Chapter 24
The Verdance begins preparing for the festival at dawn.
I notice it before anyone tells me. The root-paths have changed overnight.
Where they were smooth and functional yesterday, today they're threaded with thin veins of gold that pulse in slow, rolling waves from the outer ring toward the Heartwood.
The walls of the residential towers have sprouted new growth: clusters of pale flowers with translucent petals that open and close in rhythm with the golden pulse, releasing a scent that's clean, green, and faintly electric.
Even the air feels different. Charged. As if the whole city is holding a breath it's been saving.
"What's happening?" I ask Irielle, whom I find standing in the central plaza with her hands pressed against the Heartwood's bark, her marks pulsing fast.
"The Verdance is dressing itself," she says without opening her eyes.
"It does this before every Bloomfall. The city knows what's coming.
The golden veins are the Heartwood pushing extra energy into the root system, reinforcing the structures from the inside.
" She pauses. "But the flowers are for the festival.
The city grows them because the people need beauty before they need shields. "
"The city decides that?"
"The city feels what the population feels. Twelve thousand people woke up today knowing today might be their last. The Verdance responds to that grief the only way it knows how." She opens her silver eyes and looks at me. "It grows something beautiful."
I stand there for a moment, watching the golden pulse travel through the root-paths, watching the translucent flowers open and close, reminding me of Grandma Jo's garden.
About how she'd plant new flowers after every funeral, every bad diagnosis, every season that took something away.
She said growing things was how you proved the world was still working.
That as long as something could bloom, you hadn't lost everything yet.
The Verdance apparently does the same.
The festival preparations take most of the day, and I spend it walking the city. The residential corridors. The market squares. The narrow alleys between towers, where the light barely reaches and the moss grows thick and wild.
The market is the first revelation. I expected a wartime supply depot: rations, tools, medical supplies. What I find instead is color, noise, and commerce so vibrant it makes the county fair back home look like a yard sale.
Vendors have set up stalls along the main root-path of the second ring, and they're selling everything.
Fabrics woven from plant fiber so fine it feels like silk when I run it between my fingers.
Jewelry made from hardened amber sap with tiny flowers preserved inside, each piece unique, each one glowing faintly with trapped Bloom magic.
Food stands offer dishes I've never seen before.
Grilled root vegetables glazed with something sweet and spicy.
Skewers of fruit that change flavor as you eat them.
The first bite is tart. The second turns to honey.
The third shifts again, smoky and unexpected, reminding me of barbecue.
And pastries that are somehow both warm and cold at the same time, the filling changing temperature the moment it touches your tongue.
Peeble, naturally, has opinions about all of it.
"The amber jewelry is overpriced for the quality of the preservation," they announce, inspecting a pendant with one foreleg raised like a jeweler. "This flower has been dead for at least three decades. You can tell by the coloring. An amateur would miss it, but I have standards."
I buy the pendant anyway because the flower inside it is small, blue, and shaped exactly like the blossoms that bloom on the vine outside our chamber window. The vendor wraps it in a leaf that curls closed on its own, sealing the package.
Further down the market, a group of children are clustered around a woman with bark-textured skin who is growing toys directly from a block of living wood.
She holds the block in both hands; her marks glowing softly, and the wood shifts, reshaping under her fingers.
A horse. A bird. A tiny version of one of the Verdance's towers, complete with a miniature bridge connecting it to a second tower she grows from a fresh block.
The children gasp and reach for each new creation. She hands them out with a quiet smile.
I watch for a long time. The woman isn't selling them. She's just making them. Giving them away.
A boy tugs at my dress. He's maybe six, with a mop of dark brown hair. He holds up the tiny wooden tower the woman just gave him and says something in the Verdance's language. He points at me, then at the tower, and back at me with urgent, wide-eyed sincerity.
"He says you made the tower grow taller," Peeble translates from my shoulder. "He thinks your marks did something to his toy."
I look at the tiny tower in the boy's hands.
The bridge connecting it to the second tower is glowing faintly.
A soft gold that matches my own marks. I didn't do anything.
At least, I didn't mean to. But the living wood responded to my proximity the way the entire city responds to magic it recognizes.
"Tell him it's a gift," I say. "From the Heartwood."
Peeble relays this in what I assume is an accurate translation, though knowing Peeble, there's a high chance they added an embellishment about their own importance. The boy grins, clutches the tower to his chest, and runs back to his friends.
Past the toy-maker, I find a stall that stops me in my tracks.
An old fae man with silver hair to his waist is painting.
Not on canvas. On skin. He sits cross-legged on a woven mat with a tray of pigments made from ground flowers and mineral dust. People line up to have him paint temporary marks on their bodies.
Designs that curl and bloom across forearms, shoulders, and cheekbones.
Each one unique, drawn freehand with a brush so fine the tip is a single hair.
The line is long. Some of the people waiting are in full festival dress; their gowns and robes catching the light.
Others are in work clothes, stopping by between shifts on the repair crews.
A pair of elderly fae women stand arm in arm, already painted, their cheeks covered in matching designs of intertwined vines that glow faintly gold.
They look at each other and laugh, touching the marks on each other's faces with gentle fingers.
It hits me again, the way it keeps hitting me in this place. This is a city brimmed with resilience.
Near the inner ring, the preparations shift from commerce to ceremony.
Crews are stringing garlands of luminous flowers between the towers, creating archways of living light that span the main pathways.
The garlands aren't static. Each flower opens and closes in a pattern that travels the length of the garland, creating a ripple effect that makes the archways shimmer and pulse.
At the base of the Heartwood, a team of Rootkeepers is laying down a new layer of golden veins in a circular pattern, creating what looks like an enormous mandala on the ground.
The pattern is precise, geometric, and the light pulsing through it is brighter than anything I've seen in the city.
"It's a gratitude circle," says a voice behind me.
I turn to find a young fae woman with wide brown eyes and moss woven into her braided hair.
She's carrying a basket of small white flowers.
"Every cycle before Bloomfall, the Rootkeepers lay the pattern and the city fills it.
Everyone brings a bloom. You place it in the circle and you speak a name.
Someone you're grateful for. Someone you want to carry with you into whatever comes next. "
"What happens to the flowers?"
"The Heartwood absorbs them at midnight. Takes the names into its roots." She holds out the basket. "You can take one. For tonight."
I take a small white flower from the basket. Its petals are soft and warm, and when I hold it in my palm, it glows faintly, as if it knows it's been chosen.
"Thank you," I say.
She nods and moves on, offering flowers to the next group of people.
I stand at the edge of the gratitude circle with the flower in my hand and think about who I'd name.
Grandma Jo. Mom. Leo and Sarah. Kaelren.
Peeble. Thalia. Bryx and Sarnyx and Mora and Nimor and Vashael and Eltrien, who are somewhere on the other side of the Rootline, holding things together without us.
One flower isn't enough. I'll need to come back tonight with a handful.
The dress is waiting in our chamber when I return.
It's laid across the bed on a sheet of woven moss, and the first thing I notice is that it's white. Not cream, not ivory. White. The kind of white that looks like fresh snow, clean paper, or the inside of a seashell held up to the light.
The second thing I notice is that it moves.
The fabric isn't still. It shimmers. Not with sequins, thread, or any kind of embellishment.
The shimmer comes from the material itself, which catches the light at different angles and reflects it back in prismatic fragments.
When I tilt my head, the white shifts through colors: pale blue, soft gold, the faintest blush of pink, a flash of green that comes and goes.
It looks like a soap bubble. Or a diamond. Or sunlight spun into cloth.
"The Verdance grew it," Thalia says from the doorway.