Chapter 42
FORTY-TWO
ZRYNOK
The basement stairs descend into darkness.
Arwen carries a torch, its flame casting dancing shadows on walls that have never seen sunlight.
The air grows thicker as we descend—heavier with spores, sweeter with the Bloom’s particular rot.
My infection surges in answer, a deep pulse under the skin that recognizes what it’s moving toward the way a compass needle finds north.
“The Abbot called this the Cultivation Chamber.” Her voice echoes off stone that seems to swallow sound. “He brought his most interesting subjects here. The ones who responded to the Bloom in unusual ways. The ones whose transformations were... extreme.”
“Why?”
“Research. He wanted to understand the Bloom’s full potential. How far transformation could go. Whether complete integration was possible—human and flower becoming one organism.”
We reach the bottom of the stairs. A corridor stretches ahead, lined with doors larger than the ones in the cells above. These have windows instead of slots—thick glass panels that allow observation without contact.
Arwen stops at the first window. Her face goes pale.
“Oh, Sera.”
I look through the glass.
The thing in the cell might have been human once.
Its body is split open—chest cavity expanded, ribs folded back like the petals of a flower, organs displaced to make room for the Bloom that grows from its core.
Crimson flowers bloom from the exposed flesh, their petals glistening with moisture that might be blood or might be something else entirely.
Stems have replaced veins, carrying nutrients to tissue that has become more plant than animal.
The face is still mostly intact. Female, I think, though the transformation has obscured most identifying features. Eyes that hold awareness—fractured, tortured awareness—fix on the window. On us.
Her mouth moves. Shaping words that the glass muffles into silence.
I can read lips. An executioner’s skill, useful for catching final confessions through the noise of crowds.
Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
“She was called Sera.” Arwen’s voice is barely a whisper. “We were friends, before. Before she started showing signs of accelerated transformation. Before the Abbot took her for study.”
“How long?”
“Three years. She’s been like this for three years.”
Three years of being a living experiment. Three years of consciousness trapped in a body that is no longer hers, that flowers and blooms and grows while her mind watches from behind eyes that still know how to weep.
I unlock the door.
Arwen doesn’t try to stop me. Doesn’t ask what I’m planning. She already knows.
Sera—what’s left of Sera—watches me enter. Her mouth keeps moving, keeps shaping the same two words, keeps begging for the only thing I can give her.
I draw my knife. The small one. Sharp enough to make this quick.
“I see you.” I crouch beside her transformed body, close enough to smell the sweetness rising from her blooming flesh. “I know you’re in there. I know you’ve been waiting.”
Her eyes track to my face. Something like gratitude moves through them.
“This is going to hurt. Just for a moment. Then it won’t hurt anymore.”
I find the place where human tissue meets flowering transformation. Find the pulse point that still beats despite everything the Bloom has done to her.
“Rest now.”
The knife does its work. Quick. Clean. Merciful.
The flowers keep blooming for several seconds after her heart stops. Then they wilt. Then they’re just dead flesh, no longer sustained by whatever unholy symbiosis the Abbot had created.
I close her eyes.
Move to the next cell.
There are seven cells in this corridor.
Six of them I can reach.
The seventh sits at the corridor’s far end, its door submerged to the sill in dark water from a ruptured cistern—decades of seepage pooled against the lowest point of the foundation. Whatever is inside, it cannot be reached. It will have to be left to the fire.
I do not look through its window.
Six people, then. Six minds trapped in bodies that have become gardens. Six voices mouthing the same words through glass that was designed to contain their screaming.
I give them what Arwen gave Sera—the same words, the same waiting, the same knife when they are ready.
Not because I want to. Not because it’s easy. Because no one else should have to carry the burden of what happens in these cells—not Arwen, who has already carried enough, not Cael or Circe or any of the survivors we’ve freed.
This is work I was made for. Work I chose. The executioner’s duty: to deliver death when death is the only mercy left.
Each one takes something from me. Each stroke of the knife carves away another piece of whatever remains of the man I was before I walked into this monastery.
By the time I finish the sixth—a young man, barely twenty, his body so thoroughly transformed that only his eyes remained human—I am hollowed out. Empty.
The work is done.
I leave the last cell. Close the door behind me. Walk three steps down the corridor.
Then I fall to my knees and vomit.
Arwen waits outside.
She doesn’t enter the corridor. Doesn’t offer to help. Just leans against the wall at the top of the stairs, arms wrapped around herself, tears tracking silently down her cheeks.
I emerge from the basement with the taste of bile in my mouth and the smell of flowering death clinging to my clothes. My hands shake. My vision swims. The Bloom in my blood pulses with something that might be satisfaction or might be horror—I can no longer tell the difference.
She holds out a waterskin without speaking.
I take it. Rinse my mouth. Spit into the dust.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice is raw. “I should have warned you. Should have told you what you’d find.”
“No.” The word comes out rough. Broken. “I needed to see. I needed to understand what we’re fighting. What we’re burning.”
“You didn’t have to do it alone.”
“Yes. I did.” I meet her gaze. Let her see the devastation that I’m barely containing. “You’ve carried horrors you never should have witnessed. This one’s mine. Let me carry it for you.”
She moves toward me. Wraps her arms around my waist. Presses her face against my chest and holds on like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s turned to ash.
I hold her back. Breathe in the scent of her hair—smoke and sweat and something underneath that’s purely her. Feel her heartbeat against my ribs, steady and alive and proof that not everything in this place is dead.
“We’re burning it.” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. “All of it. Tonight. Making sure no one ever has to see what I just saw.”
“Yes.” She pulls back enough to look at me. Her eyes are red, her face streaked with tears, and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. “But there’s something else first. Someone I didn’t tell you about.”
I wait.
“There’s one more prisoner.” She takes a breath. Steels herself. “In the Abbot’s sanctum. In cells that even his inner circle didn’t know existed.”
“Who?”
“Someone who knows things. About the cult’s patrons.
About the nobles who funded this place.” Her jaw tightens.
“About why the Abbot was able to operate for so long without interference. The reason I escaped when I did—it wasn’t just opportunity.
I overheard things. Enough to know that destroying this monastery isn’t enough.
There are people outside these walls who need to answer for what happened here. ”
She takes my hand. Squeezes once.
“I have to get her out. Even if it means going back into the worst part of this place.”
I should argue. Should tell her we’ve done enough, freed enough, killed enough for one day. Should suggest we rest, recover, gather strength for whatever comes next.
Instead, I nod.
“Then we go. Both of us.” I meet her gaze. “Whatever’s in that sanctum, whatever she knows, whatever it costs. We finish this.”
She rises on her toes. Presses her lips to mine—brief, fierce, a promise and a thank you wrapped in a single gesture.
“Then let’s move. We’ve got a sanctum to breach and a prisoner to rescue.”
She pulls me toward the stairs. Toward the upper levels. Toward whatever final horror waits in the Abbot’s private domain.
And I follow. Because that’s what I do now.
I follow her.