The flowers kept growing.
Not fast. Not wild. Just steady. Spiraling outward from the place where Aelira had vanished. Their petals were pale gold, dusted with dew, and they glowed faintly in the dark like they remembered her light even when the rest of the world did not.
Astren sat by them every night.
He didn’t speak. Not to the others. Not even to Vess, who watched him with eyes too knowing for comfort. He only sat, one knee bent, hands resting on his thighs like a soldier waiting for orders that would never come.
But his eyes his eyes searched the air.
Like if he looked hard enough, he’d see her shape in the mist.
Raze called it foolish. Cain called it grief. Vess called it something older.
Faith.
Because the flowers never wilted. Not once.
Because sometimes, when the wind cur
