Three Years After the Abdication
The amber light of Serenity's Dawn cast long shadows across the terraced garden where Lyralei knelt among the blood-red roses, her weathered hands gentle against thorns that had once drawn inspiration from battlefield carnage. At fifty-six, the former Iron Mother of the multiverse had traded her armor for simple work clothes, her legendary graviton blade for gardening shears. Yet even in this pastoral setting, death clung to her—the roses bloomed more vibrantly where her tears had fallen, as though the soil itself remembered the weight of her choices.
