The skeletal hand did not move again.
It remained frozen at the base of the sprout, fingers curled slightly inward, the bones dry and black-veined. At its wrist, silver tendrils wrapped like sinew, pulsing faintly. The sprout no longer leaned toward the boy. Now, it bent eastward.
Toward something unseen.
Kael crouched beside it at dawn, watching as the hand's knuckles twitched once in the wind. Whether it was wind at all, he couldn't tell.
"It's pointing," the chronicler whispered from behind him.
Kael didn't turn. "No. It's offering."
They buried the second child that morning.
Her veins had glowed blue after touching the sprout. She'd spoken in strange rhymes for a day, then collapsed without warning. No pain. No fever. Just... stopped.
Her eyes had remained open even in death.
As they lowered her body, the settler who had cared for her — a broad-shouldered woman named Mara — sat curled by the fire. Her lips moved slowly, repeating the same melody.
It wasn't hers.
It was the lullaby the girl had sung before she died.
Her partner wept beside her. Mara didn't respond. She hummed the tune over and over, eyes unfocused.
Eris stood over the grave longer than anyone else. "It's not a witness," she muttered. "It's a collector. It doesn't remember. It archives."
Kael said nothing.
That evening, Kael met with the chronicler in her tent. She'd laid out every scroll she had — sketches of the Pale Root, fragments of Mercy's runes, ancient scythe scripts.
He pointed to a word scrawled at the edge of a half-burned parchment: gallierum.
"It means gallery," she confirmed. "But in the old tongue, it meant something else too."
"What?"
She hesitated. "Graveyard. Or... exhibit."
He leaned back slowly. "Exhibit of what?"
"Memories, maybe. Power. Failure." She pointed to another symbol — a spiral within a spiral. "This was on the First Scythe's hilt. It marked its purpose. Not to cut — to preserve."
Kael stared at the parchment, unease tightening his chest.
The boy had not moved since his last whisper.
Some settlers began leaving ink-scrawled names at his feet — lost loved ones, faded memories, fragments of song. One man placed his father's bloodstained belt beside the boy's foot and wept.
"They're calling him the Index," the chronicler told Kael.
Kael stiffened. "He's a child."
"Not anymore."
Eris walked the perimeter at sunset.
She carried a cloth-wrapped blade — not Mercy, not anything from the Order. Just a shard of metal she'd scavenged from an old helm. Her hands were steady.
She'd seen too much. The boy's stillness. The skeletal sprout-hand. The shard she found lodged in the soil earlier that morning — blackened, curved. A piece of Mercy's hilt.
Kael had stared at it when she handed it to him, eyes wide.
"It's not possible," he said.
"Neither was this," she replied, gesturing toward the sprout. "But here we are."
Inside the crater, the sprout had changed again.
Its grip had grown another joint. The bark was now ribbed, the texture close to scar tissue. The skeletal hand now cradled something small — the blackened shard of Mercy's hilt, polished and clean.
Kael reached toward it. His fingers brushed bone — and in that instant, everything stopped.
The camp. The wind. Even the boy.
He wasn't touching metal. He was touching memory. It moved through him like cold water. Visions flickered — Seth's tank. Draven's husk. The Hollow King's stitched grin.
And beneath it all — the sound of Mercy's voice, no longer screaming.
Just... breathing.
He pulled back. His hands trembled. The shard burned cold — not just chilled, but sharp, bone-deep, a frostbite ache that lingered.
Eris stepped in behind him. "What did you feel?"
Kael shook his head. "Not pain. Not hunger."
"Then what?"
He looked at the boy, still silent beneath the sprout's shadow. "Recognition."
That night, one of the settlers lost her memory.
She'd tried to help the blue-veined girl before her death. Carried her. Fed her. Touched her hand in comfort.
Now, she couldn't remember her own name.
She sat by the fire muttering fragments of old nursery songs. Her partner wept beside her, unheard.
Eris watched in silence, fists clenched.
"I want to burn it," she said to Kael. "The sprout. The boy. All of it."
He stood across from her near the crater rim, shoulders hunched.
"You don't mean that."
"I do. This is a new Garden, Kael. One that doesn't scream or thrash. It whispers. It waits. And that's worse."
"It's not the same."
"No? Then explain the girl's blood. The shard. The boy's voice sounding like a dead sword." She stepped closer. "You think it's different. You want it to be. But if you're wrong…"
He turned away. "I'm trying to understand it. Isn't that what we failed to do last time?"
Eris exhaled hard, then tossed a small vial at his feet. It rolled to a stop. Inside, a swirl of silver and blue shimmered.
"The gel. From his blood. I tested it again."
"What happened?"
"It froze." She looked at him. "Literally. In seawater, it formed a crust. Solid. Cold. It doesn't heal. It numbs. And then it silences."
Kael knelt and picked it up. Held it to the firelight.
Eris crossed her arms. "Still think it's mercy?"
He didn't answer.
At the far edge of camp, Ilya sat cross-legged, speaking to no one.
The firelight caught her eyes — too wide, too still. Her voice drifted in a steady whisper.
"She buried a sword. He buried a brother. They buried a king. But nothing stays buried."
Kael approached slowly.
"What are you saying?"
Ilya tilted her head. "Roots twist in the dark. But memory? Memory finds light."
He crouched beside her. "And the boy?"
She blinked. "He's not collecting. He's offering."
"Offering what?"
She smiled. "The things we forgot to grieve."
A wind stirred the crater. The skeletal hand curled tighter around the Mercy shard.
And something began to grow from it.
A sliver of black root unfurled from the shard's base, reaching down into the soil. It didn't pulse like the sprout. It didn't adapt. It just sank deeper.
Kael and Eris saw it at the same moment.
Her breath hitched. "It's grafting."
Kael whispered, "No... it's anchoring."
That night, Kael didn't sleep.
He dreamed — but not of Seth, or Mercy, or the past.
He dreamed of a city with no walls. People moving like shadows. Faces without mouths. Weapons displayed like art. And in the center, beneath glass — the blackened sprout, mounted like a relic.
A gallery.
When he woke, his palms ached.
He looked down and found dirt beneath his nails.
As the sun rose, the boy stood for the first time in days.
He didn't speak. He walked to the skeletal hand and placed both palms on its bones.
Then he turned, slowly, and stared at Kael.
Kael stepped forward.
The boy opened his mouth and whispered just one thing.
"I remember."
Kael froze. "Remember what?"
But the boy only smiled.
Not cruel. Not kind.
But Kael had seen it before —
In a lab, behind Aetherium glass.
Seth had smiled just like that.