Epilogue
The morning is cool for late spring in Wynmire, the kind of morning where the dew hasn’t burned off the moss, yet.
I walk the northern bridge of the Verdance with my hands clasped behind my back the way my father does when he’s thinking, though I’ve never told him I picked up the habit.
Some inheritances are better left unannounced.
Below me, the market district is already loud. Vendors arguing over stall placement, a Florakith woman stringing flower lanterns between the Root arches, two children chasing a ball rolling through the streets.
It’s been four months since the Cathedral fell. Four months since the iterations collapsed into one clean timeline and the Verdance merged into the northeastern reaches of present-day Wynmire like it had always been there.
Four months, and I still check the sky every morning for fear that this has all been just a dream.
The sky stays whole, but the part of me that learned to count days by the time until the next Bloomfall Moon hasn’t quite caught up to the part of me that signed the Charter of Free Growth last week.
Two versions of myself, inhabiting the same body: the wartime leader and the woman who is just figuring out what she wants when survival isn’t the only item on the list.
I touch the locket at my throat. It’s warm, as it always is now, the silver worn smooth by generations of hands.
It acts as a different anchor these days.
Reminding me we won. That I will never have to brace for battle in my lifetime again, hopefully.
I let loose a breath, smile at the thought, then make my way to the council chamber.
The council session runs long, which is becoming a tradition of its own.
Representative Thessara from the Willowmere colony wants to expand the trade corridor.
Captain Rhyven’s people want to reinforce the eastern watchtowers despite there being nothing to watch for anymore.
Irielle insists the Bloom patterns near the old Heartspire ruins are shifting in ways that require study, not alarm, but she delivers this information with the calm intensity of someone describing a house fire, so it takes me ten minutes to convince the room she’s not predicting the apocalypse.
Raskel attends, as always, representing no one and contributing opinions on everything. He has taken to wearing a bow tie to formal sessions. It is tiny. No one has the courage to comment on it.
Torvel keeps the minutes with his usual precision, while Sarnyx sits at my right, arms crossed, watching the room the way she watches everything: like a woman cataloguing exits. Old habits. We share that.
When the session ends, I sign three documents, approve a construction petition for the new residential quarter, and decline, politely, an invitation to name the quarter after myself.
“Call it the Free Quarter,” I tell the delegation. “Or the New Growth. Or literally anything that doesn’t put a person’s name on a place where people are trying to build lives that belong to them.”
They look mildly disappointed. I can live with that.
I take the crossing in the late afternoon.
The wildflower sits at the base of the old elm in Grandma Jo’s garden, right where my mother planted it three months ago.
It’s small and unassuming, a five-petaled thing with white edges that fade to gold at the center, and it has absolutely no business being the most important piece of magic in two worlds.
But my mother has always had a talent for putting extraordinary things in ordinary containers. Dr Pepper cans. Lockets. Herself.
She said it was given to her by the Autumn Court.
While she thought it might have some importance to save the world, she realized it was destined for something equally important.
When she crossed the gate after the final battle, it warmed, letting her know she needed to plant it.
Low and behold, it was designed to act as a permanent portal between Wynmire and Grandma Jo's backyard.
A way for Leo and Sarah to visit anytime they wish, and Raskel to no longer have to guard the gate.
Leo and Sarah use it twice a week now. Leo brings Dr Pepper, which my mother insists she needs for survival and which my father drinks without admitting he likes it. Sarah brings books and casseroles. I like Sarah.
I step through the wildflower’s light and onto Arkansas grass, and the heat hits me like a wall. Late spring here differs from late spring in Wynmire. The humidity is thick. The cicadas are already screaming, which Peeble once described as “insect propaganda” and refused to elaborate on.
I find them in the back.
My father is on his knees in the dirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his corruption marks visible against his forearms in the afternoon light.
The marks are stable now. They don’t spread, don’t hunger, don’t pulse with the restless consuming darkness that defined him for most of his life.
They’re just part of him, the same way the scars on his hands are part of him.
He is pulling weeds with the focused precision of a man who once planned sieges and is now applying those skills to crabgrass.
My mother is beside him, sitting cross-legged in the dirt with her hair pulled back and a smudge of soil on her jaw.
She is talking. She is always talking. Right now she is telling him about something Bryx said in a letter, and she is doing an impression of Bryx that is genuinely terrible and also somehow captures him perfectly, and my father is trying very hard not to smile.
He fails. He always fails at that with her.
Peeble is perched on the fence post nearest the elm, offering a running critique of the tomato plants’ growth trajectory with Kevin hovering nearby.
“The tomatoes need more sun,” I call out.
They both look up. My father squints, and my mother grins, wide and immediate. “Told you she'd show up today,” she says to my father.
“Lucky guess.”
“No, it's because I’m always right.”
“Debatable.”
I open the gate and walk in. I kneel beside them in the dirt, and my mother hands me a trowel without being asked. My father shifts to make room without looking up.
They split their time evenly between here and Thronwood Throne, although I secretly suspect my father is enjoying his time here more and more, though he will never admit it.
I push the trowel into the soil and turn the earth, and beneath my hands the ground is alive with roots that connect this garden to every growing thing in Wynmire, a living network that stretches across a world that nearly ended and chose, stubbornly and against all odds, to keep growing instead.
My grandmother built this garden. My mother freed it. I intend to tend it.
And somewhere deep in the root system, in the place where the Bloom remembers everyone who ever loved it well enough to let it grow wild, something hums. Quiet and patient and endlessly, endlessly alive.
Three gardeners. One garden. Finally growing.