.
"Let go. You can let go now."
Then I feel him.
The shared pulse. The resonance between every version of us that exists in the architecture of the Rootline itself. He's there, and I'm here, and for one stretched moment, we are the same person standing on both sides of a choice.
The vine wall in front of me softens. Becomes translucent, and through it, I can see the cavity's center.
I can see him.
He's sitting on the root seat, but the vines that bound him have become flowers.
Elle's hand is on his chest. Her marks are blazing gold. The white flowers cover him from neck to feet, and they're still spreading, still growing, still transforming the Cathedral's structure from the inside out.
He looks up and sees me.
His silver eyes lock on mine, and I feel the full weight of his recognition. He raises his hand.
Slowly, with the deliberate effort of a man whose muscles have been vine for years, he lifts his palm and presses it flat against the translucent wall from the inside.
I cross the distance. The flowers brush my shoulders as I push through the transformed vine matter, and it parts for me because it isn't armor anymore. It's a garden. I stop at the wall and raise my hand, pressing it flat against the surface from the outside.
Our palms align. Mine is warm flesh and corruption marks. His is vine-laced skin and Root matter that is already beginning to bloom. The wall between us is thin enough that I can feel the heat of his hand through it. Two versions of the same man, separated by the width of a petal.
He looks at me with those silver eyes, and what I see in them is not rage, not despair, not the feral obsession that drove him into the Cathedral's body all those years ago.
Relief.
"You found her," he says. His voice comes through the wall, muffled and layered, but clear enough to understand. "The real her."
"I found her."
"And the girl." His eyes shift, looking past me, toward where Thalia kneels at the edge of the cavity. "She looks like both of you."
"She's our daughter."
He closes his eyes. When he opens them, they're wet.
He looks at Elle, whose hand is still on his chest, whose marks are still blazing, whose white flowers are still transforming everything they touch. "She always was the answer. Every version of us knew that. We just kept trying to fight our way to her instead of letting her grow her way to us."
The flowers reach the wall between us. They push through the translucent surface, white petals erupting around our pressed palms, vines curling between our fingers, connecting us through the living matter that was once a prison and is becoming a garden.
"Take care of them," he says.
"I will."
He smiles. It's my smile, on a face that has forgotten how to wear it, and the cracks where the expression doesn't quite fit, make it the most honest thing I've seen from any version of myself.
Time to go.
The flowers bloom through his body the way morning light fills a room. The vine matter that made up his form transforms into white petals and golden stems, and his body dissolves into the garden Elle is building, becoming part of it instead of apart from it. His hand against the wall softens, becomes petal, becomes light.
His silver eyes hold mine until the last second. Then they close, and the man who was the Cathedral becomes flowers, and the flowers become light, and the light fills the cavity and the walls and the ceiling and the floor and pours outward through every crack and seam in the structure.
The Cathedral explodes.
Not with force. With growth. The entire structure blooms at once, transforming in a single, cascading wave of white flowers that erupts from the inside out. The root-legs dissolve into garlands. The petal-mouths open one last time and release not pollen but petals, thousands of them, white and gold, pouring upward into the sky. The vine armor cracks and blooms and falls away, and the body of the Cathedral becomes a garden so massive it covers the field between the outer ring and the treeline in a carpet of white flowers.
