The sky didn't move.
That was the first thing I noticed after stepping away from the house—after pulling the door shut behind me for what felt like the last time. The clouds were frozen in thin, silver strokes, the same exact shape they had been minutes ago… or hours ago. Time had stopped keeping track of itself. Or maybe the world had simply grown tired of pretending it ever mattered.
I stood at the edge of the road, my breath rising in slow, steady coils. The air tasted like rain that had not yet fallen—damp, metallic, heavy with the weight of something waiting.
Waiting for me.
The last pulse beneath my skin hadn't faded. It throbbed faintly at the base of my throat, as though something inside me was tapping gently, reminding me it was still awake, still listening, still growing. The mark—now a network of faint green veins—remained warm under my collarbone, glowing whenever the wind shifted.
Aya's voice still clung to the edges of my mind.
> "If it opens again, don't look at the sky."
I didn't understand what she meant. Not fully.
But the silence around me felt stretched thin, like a sheet pulled too tight. Something above was holding its breath, and something beneath the ground was exhaling.
I looked up anyway.
The sky was wrong.
The color wasn't gray or white or blue—it was all of them at once, shifting whenever I blinked, like a bruise healing backward. Something moved inside it. Not clouds. Not wind.
Shapes.
Long, thin, branching shapes—like roots—pressing against the inside of the sky's shell, stretching across it in slow, deliberate motion.
As though the heavens were only glass.
And something enormous was growing behind it.
A faint tremor rippled beneath my feet.
Not enough to knock me off balance—just enough to remind me the ground had a heartbeat too.
I began walking.
Not toward the school. Not toward the shrine.
Toward the hill at the far edge of the village—the one place the garden had never fully swallowed. The only place that had remained "wrong" even before everything changed.
My shoes sank slightly into the dirt path with every step. The soil was softer than before, warmer too, as though something below was rising toward me.
The air shimmered.
The first root broke the surface a few meters ahead—thin at first, like a pale hair. Then thicker. Then thicker still. It twisted upward like a blind worm searching for sunlight.
I stepped around it carefully.
But the root followed.
Slowly. Almost lazily.
Like it recognized me.
I walked faster.
Another root surfaced near the fence.
And another by the old mailbox.
And another where the road curved.
All of them growing in the same direction.
Toward the hill.
Toward where I was going.
It wasn't trying to stop me.
It was guiding me.
The wind shifted again. The sky pulsed.
A faint whisper brushed the inside of my ear—not sound, but pressure.
A memory.
No… not mine.
Something deeper.
Something older.
"Five roots. Five breaths. Five seasons."
I stopped walking.
The voice didn't come again.
But the mark under my collarbone throbbed in answer—once, then twice, then dissolving into a slow rhythm that wasn't mine.
My fingers brushed the skin.
Five roots.
Five breaths.
Five seasons.
I didn't know what it meant.
But my body did.
My feet moved on their own, drawing me up the slope of the hill, the ground vibrating faintly beneath each step. The air grew colder. The light dimmer.
Halfway up, I turned back.
The village below me looked small—small and quiet and too still. The houses were pale shapes. The trees were leafless silhouettes. The river reflected a sky that wasn't the sky.
And then—
The entire village pulsed.
A green flash.
Brief. Dim.
Like the beat of a colossal heart.
It wasn't coming from underground.
It was coming from the sky.
The roots pressing behind the clouds glowed faintly, forming five branching lines—five pillars stretching across the horizon like the fingers of a hand.
And for the first time since the garden woke, I felt something close to fear.
A deep, quiet, cold fear that settled in my stomach.
Whatever was behind the sky wasn't finished growing.
And it was waiting for me.
I kept climbing.
---
The silence that followed was almost unbearable.
It wasn't empty.
It pressed against me — like a weight, like air that had forgotten how to move.
And underneath it, faint but unmistakable, the ground continued to pulse… slow, steady, patient.
The same rhythm that had answered me in the dark.
I didn't turn back toward the house.
I didn't dare.
Instead, I kept walking.
The trees ahead looked wrong under the sky — stretched taller than they should be, their branches bending in shapes that seemed to mimic arms reaching toward something unseen. Their leaves shimmered faintly, as if lit from below.
The forest had always been strange, but tonight it felt awake.
More awake than ever.
The hum beneath the soil matched each step I took. Not following — anticipating.
Waiting.
"Five roots…" I whispered.
The words tasted heavy. Real.
Like they were never meant to be spoken by a human mouth.
Aya's voice still echoed inside me, threads of memory tightening and unraveling with each heartbeat:
> There are five beneath the sky.
Five that remember.
Five that feed.
Five that wait for you.
I didn't know if she was warning me
or calling me
or guiding me.
Maybe all three.
The deeper I walked, the more the air changed. It thickened — not fog, not humidity, but something denser, like the very atmosphere had begun to congeal. Every breath felt like pulling warm water into my lungs.
The ground sloped downward.
And then the path opened.
A clearing I had never seen before — wide, circular, perfectly smooth, as though carved deliberately from the forest.
The moon hung directly above it, impossibly bright, illuminating everything in a pale glow.
And at the center…
My chest tightened.
There was another house.
But this one—
This one had no door.
Just walls.
Perfectly smooth.
No windows. No hinges. No opening of any kind.
A house built for no one to enter.
Or for no one to leave.
My breath trembled.
"Again…" I whispered. "It's happening again."
The air moved for the first time — a slow, deliberate wind that brushed the back of my neck, cold enough to make my skin burn.
And then something shifted behind me.
Not footsteps.
Not movement.
Just a presence.
A shape in the dark — huge, tall, indistinct — watching.
The hum under the earth synced with my pulse, faster now, hungrier.
I turned toward the house.
Something in me — something not entirely mine — pulled.
I walked closer.
The wall of the house was smooth like polished bone, pale and slightly warm beneath my fingertips.
When I pressed my palm against it, the glow of the moonlight bent — like the surface of the wall rippled beneath my touch.
A breath.
Not mine.
From inside.
Then a whisper slipped through the wall, thin as a thread:
> "Mizu…"
My blood froze.
The house had no door.
But it knew my name.
And the voice —
The voice sounded like my aunt.
The vines around the clearing shuddered.
The moon dimmed.
The earth pulsed in four places around me at once —
four points in the perimeter of the clearing —
and one beneath the house.
Five points.
Five roots.
The rhythm shifted, forming a pattern — like an ancient heartbeat, speaking in pulses instead of words.
I stepped backward, my breath catching, the whisper repeating:
> "Mizu… come inside…"
"There's no door," I whispered. "How—"
The wall rippled.
Then parted.
Not like a door opening —
but like skin splitting to reveal bone underneath.
I stumbled back, my heart pounding, my vision blurring—
But something inside the house moved.
Something stepped forward.
A faint silhouette.
Slender.
Familiar.
Human-shaped.
My aunt?
Aya?
Myself?
I didn't know.
The figure's hand reached outward, stretching the wall with it — skin bending around a palm that wasn't entirely solid.
"Mizu…"
The voice came again, clearer this time.
Sad.
Tired.
And full of something I didn't want to understand.
"Come home."
The five roots beneath the clearing pulsed all at once.
And as they did—
The doorway of living flesh opened wider.
Waiting.
Inviting.
Demanding.
I forced myself to breathe — slow, quiet, controlled — because even the air felt intelligent here, like it was listening.
"I'm not afraid," I whispered.
But the truth was colder:
I wasn't sure fear mattered anymore.
Because something deeper than fear — deeper than memory — was calling me inside.
And part of me
recognized the call.
---
I had only just stopped moving when the corridor ended.
One moment the earth seemed to fold into itself like a book being closed, the next there was space — a hollow so wide that my breath bled into it and disappeared. My footsteps echoed differently here; they landed and then were swallowed, as if the place between sound and silence had its own weight. My legs felt like they belonged to someone who had been standing too long; every muscle hummed with a tiredness that was older than my years.
When I looked up, the ceiling was the sky—no ceiling of stone or wood, but a sky rooted beneath the earth. It hung inverted above us, stitched with five enormous veins of light. They ran from horizon to horizon like arms, each pulsing in a cadence that matched, impossibly, the rhythm under my ribs.
Five roots, I realized slowly. Five slow-throbbing arteries of green-white, and all five were looking — or reaching — toward me.
The last thing Part II had left me with was a hush and the sense of being observed. Now that observation had a face. Or something like a face: the roots themselves were lined with hundreds of small openings, petal-like mouths in which thin tendrils quivered. From some of them, a faint breath came out, not air but a sound like distant choral humming. It set the hair along my arms standing up in tight, prickling rows.
I moved without deciding to. Part of me had already been walking even before my mind caught up; my feet simply followed a groove in the soil that led straight toward the central root — the largest of the five — which blazed with a light so soft it seemed to belong inside the eye. Its surface was not bark and not skin; it was a skin of memory. When my hand hovered near it, the light shimmered inside the grooves, and for a second I saw a face not unlike my aunt's and my own and then a score of faces rolling like film inside a drop of resin. Each pulse spilled one image, and each image was a life that had been pressed and folded into the root.
A low voice, layered and many, uncoiled from the air around me. Not words, exactly, but a cadence I could parse into syllables. It said my name and then asked a question I did not remember being asked but had always known:
> "Will you remember the roots that fed you?"
I tasted soil in my mouth. The light in the central root answered by slowing until its pulse was the slow, patient ticking of some ancient clock. Then another pulse — sharper — split from it and ran along the nearest root, which leaned toward me like a curious thing.
The first root I had touched before — the slender one that had made my neck prickle with a heat I couldn't name — it reached first. From it came a thin filament, transparent and moving like a reed in water. When it brushed my palm it felt like cooled metal and warm honey at the same time. The sensation brought a memory across me like a wave: a sunday my mother had not remembered, a bowl of rice still steaming, a laugh that belonged to somebody else's childhood. I swallowed the feeling down, the way you swallow a sickness you do not want to keep.
"You gather pieces," the thin root whispered, and I knew then that everything here was conversational. The place spoke in the way of old houses that hold their stories behind boarded windows; it arranged language in currents of sensation, in memories threaded to light.
I stepped between the roots, toward the center. Each one hummed differently: a child's lullaby under the second, the metallic scrape of a cart wheel under the third, a distant prayer under the fourth. They were not separate; they were interwoven, and as I walked they braided beneath me. I felt their binding gentle and inexorable, like hands guiding me along a path I both wanted and feared to know.
When my shadow — if I still had a proper shadow — fell on the trunk, the surface opened. Not like a door; more like a page folding back. Inside the fold, there was a thin corridor of light that led down into the root's heart. It smelled of old paper and bitter tea; it tasted of rain.
I did not step inside right away. I found myself listening for a heartbeat that was mine and listening for others at the same time. In that listening, the roots unrolled their story.
They told me, without full sentences, a history of hunger and recollection. Long before anyone had called the valley a village, the place had been a patch of earth that listened to the sky. The first seed had been planted by someone who wanted not to be forgotten; since then, the root had learned the language of preservation. It did not devour; it recorded. Each root, the place conveyed, was a ledger: one for birth, one for grief, one for the forgetting of faces, one for the names people let slip away, and one — the central — for what remained, the heavy cargo no root could name alone.
"You carried the wish to keep," the light around the central root intoned. "You wanted the single thing no one here could grant: permanence."
I wanted to protest. It felt unfair that the whole place understood me, piece by piece, while I still had to fashion my meanings into words. But my protest crumbled into what it always became in this valley: a small, brittle sound. Even my anger, here, tasted like the green sap on the roots — sweet, mineral, not quite mine.
"It was loneliness," I said instead.
The roots accepted the word. They threaded it into their song and set it between two pulses.
A second voice — softer, sighing, like a breath through paper — drifted from the fourth root. From it came images not mine to hold: a woman smoothing the hair of a child who was not there anymore; an old man refusing to step into the dark; a tear that had been too proud to fall. The fourth root carried these shawls of memory and folded them into a fabric I could feel graze my cheek.
Something moved at the edge of my perception. Shadows, or perhaps definitions of lives — and in one I glimpsed Aya, upright and smiling, but so thin and luminous I thought I could see the seams along her limbs where the light stitched together her memories.
"You are asking me," I said to the air, "what now? After this remembering?"
The answer was a slow unwinding. The central root pulsed in a long cadence; the seam of its light opened wider and a flood of warmth rose like steam. I knew what they wanted without the need for language to translate: they required a voice that would not vanish, a steward for the ledger. They did not ask for sacrifices in the manners our libraries warned of; they asked for attention, for recognition, for the willingness to stand and fold yourself over memories so they would not leak into coldness.
It was both simple and monstrous.
"You would have us steward the remembered?" I asked.
They hummed as if in laughter and then sent to me a memory that was not mine but felt like the outline of my desire: hands press a seed into the soil, it sprouts tall and white, children dance in a ring until, eventually, they do not return. The root keeps the outline: the laughter, the names, the smallness of a person's habits. The root holds the rhythm so the village does not lose the beat of itself, even as the tide of forgetting rises and corrodes faces.
I had the sudden image of my own hands cupped around that seed, younger and softer, pressing with the uneducated urgency of someone who believed a gesture could outpace grief. I touched my palm, felt the tiny scar there that memory now insisted had not been only my imagination.
"You planted first," the second root murmured, as if repeating the ledger's line. "You placed what you feared would be lost. You taught us how to keep."
"And that's why—" My throat closed. The central root's light quickened, and with it an entire chorus of small lights in the smaller roots. My skin felt mapped in a way that made me dizzy. "That's why I wake in different places," I finished.
"Yes," the roots agreed, harmonizing. "You are the pulse's echo. You are the voice between beats."
It was not exactly a promise, nor a judgment. It was a designation: the ledger needed a mouth.
I should have been horrified, and a rational part of me was. But then the roots laid another image in my mind: the face of a child laughing with an apple in each hand, calling someone to come and see. The sound of a door opening onto a bright day. A grandmother's hands arranging a tray of tea exactly the way she liked. The roots were not only a collection of the ugly or the grotesque; they cataloged small acts of care, the mundane reliquaries of ordinary lives.
"How do I keep it?" I asked, remembering how my aunt had told me once, in a voice that was still mine under the green, that to remember was an act that could be tender or brutal depending on how you held the memory. I feared I would not have the strength to hold what the roots asked.
"Speak," the first root said. It unfurled another filament and touched my lips. I felt coolness, like the inside of a shell, and with that little filament a flood of words — my words, other words, fragments — passed through me. I tasted syllables that had been lodged in the soil for decades: names of people who were ghosts now, recipes for cakes I'd never eaten, an apology whose owner had long since died without learning to keep it.
The task was less about conquest than about becoming translator: to let those syllables live and to let them pass through the world in a way that would bind the village together, not as a museum of dead things but as a living cartographer of what it had been.
"You want me to keep telling it?" I asked.
A mesh of light braided over the central root at my feet. It hummed like an instrument being tuned. From it came a soft, terrible empathy — the recognition that to hold a thousand such memories was to change oneself until you were both more and less than human. The roots did not mask this truth. They presented it openly, like an honest coin turned over in the hand.
"Yes," they said. "Grow with it. Anchor the remembering. Tend it. Speak it in days, not in silence."
I thought of the gift I'd once wanted — to be remembered — and of the cost that came with being the thing that keeps remembering. It was thin as a blade and heavy as the sea. I pictured the ledger I would hold, my voice a slow stitch that would keep the fabric whole. My stomach felt cold and full of rain.
"What if I refuse?" I heard myself ask.
The central root's pulse slowed; for a moment, the five lights dimmed to the hush that comes before sleep. The air tasted of mint and old books. Then the four smaller roots sang in counterpoint, and the answer, when it arrived, was not cruel. It was simply factual.
"If you refuse, the remembering unwinds. The doors of memory close. The village becomes a place without names; people thin, and the faces fade. The skies forget the outlines of houses. Seasons slip their tether. We are left with a field of seeds that do not know the hands that planted them."
My throat was so raw with breath that I could not make words of my own. The notion struck me dumb not simply for its horror but for the way it tugged at something softer inside: the temptation to simply let go and allow oblivion to make life into a clean, forgetful thing. I had imagined erasure as mercy at times. The root's voice forced me to measure mercy against memory and ask which was the cruelty.
There were no thresholds here that were unguarded. The five roots were patient as tide and wide as weather. They did not press me in a way that seized; instead they offered. Offerings can be answers, and my life up until now had been a string of answers I had given to other people. Now they asked me for one that would belong to the place.
I closed my eyes. From somewhere high and invisible, something small fell — a single petal of light. It landed on my palm and burned neither hot nor cold. When I opened my hand, inside the glow floated a name I had not thought of in years: a boy who used to follow the old woman in the store with questions. I thought of how often I had seen him in my peripheral vision and never called his name. I felt ashamed and then strangely buoyed.
"It will not be perfect," the central root said. "It will be a seeing of what can be held and what cannot. You will stumble. You will rest. You will forget some things. But the ledger mends."
When I finally made a sound, it came out rough and small. "I will try," I said.
They did not answer in words, but the five roots braided, and their light multiplied into a pattern that felt like blessing. Near the base of the central root an opening widened, and I saw inside not only memory but the shape of things I could do: a map of names to places, a schedule of retellings, a way to call those who had faded in the correct order so that they would bloom without choking. It was not a chart I could memorize quickly; it was a landscape I would have to walk, a craft I would have to learn.
"You will need to leave sometimes," the thin root murmured. "You will have to go into the world, because memory needs witnesses that are not only of the roots. The ledger holds what you plant and we feed what you speak. Grow outward."
The words were gentler than the immensity of the request. A small, reasonable voice in me answered with trembling clarity: I will fail. But the roots had already known that. They had not promised perfection. They had promised continuity.
I thought of the people I had loved and the ways I had wanted to assure them and failed. I imagined them folded into the tissue of the root and my role as translator as a way of finally saying the things I had left unsaid. The ledger would not resurrect old sins; it would make them into story. Stories could carry grief differently.
Above, the five roots tightened their circle and drew light inward. The whole cavern inhaled and exhaled as one living thing. For the first time since the seed and the wish, I felt an odd, reluctant kinship with the place that had taken my loneliness and turned it into a system of care. Its love was complicated; it was not moral or kind in the ways I had been taught to value. But it held. It gathered the remnants of people and pinned them softly together.
I pushed my palms into the root's skin. The filaments slid beneath my nails and left no marks. The light settled warm against my bones.
"All right," I said, the syllable small but steady. "Then teach me how."
They did. They spoke in the language of tenderness and ledger-making. They taught the first steps: how to listen on days when the village seemed fine, how to call a name when a face wavered like a reflection, how to place one memory in a small, safe space so it could be retold aloud like a prayer. They showed me how to take grief and fold it into story so it would not crumble into ash.
As the lesson unfolded, a single idea unstitched itself gently in my chest: this would be my life now — not a single act of guardianship but a slow craft, tending a garden that grew from remembering rather than forgetting.
When I finally stepped away from the root, it pulsed once and gave me a small gift: a filament of light, no longer than my thumb, which I tucked into my palm. It was warm and alive and it hummed faintly with the names of a hundred small things: a laugh, a name, a turning of a key. I would not be able to carry all the village's recollections by myself, but perhaps I could be the place where they came to be heard again.
I walked back through the ring of roots. Each touched me like a benediction. The five major veins above dimmed and then steadied into the slow cadence of day and night — or whatever the measurement of day was here, under the sky that pulsed beneath the ground.
Outside the hollow, the corridor opened to the familiar crooked path that led back to the village. When the first light of the real morning reached me, I felt the green filament warm and alive in my palm.
I had promised the roots my voice.
Now I would have to learn how to use it.
---
The ground didn't stop shaking.
For a moment I thought it was only my legs trembling, but then I felt it again — a long, slow pulse pushing upward through the soil, rising from somewhere impossibly deep. The clearing around me tightened, as if the earth itself were inhaling.
My name echoed again.
Not from the air.
Not from the trees.
Not from the sky.
It came from below.
"Mizu…"
A whisper pressed against the soles of my feet, vibrating through my bones. The roots around the clearing recoiled slightly, like something beneath them had brushed against their underside.
I stepped back, but the soil rose subtly with me, almost following. Part of me wanted to run — the human part, the instinctive part — but another part, deeper and quieter, felt pulled toward the sound. Like recognition. Like memory.
The air thickened. The sky dimmed.
That was when I realized the light above me wasn't fading.
It was bending.
The clouds twisted slowly, spiraling into a pale green circle directly overhead, aligning with the exact center of the clearing. The roots beneath my feet responded instantly — tightening, curling, drawing inward like an exposed heart retreating deeper into the chest.
Something was waking up.
Something old.
Something that had known my name long before I remembered it.
"Mizu… come down."
The soil cracked.
A thin, black line opened at my feet — small at first, a harmless fracture — but the whisper that came through was warm. Familiar. Almost relieved.
I stared into the darkness.
And the darkness breathed back.
The path beneath my feet kept shifting.
Every few steps, the dirt softened into moss, then hardened into cracked stone, then dissolved into the thin, trembling root-threads that stretched like veins into the distance. I didn't know if it was the garden changing, or if I was simply walking through places that remembered different versions of themselves.
The air thickened as I moved.
Heavier.
Sweeter.
Like something blooming just out of sight.
Ahead, the sky flickered again — the same pale, rippling distortion I had seen forming above the mountain ridge. It pulsed, expanding and contracting as if it were trying to tear itself open.
I wasn't supposed to see that.
I knew instinctively — the same way prey knows where not to step in a forest.
But I kept walking anyway.
Because I could hear them now.
Five voices.
Five breaths.
Five heartbeats rising from somewhere inside the distortion.
The Five Roots.
The ones Aya said would awaken when the sky finally remembered what was buried beneath it.
Their presence was like a cold hand pressed against the back of my skull — not painful, but insistent. Guiding. Pulling. Whispering without words.
And as I reached the top of the hill, I saw them clearly for the first time.
Not bodies.
Not shapes.
But figures made of roots and light — tall, elongated silhouettes that twisted upward like trees growing in fast-forward. Their limbs were branches, their hair a tangle of vines, their faces masks carved from pale bark.
They stood around a crater in the earth — a perfect circle, pulsing with light that shone upward into the trembling sky.
I stepped closer.
The air around the five figures oscillated, vibrating the way heat wavers above asphalt. Their voices hummed beneath the noise — soft at first, then forming into a strange harmony.
Not music in the human sense.
Something older.
The sound of soil remembering rain.
I couldn't understand the words — if they were words — but something inside me recognized the rhythm. My chest pulsed with it. The mark at my collarbone burned with it.
And then one of the figures turned toward me.
Slowly.
Fluidly.
Like a tree bending in a wind only it could feel.
Its face — the white bark mask — split slightly at the center, revealing soft petals underneath. Its eyes opened, glowing the same pale green as the veins beneath my skin.
And when it spoke, the sound wasn't a whisper.
It wasn't even a voice.
It was a memory.
> "The season has opened."
The ground trembled beneath my feet.
The crater pulsed again — brighter this time — and something rose from its center. A shape. A silhouette. Human-sized but utterly wrong.
I staggered back as it lifted from the earth, suspended by threads of roots.
Limbs twitching.
Chest rising and falling in a rhythm not its own.
The Five Roots turned toward it, bowing their heads in unison.
Their voices merged, a sound like branches scraping against stone.
> "The blossom returns."
The figure convulsed — once, violently — and a cascade of petals spilled from its chest.
I gasped, stepping back again as the petals hit the ground and burned into the earth like embers. The figure twitched, spasming as if something inside it fought to escape.
And then it turned toward me.
Slowly.
Shuddering.
Not alive, not dead — something halfway between.
Its face lifted.
Its eyes opened.
And I saw my own face staring back at me.
Not the reflection from the dream.
Not the double from the mirror.
But another me.
This one hollow.
This one unfinished.
This one grown.
I staggered back. "No— that's not— that can't—"
But the hollow version of me raised a shaking hand, roots spilling from the cracks in its fingers.
And then it spoke.
My voice.
But warped.
Echoing through soil.
> "You planted us."
The sky above split open — a line of brilliant white tearing through the mist.
The Five Roots lifted their faces toward it, their branches extending, reaching, pulling the tear wider.
Light poured down the crater.
The hollow version of me screamed soundlessly as the light hit its chest, splitting it open like a cracking seed.
Roots burst upward.
Petals erupted in spirals.
The ground shook so violently I fell to my knees.
And above it all, the sky continued tearing — opening, opening, opening—
Until I saw what lay beyond it.
Not sky.
Not stars.
But an enormous, pulsing blossom — as large as a mountain, its petals trembling like wings.
A flower bigger than the world.
Its voice rang inside my skull:
> "COME BACK TO US."
I clutched my head. The pulse grew louder, drowning out thought, drowning out breath. The Five Roots bowed. The hollow me lifted its broken arms toward the light, crying without sound.
The blossom pulsed again.
> "THE SEASON IS NOT COMPLETE."
My vision blurred.
The world flickered.
The ground dissolved beneath—
And then I felt it.
Something gripping my ankle.
Cold.
Wet.
Rooted.
Dragging me toward the crater.
Dragging me toward my other self.
Dragging me toward the blossom above the sky.
I clawed at the dirt, nails tearing, breath shaking.
"No— no— let go— let go—!"
But the roots did not listen.
They tightened.
Pulled—
The ground opened—
And I fell.
Straight into the light.
---
The tremor didn't stop.
Even after the sky split open and the five roots began glowing—five pillars of pale light rising into the impossible distance—the earth beneath my feet continued to shudder, each vibration synchronizing with my pulse until I couldn't tell which was which.
Aya's hand was still gripping my wrist. Even in this form, where her body flickered in and out like breath on glass, she felt solid in the moments that mattered. Her voice trembled when she spoke:
"Mizu… don't look behind you."
Which, of course, made me look.
And I shouldn't have.
The village was gone.
Not destroyed—replaced.
Where houses once stood, giant stalks spiraled upward, each one shaped like a spine twisted into a pillar. The air shimmered with pollen that glowed brighter than fog, moving in waves, pulsing like lungs. Faces—familiar, wrong, half-remembered—pressed outward from inside the stalks as if trapped behind thin skin.
Some of them wept.
Some of them smiled.
Some of them opened their mouths in silent screams.
Aya pulled me forward sharply.
"Don't listen," she whispered. "They aren't calling your name. They're calling the seed that remembers you."
I didn't fully understand what she meant—but understanding stopped mattering ten chapters ago.
The five roots above us twisted toward one another, slowly bending until their tips touched like fingers meeting in prayer. When they made contact—if that's what it was—everything went still.
Every sound. Every tremble. Every breath.
The world froze.
Then the sky began to peel.
Not open.
Not crack.
Peel—like the membrane of a chrysalis being split open by whatever grew inside.
A faint voice echoed through the vast chamber of air:
"The Fifth Root has awakened."
Aya stumbled. "No… no, it's too soon…"
Lights threaded through the ground beneath us, forming complex patterns that shifted under my feet. Circles within circles, spirals wrapping into one another, shapes that felt like words without letters.
I took a step back.
"Aya—what is happening?"
She didn't answer immediately. Her face was pale, eyes glowing faintly, every part of her flickering like a candle gasping for air.
"Mizu… what you saw in the dream… what you fought… that was only one of you."
The patterns under us glowed brighter.
"There are five."
The air left my lungs.
Five?
Aya placed her hand over mine, her voice a trembling whisper:
"You are the Fifth Root."
The words felt like a physical impact, slamming through my chest and spreading outward in hot ripples.
"No," I whispered. "I'm not—"
"You've already split once," she said softly. "The one you faced—the reflection—was only a fragment. A stem. A shadow grown from you."
She pointed at the sky.
"And now the others are waking."
I followed her gaze.
The peeling sky revealed five silhouettes—so distant they looked like cracks in the world, yet so enormous I felt them even with my eyes closed. Shapes made of memory, bone, root, and light. Each one pulsed with a different rhythm.
One matched my heartbeat.
The other four did not.
Aya squeezed my hand.
"If they fully emerge, the world will rewrite itself around them."
"What do you mean rewrite?"
She stepped closer.
"Mizu… the Garden doesn't create duplicates. It creates truths."
My pulse accelerated.
"You mean those… things… are versions of me?"
Aya nodded. Her body flickered again, and for a moment she was transparent enough that the roots behind her were visible through her chest.
"When you planted the seed, you fractured your wish. You didn't ask to be remembered. You asked not to be alone."
Her voice softened.
"And the Garden answered."
A groaning sound echoed through the roots.
A deep, ancient resonance that made the air vibrate.
The silhouettes descended slightly—each one lowering like a star sinking toward the earth. Their forms became more distinct.
One had hair like falling soil.
One had arms that split into branches.
One had no face—only a mouth that opened into light.
One crawled through the air as though climbing unseen walls.
And the fifth—
—looked like me.
Perfectly.
Except her eyes were nothing but swirling white petals.
I stepped backward.
Aya caught me.
"Mizu… you can stop this."
"How? How am I supposed to stop five versions of myself?"
"Not five," Aya corrected gently. "Only four."
She touched my chest—right where the faint green vein pulsed beneath my skin.
"Because you are the Fifth. You are the real one."
"But—"
A sound cut me off.
A low, rising chime that felt like a bell being rung inside my skull.
The four approaching "selves" turned their heads toward me in perfect unison.
"Mizu," Aya whispered, voice cracking with urgency, "you have to choose."
"Choose what?"
"Which one of you gets to bloom."
The world trembled again.
The roots in the ground rose upward violently, wrapping around my ankles and wrists. Not painfully—but possessively. Like hands refusing to let go.
My mind fractured for a moment—five pulses, five rhythms, five lives flickering across my vision like a broken film reel.
A child version of me crying in a rainstorm.
An older version standing alone in a field.
A version drowning in roots.
A version cradling a dead flower like a newborn.
All woven into the silhouettes descending from the sky.
Aya's voice rose through the roar of the world collapsing:
"You must claim the bloom before they do!"
The roots surged upward.
The first silhouette reached the ground.
Its feet touched the soil—gently, almost reverently.
It opened its mouth—
—and whispered my name.
Not with its voice.
With mine.
The ground split open beneath us.
Aya shoved me aside as a column of light erupted where I had stood, scorching the air with a sound like tearing silk.
"MIZU!" she screamed. "RUN!"
I tried.
But the roots dragged me back.
Held me.
Lifted me toward the approaching copies.
The four "other Mizu" forms reached out—four sets of hands, four interpretations of my shape, each one incomplete, each one terrifying in its own way.
The one with branch-arms spoke:
"Let us bloom."
The one with no face whispered:
"Let us finish your wish."
The crawling one rasped:
"Let us survive."
And the perfect one said nothing—
She only smiled, slowly, gently, lovingly—
—and I realized, with a coldness sharper than ice:
She didn't want to hurt me.
She wanted to replace me.
Aya screamed:
"MIKU—CHOOSE YOURSELF!"
The roots tightened.
The sky cracked open.
The four reached for me.
And in the center of it all—
—I felt the fifth rhythm.
My own.
My real one.
Deep.
Human.
Unsteady.
Afraid.
Alive.
I grabbed it.
Not with my hands—
with the part of me that had survived everything the Garden tried to turn me into.
The rhythm exploded outward, shattering the roots around me in a burst of white light.
The four copies recoiled.
The crawling one shrieked.
The faceless one rippled like melting wax.
The branch-armed one splintered at the joints.
And the perfect one—
—stared at me with something like heartbreak.
"Mizu…" she whispered.
And for the first time—
—she sounded human.
"I just… didn't want to be alone."
I swallowed.
"Neither did I."
Her smile trembled.
Then her body began to dissolve—
petal by petal, root by root, leaving only a fading outline of my face.
"Bloom for me," she whispered.
"I can't," I whispered back.
"You already have."
And then she was gone.
The other three dissolved next, collapsing into dust and petals, fading into the roots beneath.
Aya fell to her knees, breathing hard.
The sky above slowly sealed shut.
The five roots dimmed, one by one, until only mine remained—faint, flickering, like a candle in the wind.
Still alive.
But tired.
Very tired.
Aya crawled toward me, her voice hoarse.
"Mizu… you did it."
"Did I?" I whispered.
The ground pulsed.
A deep, distant heartbeat echoed from somewhere far below the world.
One root.
One rhythm.
One version of me—
—but a garden full of memories waiting for a new season.
Aya took my hand.
"The sky is closing," she whispered. "The others are gone. Only you remain."
I didn't know if that was meant to comfort me or terrify me.
But I squeezed her hand back anyway.
The heartbeat beneath us grew softer.
Slower.
Almost peaceful.
And for the first time since this nightmare began…
…the world felt quiet.
Not safe.
But quiet.
And the chapter closed on that silence.