Chapter 10 The Nightblooms Secret #3
des details about how that being would arrive.
" He paused, and his eyes, those faded gold eyes that had looked on the birth and death of civilizations, were fixed on hers with an intensity that was almost physical.
"It describes the nightbloom. It describes the Thinning Point near Ashenmere.
It describes the specific conditions under which the flower would bloom and the specific resonance of the being who would be drawn to it. "
Sera felt the words land in her chest like stones, each one creating a ripple that spread outward through her body, disturbing the careful equilibrium of denial and determination that had sustained her since her arrival.
She had known. Some part of her had known since the memory-crystal, since Seraphine the Elder's face, since the moment she had first touched the nightbloom and felt the world dissolve beneath her.
But knowing and hearing were different things, and hearing Oren say it, in his gentle, scholarly voice, with the weight of two thousand years of patient waiting behind every syllable, made it real in a way that suspicion never could.
"How long?" she repeated, and her voice cracked on the second word.
Oren was silent for a long moment, and when he spoke, the truth came out of him with the slow, reluctant heaviness of something that had been buried for a very long time.
"I have been watching the Thinning Point near Ashenmere for six hundred and forty-seven years," he said.
"I established a monitoring resonance at that location when I first identified it as the site the prophecy described, and I have maintained that resonance continuously since then, checking it at regular intervals, waiting for the specific conditions the prophecy requires.
" His voice dropped, and the weariness in it was so profound that it seemed to age him further, drawing new lines in his face and dimming the gold in his eyes.
"For six centuries, Sera, I watched. And for six centuries, nothing happened.
The soil I prepared remained dormant. The nightbloom seed I planted did not germinate.
The conditions were not right. And then, seventy-three years ago, the seed sprouted, and