My voice is low, rough, but steady. The Grove doesn’t stir—but it listens. It always has.
“I watched you kneel beside the ward stone. I felt you call me. But I couldn’t come.”
The words catch in my throat. I swallow hard.
“I wasn’t made for this, Clara. Not for wanting. Not for feeling. I was shaped to guard, to stay. To die when the tree dies.”
The moon catches the edges of the sacred tree, its failing glow flickering like a heartbeat too tired to continue.
“You were a light in the dark,” I whisper. “A bloom in old soil.”
I rest my hand against the bark one last time.
“But I can’t live in your light.”
A breath.
A silence.
Then I step back, deeper into shadow.
Because if the Grove must fall, let it be with me in it.
And not her.
I don’t know if she hears me.
But I feel her tears hit the soil moments later.
I watch from the shadows as she stumbles into the glade, clutching something small to her chest—leather-bound, frayed at the edges.
Her father’s seed journal.
She drops to her knees beside the dying rootline, sobbing, the sound quiet but endless.
Like something breaking that doesn’t know how to stop.
She doesn’t call out for me.
Not this time.
She just holds that journal like it’s the last piece of anything that ever made sense, pages fluttering in the moonlight. Her shoulders quake. Her breath catches and stutters, and I swear I feel it in the bark beneath my feet.
I want to go to her.
To hold her. Tostay.
But I don’t.
Because staying would destroy her in ways she doesn’t see yet.
So I do the one thing I’ve ever been good at.
I disappear into the shadow.
And I leave her there, in moonlight and memory.
Alone.
