The Seed bloomed.
Not into a tree, but into a place—a sanctuary carved from time, spiraling outward in loops of thought and feeling. One moment they stood upon the broken earth before the Nameless King. The next, they were somewhere else.
The sky was woven from dreams.
The ground from shared memory.
And stretching in all directions, an orchard of impossible trees—each bearing fruit that shimmered with moments never lived, yet deeply known.
Kael blinked, dazed. "What… is this?"
Lyra knelt beside a tree. Her hand brushed one of the fruits—it pulsed gently, showing her face within its skin. Older. Smiling. Holding a child.
"A world that could be," she whispered. "One the Seed remembers, even if we haven't lived it yet."
Orion turned slowly. "It's possibility made real. A defense against the god's certainty."
Behind them, the Nameless King thundered beyond the veil of the orchard, unable to enter. Not fully. Not yet.
Caldrein walked among the trees like a priest in a sacred hall. "Every tree is a choice unmade. Every fruit a memory we never got to create."
"Then this is our weapon," Kael said. "A place the god cannot shape—because it didn't make it."
"No," Orion said softly. "This is our answer."
At the orchard's heart stood a single tree unlike the others—tall, luminous, made from twisted echoes of their shared pain and joy. It bore only one fruit, and that fruit pulsed with something… alive.
The child approached it. "This is where you decide."
Lyra frowned. "Decide what?"
"If you will leave the story as you found it… or grow something new."
Behind them, reality began to shake. The Nameless King pressed closer, howling through aeons of unspoken thought. Time buckled. Stars cracked.
Orion placed a hand on the tree.
He felt them all—his friends, his regrets, the versions of himself that had failed, the ones that had never existed, the one that could still save everything.
And in that moment, he understood:
They didn't have to defeat the god.
They had to outgrow it.
He plucked the fruit.
And ate.