The shock wave hits me. I stagger, catch myself, and turn.
Thalia.
She's on her back on the ground, the locket blazing one final pulse of white at her chest before dimming to silver. Her hands have left the root floor. The anchor has released because thereis nothing left to anchor. Her eyes are closed, her breathing shallow, her marks dim.
I am beside her in two steps. My hands find her face. "Thalia. Thalia, open your eyes."
She opens them. Green, clear, focused. Present. Here.
"Did it work?" she asks.
Behind me, the Cathedral's remains settle into a field of white flowers under a pale violet sky that is already beginning to clear. The Bloomfall Moon fades. The fractures in the boundary close. The sky lightens from violet to indigo to blue; the color returning in bands, and real sunlight breaks through for the first time.
Elle walks out of the garden. She's covered in petals. Her marks are still glowing gold, fading slowly, and her face is wet with tears that she isn't bothering to wipe away. She sees Thalia on the ground and runs.
She drops beside us. Her hands find Thalia's hand. My hand finds Elle's.
The three of us, on the ground, in a field of white flowers under a sky that is blue again.
"It worked," I say.
“Well,” Peeble says into the silence, “that escalated in ways I specifically warned against.”
The light keeps spreading. Warm, clean, gold. It rolls across the battlefield and the Verdance and the meadows beyond, and wherever it touches, the world gets a little quieter, a little more still.
Then the white light swells. Brighter. Filling the sky, the ground, and the space between us. It swallows the flowers and the field and the Verdance and the Heartwood and the whole of Wynmire, and the last thing I see before it takes everything is my daughter's face, and my mate's hand in mine, and the locket at Thalia's chest catching the light one final time.
Then silence.
Iwake up in sunlight.
I'm lying on grass. Real grass, cool and damp, the kind that grows in meadows and smells like rain and earth and something green that reminds me so strongly of Grandma Jo's garden that my chest hurts before I'm fully awake.
My marks are quiet. Not pulsing, not glowing, just present. Thin golden lines along my collarbone, steady and warm against my skin, like it's been turned down to a resting frequency. I'm wearing simple clothes: pants and a linen shirt, slightly damp with morning dew.
I sit up. The world tilts, steadies, resolves.
The first thing I see is the Heartwood.
It's still there. Rising above the treeline a quarter mile to the east, its silver-white trunk massive and unmistakable, its canopy spreading outward in branches that catch the sunlight and throw dappled shadows across the ground. The living towers of the Verdance cluster around its base, their pale wood surfaces catching the morning light. Root bridges arc between them. The vine-covered walkways glow faintly with the last residual pulse of the golden veins.
But the surrounding landscape has changed. The concentric rings of the Verdance are sitting in terrain I know. Rolling hills covered in wildflowers, purple and gold and white, stretching outward from the city's edges.
The Verdance is in Wynmire.
Not dropped onto it. Not transported. Merged. The living city has rooted itself into the northeastern hills, and the transition between the Verdance architecture and Wynmire landscape is seamless. Root-paths extend from the city's outer ring into the surrounding meadows, and where they meet the native soil, wildflowers grow along the edges in thick clusters, as if the two ecosystems met and decided to collaborate. The Verdance didn't land on Wynmire. It grew into it.
"Elle."
Kaelren is beside me. Lying on the grass two feet away, already awake, propped on one elbow. His corruption marks are dim; the dark lines along his forearms are barely visible in the morning light. His silver eyes are clear, calm, carrying none of the desperate intensity I've grown so used to seeing. He looks rested.
"We're in Wynmire," I say.
"Yes."
"The Verdance is in Wynmire."
"Yes."
