جميع فصول : الفصل

Ava’s POVThe garden feels different in the morning.Not because anything has changed visibly — the black frost lilies still grow in their protected stone bed, the mountain still breathes its cold mist through the northern cliffs, and Valley Creek still carries the same steady, patient rhythm it always has.But everything inside me has shifted.Not broken.Aligned.Milrac stands beside me as Vessa studies the lilies like they are an unsolved language rather than a plant. Cassian is somewhere in the lower archive wing cataloguing Council records we still haven’t fully unpacked. The network hums softly through the mountain, no longer chaotic, just… aware.Structured.Alive.Vessa crouches carefully near the edge of the garden bed. “The soil composition here is unusual,” she says quietly. “It’s been engineered to slow metabolic decay in the root system.”Milrac doesn’t look away from her. “It was designed to preserve them indefinitely.”“By who?”He pauses briefly. “No one I still trust.