Eirene's familiar held the Echo Bloom with both tiny hands.
Of everyone gathered there, she understood seeds, roots, soil, life-force, and the silent logic of growth better than any of them. So when the time came to begin, no one argued when the task was left to her.
The seed did not feel ordinary.
That was the part Eirene had noticed before.
The aura rising from the Echo Bloom was faint, but not simple. It felt eerily close to the Revenant Asphodel, the same miraculous flower Eirene had once cultivated with painstaking care.
It carried that same unnatural quality of something that stood halfway between life and return, as if death had already tried to claim it once and failed to secure the argument.
The little familiar floated lower.
She did not simply place the seed into the earth.
She measured.
The angle. The depth. The direction of the roots relative to the ley-flow. The moisture density. The breath of the surrounding air. The ratio of warmth to stillness.
