No heat. No pull. No answer.
That’s not Elle. It’s the Bloom wearing her shape. A lure, a puppet of sap and memory, crafted for exactly the kind of desperate fool who would charge a walking cathedral of teeth to save a ghost.
A fool like the one currently charging across the flooded clearing with Root magic burning in both hands.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren slams into the Bloom-core like a battering ram. His fighters fan out at its base, hacking at root-legs and dodging whipping tendrils. He ignores the legs entirely and climbs, driving bare hands into the vine-armor as if it yields for him. The Root-veins beneath his skin pulse in time with the cathedral’s rhythm, syncing, aligning, almost merging.
He’s trying to carve her out of it.
"He sees the shape," I say. My voice sounds distant to my own ears. "He thinks it’s her."
"It’s not," Peeble says firmly. "You know it’s not."
"I know."
But knowing doesn’t stop the feeling. Watching him climb that thing, watching him tear through vine and thorn with bare hands, I understand him completely. I understand the math he’s done in his head. The calculation that saysany chance, even a wrong one, is better than standing still. I’ve done that math. I’ve almost acted on it. The only difference between us is that I have Peeble on my shoulder telling me I’m an idiot, and he doesn’t.
"We should go," Peeble says. "Now. Before this gets worse."
It gets worse.
Iteration Fourteen Kaelren reaches the heart of the Bloom-core and lets go. Full Root magic, unrestrained, tearing out of him in waves that make the air shudder. The cathedral screams, a single, layered sound from every petal-mouth at once, high and almost human.
But the Root doesn’t answer the way it should.
In our iteration, Root magic is power; dangerous, but wielded. Here, where the Bloom has devoured everything else, the Root is starved. It’s had nothing left to feed on.
And when Fourteen opens himself fully, pouring everything he has into the strike—
The Root reacts like a predator catching the scent of blood.
Vines burst from within the cathedral, Root, not Bloom. Dark and pulsing, the same shade as the veins beneath his skin. They don’t strike. They reach. Curling around his arms, his legs, his torso, sliding through the gaps in his stripped-down armor and sinking into the Root-veins already threaded through him.
He doesn’t scream.
He laughs.
It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard—not because it’s manic, though it is, but because I understand it. That laugh means he’s finished weighing outcomes. Finished holding himself back. He’s chosen his answer, and his answer is surrender.
“If she’s inside you,” he says, his voice carrying across the clearing with impossible clarity, “then I will be too.”
He opens his arms, and the vines take him. They lift him into the cathedral’s body, plant matter folding closed around him, sealing him in sap beside the silhouette that isn’t her and never was.
I can’t breathe.
My fingers lock against the rock, knuckles draining white as corruption spreads up my arms, black veins threading higher without my consent. Because I see it now. I see exactly what he’s become. Obsession without anchor. Love without direction. The version of me that stopped caring about returning, that burned everything down for the chance to reach her, even if reaching her meant becoming something that could never hold her.
That’s what I am without her.
Not a hero.
Not a prince.
Not even a monster.
Just gone.
Peeble and I stand there, stunned, for a breath too long before the collapse begins.
