Elira walked barefoot through a garden made of starlight.
The blossoms shimmered silver-blue, their petals like fragments of a dream. Vines curled around broken temple columns, blooming where ash once choked the stone. The sky above was lavender, washed in peace, and the air tasted like memory—sweet, aching, impossible.
She didn't question how it had come to be. The garden had grown from Caelen's final breath. It was his legacy, his gift to the world. Here, his voice echoed in the rustle of the trees, and his warmth lived in the soft wind that kissed her cheeks.
She knelt by the great tree at the garden's center. Its bark shimmered like silver rain, and its roots pulsed faintly beneath the soil—like a sleeping heart. Her fingers brushed its trunk. "Caelen," she whispered, voice cracking. "I miss you. I miss you more than breath, more than sun, more than the shape of my own name."
It was beautiful. It was perfect.
And it was wrong.
At first, it was only a flicker—the color draining from one of the leaves. Then another. Then the wind shifted, and instead of warmth, it carried a strange silence. A wrongness that crawled down her spine.
She rose, heart stuttering. The garden... something about it felt distant, blurred. Like a painting left too long in the rain.
The petals beneath her feet turned gray.
"Elira," whispered a voice she couldn't place.
She turned.
The children who had once laughed beneath the silver trees were gone. The villagers who had worked beside her—vanished. Even the sky above cracked slightly, a jagged fracture running across the heavens like shattered glass.
Her hand flew to her chest. The Weeping Blade wasn't there.
"Elira," the voice came again, more urgent this time. "Wake up."
She clutched her head. "No, no, this is real! I buried him. I built this. I lived this!"
The garden trembled beneath her.
"You were never enough," a hundred voices hissed from the cracking sky.
She screamed.
The world peeled apart like scorched parchment. The blossoms turned to ash. The tree at the center burned from the inside out. Her feet gave way, and she fell—into shadow, into silence, into a nothingness that wanted to erase her.
Until one voice reached her. Steady. Familiar. Desperate.
"Come back to me."
Caelen.
A thread of warmth wrapped around her chest.
"Elira... you're not alone."
She gasped.
The illusion shattered.