Chapter 10 Sam
Sam
I woke to the smell of flowers.
Not a mere suggestion, like catching a breeze from a garden down the block—but thick, heavy, everywhere. The scent was in my hair, in my lungs, pressing against my skin like the whole world had shifted while I slept.
I sat up, blinking hard, and froze.
The inside of the hunting blind was unrecognizable.
What had once been rotting wood and packed dirt was now bursting with life.
Vines completely covered the walls, curling out between the slats, and their bright green leaves stretched toward the sun.
Tiny, pale blossoms clung to the beams, some spilling onto the floor, their petals scattering in soft piles.
Fruits hung in clusters—plums, figs, berries I didn’t recognize, all ripening in real time, swelling like the earth itself had decided harvest season was upon us at the cusp of spring.
And Faelan…
He wasn’t just part of it. He was the center of it.
He lay where we had left him, but his skin had deepened into something richer, greener, his hair now mostly blooming ivy, his beard tangled with flowers. He should have looked sick, fading. But he didn’t. He looked transformed.
Callie rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Welcome to the equinox.”
Beside her, Bethany sat up and looked around in wonder. “Is how things used to be—before human beings came along and screwed it all up?”
Callie scowled. “Given the state of my neglected backyard…I highly doubt it.”
Bethany nodded slowly, still staring at the ridiculous, lush greenery. “It’s like the forest folded over this place and swallowed it whole.”
Callie’s gaze landed on Faelan, her lips pressing into a thin line. “Is this it? Is this…what was supposed to happen?”
No one answered.
Because none of us knew.
Callie stood up and offered Bethany a hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s give them a minute.”
Oh shit.
She was giving me time to say goodbye.
I eased up beside Faelan as best I could without crushing the flowers and vines that now curled from his body, since I wasn’t sure where he ended anymore and the plants began. His breathing was steady, too steady, like he was already slipping beyond reach.
I exhaled and rubbed my hands over my face. “I don’t know if you can hear me,” I whispered, “but I’ve got something to tell you anyway.”
He didn’t stir.
“I came here to make Callie see reason. I was supposed to march into this place, wave my arms around, call her an idiot, and haul her back home.” I gave a short laugh, shaking my head. “Just goes to show how much I know.”
Nothing. No flicker of awareness.
I swallowed. “I was wrong about a lot of things. Not just about her. About myself.”
I traced my fingers over a fallen flower petal. It felt fragile, impossibly so—like it didn’t belong here, not with him.
“I spent so long designing my green spaces and convincing myself it mattered. And maybe it did, in some small way. But I thought that was nature. I thought a rooftop garden meant something. I thought I knew what the land was.” I let the petal fall from my fingers.
“I didn’t know a damn thing. The earth doesn’t need me. It never did.”
I traced the line of Faelan’s brow. It felt like birch bark.
“On the street where I grew up, every sidewalk was cracked. Nothing stayed smooth for long. There was one place, right outside my apartment, where a stretch of concrete had split in half—just a thin gap, maybe an inch wide, nothing important. They paved over it again and again, but the grass would always push through.”
Faelan didn’t stir, but I kept going.
“It didn’t matter how much blacktop they piled on.
It didn’t matter how many people walked across it every day.
Something always grew. I used to stop and stare at it when I was a kid, wondering how a single blade of grass could force its way through asphalt like that.
It wasn’t just surviving. It was winning.
” The words hovered in my chest for a second before I let them go. “I think you’re a survivor, too.”
His breath hitched.
I froze. “Faelan?”
Nothing.
I was berating myself for thinking I could make any sort of difference at all when, slowly—his eyes opened.
His gaze was steady, but there was distance in it, like he had just returned from somewhere far away.
“Of course the things you do matter,” he said. “They always do. Even if it’s only to you—that’s enough.”
His words settled in the air between us, heavier than they should have been.
I wanted to argue, and tell him that not everything mattered, because sometimes the things you built got paved over, and sometimes fighting didn’t change anything.
But I couldn’t. Because Faelan said nothing he didn’t mean.
His breath came slow, his chest barely moving, but his voice held the same weight it always had. Like the world had already given him all the answers, and he was just passing them down to me.
“Nothing is still,” he murmured. “Not the earth, not the rivers, not even the mountains. Change isn’t something you fight, Samantha.
It’s something you move with.” His fingers ghosted over my forearm.
They felt more like stem than flesh. “A tree doesn’t resist the wind.
It bends. A river doesn’t argue with the stone—it carves through it, reshapes it, until the land no longer remembers what it was before. ”
His gaze flickered to me, searching. “You don’t see the shape of your work as it is. Only as it has not yet become.”
I tried to grasp the thread of what he was saying. “So, what do you mean? You think everything I’ve done is just…waiting to grow?”
The hint of a smirk tugged at his lips. “Everything grows.” He turned his head slightly, taking in the vines that curled along the walls and the flowers that now bloomed from the wooden beams. “Even in the places you’d never expect. Like the grass growing through blacktop.”
I hated how much I wanted to believe him and stop fighting against nature. Especially when he was using my own logic to convince me.
And then—
Callie’s phone rang.
The sound shattered the moment, sharp against the hush of the blind.
I used to think her ringtone was cute. But not now. I glared at her hoodie until it quit.
And then it rang again.
And again.
Annoyed, I reached for her phone to silence it—
And froze when I saw the name on the screen.
My boss.
I stared at it, uncomprehending. Why the hell was he calling Callie’s phone?
The ringing stopped. Then immediately started again.
I clucked my tongue and swiped to answer. “What?”
There was a pause, and in that instant, I pictured the exact expression on his face—annoyed, smug, already preparing some passive-aggressive remark about my tone.
“Sam.” The clipped efficiency of his voice made my eye twitch. “Finally. I’ve been trying to reach you. Look, I need you to weigh in on something—”
“Are you serious?” I snapped.
A pause. “Excuse me?”
I sat up, heat surging through me. I was in the middle of the goddamn woods. I was on vacation. And the man I— I stopped the thought before it could finish. Faelan was being consumed by the land itself.
And my boss was calling not just me, but my friends, chasing me down to answer some asinine question about a project that, in the grand scheme of things, would mean absolutely nothing.
I didn’t even let him get another word in.
“I quit.”
Silence.
“…I’m sorry, what?”
“I. Quit,” I repeated, enunciating every syllable. “I should’ve done it a long time ago. You don’t actually care about the work—only the high you get from seeing how many hours you can get away with wringing out of the team.”
I heard him tale a breath like he was preparing to argue—to condescend, and likely claim I was being emotional.
So I didn’t give him the chance.
“You need to find someone else to call with your latest crisis, because it’s not gonna be me.”
Then I hung up.
Callie and Bethany stood in the doorway, drawn by the sound of my raised voice, watching me intently. But they didn’t interrupt.
I turned back to Faelan, hoping for something—a smirk, a knowing glance, some quiet confirmation that I’d finally made the right choice.
But his eyes were closed.
And the forest was still taking him.
Vines wove along his arms and curled into his hair, twining with the blossoms already rooted there.
Their petals were lush, impossibly bright, shifting from white to deep gold to red, like the trees had decided to offer up their finest blooms just to crown him.
The scent was thick, overwhelming, heady with life.
The hunting blind had become a shrine to something too alive to be a place of death anymore.
The old chipboard was now living wood, and green swallowed everything.
Fruits swelled on the vines, leaves stretched through the slats toward the sun, tendrils wound through the beams as if they were an arbor.
It was stunning.
So beautiful, I couldn’t help but wonder…what if I’d been selfishly fighting something that wasn’t meant to be stopped?
This was nature—the thing my green spaces purported to preserve.
Maybe Faelan had been right all along.
I let out a breath, steady this time, and let my hand brush one of the blossoms in his hair. It was soft, fresh, fully formed, like it had never known anything but bloom. This was beautiful. This was balance.
And then—
A single petal wilted.
It was so subtle, I thought maybe I’d imagined it. But no. The petal went translucent and thin, and ever so gently, began to collapse.
A quiet dread throbbed behind my ribs.
What if the cycle wasn’t going to stop at its pinnacle of full bloom? It would burn through Faelan until there was nothing more to fuel it. And then everything would simply…die.
Urgently, I pressed a hand to Faelan’s chest, waiting for him to stir, for his breath to change, for some sign that he wasn’t slipping away faster than I could help him.
“Faelan,” I whispered. “Stay with me.”
His eyes didn’t open.
And another small cascade of petals dropped from a flower like silent snow.
The land wasn’t evolving him—it was consuming him.
We had to stop it. Now.