No one had ever brought a flower into this room. None of the group had encountered anything like it blooming anywhere in the valley above.
Robert looked at it for a long moment.
Someone had walked into this archive on bare feet sometime in the last three days, vanished at the base of a hidden formation door, and left behind a fresh flower at the centre of a pattern that had not been activated in three hundred years.
They were not the first people to find this place since the Keepers disappeared.
Someone else had already been here. Recently. And whoever it was had left something behind on purpose.
Amidst the tranquillity of the archive, the six of them stood in silence, their eyes drawn to the tiny white flower resting in the grooves, and the air buzzed with unexpressed feelings. Not a single person reached for the flower.
