The air in the garden was a maelstrom of violence.
The scent of ozone and freshly turned earth mingled with the coppery tang of blood and the bitter perfume of decay. Rowan crouched behind the overturned bulk of a raised bed, splinters digging into her palms.
Across the ravaged central clearing, Kael was a blur of silver light and steel, his Fae blade a glittering arc in the twilight.
He moved with a dancer’s deadly grace, parrying strikes from Morwen that were as brutal as they were swift.
She was no longer the sleek CEO. Her glamour had shattered, revealing a creature of twisted hawthorn and shadow.
Thorny vines, black and venomous, whipped from her hands, seeking to ensnare him, to poison him.
Kael’s magic was a shield of pure, sun-warmed gold, deflecting the worst of it, but Rowan could see the cost.
Sweat plastered his dark hair to his brow, and his movements, while still fluid, were losing their effortless precision. He was tiring, fighting a war of attrition against a being fueled by pure malice.
“Still protecting this pathetic patch of dirt, little prince?” Morwen’s voice was a rasp of grinding stone. She lashed out with a vine that cracked like a whip.
Kael spun away, his blade slicing the thorny appendage in two. It withered into dust before it hit the ground. “Your court is dying. Your people are fading. All this effort, for a mortal who will turn to dust in a handful of decades.”
“She is more alive than you will ever be,” Kael grunted, lunging forward. His blade hissed, leaving a trail of silver light that seared Morwen’s shoulder. She shrieked, a sound like scraping metal, and retaliated with a furious barrage.
Rowan felt a tremor of fear, cold and sharp.
From the garden’s entrance, she could hear the defiant shouts of her community and Liam’s commanding voice directing them against Vex’s security.
They were holding the line, buying them time.
But time was running out.
Kael was the garden’s only true magical defender, and he was being worn down. She pushed a trickle of her own power toward him—a desperate, clumsy offering of green, growing energy. He seemed to absorb it, his shoulders straightening for a moment, but it was like offering a cup of water to a man dying of thirst in the desert.
His eyes flickered to her for a fraction of a second, a silent acknowledgment, a warning.
But that fraction was all Morwen needed.
She didn’t attack with a vine. Instead, a shard of solidified shadow, jagged as obsidian, materialized in her hand and she hurled it.
It was too fast. Kael twisted, bringing his blade up, but not to block. He moved to shield the path to Rowan, to the Heartseed buried beneath the ancient rose bush behind her.
The shard struck him high in the side, just below the ribs.
It didn’t clatter away. It sank into him with a sickening, wet crunch.
The golden light of his shield sputtered and died. Kael staggered back, a strangled gasp escaping his lips.
His sword fell from his numb fingers, clattering on the flagstones. A web of black veins spread from the wound, a visible poison consuming his Seelie light.
“Kael!” Rowan screamed, scrambling to her feet.
Morwen laughed, a low, triumphant sound that crawled under Rowan’s skin. “The fatal flaw of the Seelie. Duty. Sentiment.”
She advanced on Kael, who had fallen to one knee, his hand pressed against the weeping wound. “It was never about you, Your Highness. You were just the lock on the door.”
Ignoring him now, she turned her gaze to Rowan. Her eyes were chips of jet, ancient and utterly devoid of warmth. “And now, the key.”
Morwen swept past the wounded prince, her steps confident, final. Panic seized Rowan.
She tried to summon her power, to throw up a wall of roots, but her magic was a frightened, fluttering thing in the face of Morwen’s overwhelming presence.
It was like trying to stop a tidal wave with her bare hands.
Morwen stopped before the central rose bush, its blossoms now blackened and dead. “So much trouble for a simple seed,” she mused, raising a hand.
The ground trembled. “But once I corrupt it, once I make its power mine, I will control every ley line under this city. A new, dark Eden, with me as its queen.”
As Morwen reached for the Heartseed, for the source of all life in this place, a profound and sudden clarity pierced Rowan’s terror.
It was a thought so simple, so fundamental, it felt like she had known it her whole life.
They had been trying to protect the Heartseed. To defend it. To keep it separate. Kael had wanted to take it. Morwen wanted to corrupt it. Everyone treated it as an object, a prize to be won or a treasure to be guarded. But the garden had taught her that nothing existed in isolation. The roots connected to the soil, the soil to the water, the water to the air, the air to the sun. It was all one system.
The Heartseed wasn’t just in the garden. It was the garden.
And so was she.
Her own life force was woven into it. Kael had told her that. Taking it would harm her. She had been its caretaker, its botanist, its guardian.
But that was the wrong role. You couldn’t stand apart from your own heart and protect it. You had to be its vessel. The solution wasn’t to remove it, or shield it, or hide it.
The solution was to become it.
Without a second of hesitation, Rowan dropped to her knees. She plunged her hands into the soil above the Heartseed’s resting place.
She didn’t dig. She connected.
She closed her eyes and let her consciousness, her very soul, flow down through her fingertips, past the roots and loam, and touched the radiant core of power nestled in the earth.
For a heartbeat, there was agony.
It felt like being struck by lightning and drowning at the same time. An inferno of raw, untamed life force surged up into her. It roared through her veins, a power ancient and vast enough to crack the world open.
It was the collective life of every seed that had ever sprouted here, every worm that had turned the soil, every drop of rain, every ray of sun. It was too much. It was going to tear her apart.
But then, she didn’t fight it. She yielded. She opened herself up, becoming a conduit instead of a container.
The pain receded, replaced by a sense of infinite expansion.
She could feel the entire garden as if it were her own body—the crushed petals of a marigold near the gate, the terror of an earthworm fleeing Morwen’s tread, the stoic strength of the old oak in the corner.
Her eyes snapped open. They glowed with a soft, green light.
Morwen, whose hand was inches from the ground, recoiled as if burned. “What is this?” she hissed.
Rowan didn’t answer.
She saw Kael, slumped against the broken bed, his breath coming in shallow rasps. The black poison was spreading, dimming the life in him.
He was a part of this garden now, too. He had bled on its soil, fought for its life, loved its keeper. He was part of the system.
She turned the fire hose of power inside her and aimed it at him.
A torrent of pure, green-gold energy flowed from her, not through the air, but through the earth itself.
Roots, visible and glowing, erupted from the ground and wrapped gently around Kael’s body. He gasped as the light poured into him, surging toward the black shard in his side.
For a moment, the two magics warred—the creeping Unseelie decay against the ferocious tide of life.
Then, with a sound like shattering glass, the obsidian shard dissolved. The black veins vanished from Kael’s skin, consumed by the light.
Color rushed back into his face. His wound sealed, leaving behind only torn fabric and the memory of pain. His eyes met hers, wide with astonishment and awe. The power didn’t stop. It filled him, revitalized him, and then, it linked them.
She could feel his heartbeat as if it were her own, the cool, ancient hum of his Seelie magic a perfect harmony to her wild, terrestrial song.
They were one. One root system. One heart.
“No!” Morwen shrieked, finally understanding.
She lunged, not at Rowan, but at the ground, trying to plunge her tainted magic into the Heartseed.
It was like trying to poison the sun.
Rowan rose to her feet. Kael rose with her. Linked, united, they acted as one. She drew upon the raw, unyielding power of the earth.
He took that power and refined it, shaped it with millennia of Seelie knowledge. Wild magic met ordered light. It braided together, amplifying, escalating into something new. Something unstoppable.
A dome of incandescent light, shimmering with green and gold, erupted from the center of the garden. It struck Morwen with the force of a physical blow, throwing her back.
She screamed as the pure, life-giving energy seared her essence, which was built on decay and domination.
“This is my kingdom!” she howled, planting her feet and raising her hands, unleashing a final, desperate wave of darkness.
But it was useless. The light pulsed again, stronger this time. It was the defiant life of a weed breaking through concrete.
It was the resilience of a forest after a fire. It was the love of a prince for a botanist and a botanist for her garden. It was everything
Morwen was not.
The wave of cleansing energy struck her, and this time it did not throw her back. It passed through her.
It didn’t destroy her, but it scoured her clean of her connection to this place. Every tendril of her power that had seeped into the soil was burned away.
Her claim was nullified. Her corruption was purified.
With a final, agonized cry that was swallowed by the light, Morwen was expelled, her form dissolving into a swarm of black thorns that scattered on the wind and vanished.
The light receded, sinking back into the earth. Silence fell, profound and absolute.
The garden was transformed.
Every plant, from the hardiest oak to the most delicate sprout, was bathed in a soft, internal luminescence. The air was clean and sweet.
The very ground seemed to hum with a new, stable, and boundless magic.
Rowan swayed, the immense power gently withdrawing from her limbs, leaving a bone-deep exhaustion in its wake.
Strong arms wrapped around her before she could fall. Kael held her, his face buried in her hair. She could feel the steady, strong beat of his heart against her cheek, a rhythm that was now as familiar as her own.
“Rowan,” he whispered, his voice thick with emotion. “What did you do?”
She leaned against him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder.
She looked out over their wounded, glowing sanctuary. “I didn’t guard the heart,” she murmured, her eyelids fluttering. “I became it.”