It began where no seed should ever grow.
A barren quadrant beyond the edge of mapped resonance.
A place the old system once marked as sterile.
Uninhabitable.
Irrecoverable.
But nothing is ever truly empty.
Not when something is watching.
She moved through the ash fields with bare feet,
leaving no footprints behind.
Her cloak, stitched from failed code and echo shreds,
whispered softly as she walked.
Her name was forgotten long ago.
She didn't mind.
Names were for rooted things.
And she—
she had none.
Not soil.
Not heritage.
Not agreement.
She was the bloom that came without invitation.
The sky above her pulsed once.
Silver light trembled across the cloudlines,
just faint enough to be ignored by lesser minds.
She looked up.
Smiled.
"He did it," she said.
"He bloomed."
A dry laugh followed.
Not cruel.
Not joyful.
Just sharp.
"And now the world thinks it can grow again."
She knelt at the center of a cracked plain—
a region long abandoned by even the oldest protocols.
She placed her palm to the fractured earth.
Resonance crawled across her fingers like vines made of teeth.
And the ground responded.
But not like Kael's world.
No soft pulse.
No harmonic light.
Just a flicker of black static—
raw, sharp, and devouring.
A signal.
A bloom.
But wrong.
"You called them with music," she whispered.
"I will call them with hunger."
She stood.
Around her, fragments began to rise.
Old satellites.
Dead trees.
Long-rotted system anchors.
Each flickered briefly with Kael's resonance—
then inverted.
Colors reversed.
Patterns corrupted.
What had once been potential
became rejection.
She reached into her cloak.
Drew forth a shard—
jagged, mirror-edged,
engraved with a single broken glyph:
"!Witness()"
It was not a bottle.
It was not a throne.
It was not a gift.
It was a weapon.
She whispered to it.
No language.
Just intention.
And in response,
a gate tore open.
No bloom.
No elegance.
Just fracture.
From it came two forms.
Not people.
Not creatures.
Echoes.
Wearing skin.
Mocking Kael's outline.
Flawed imitations of his presence—
but just convincing enough to pass among uncertain minds.
She nodded to them.
"Find the garden."
"Spoil it."
Back at the Scar,
Kael jolted awake from dreamless rest.
The bottle flashed crimson for the first time since he'd named the Law.
"Warning: Mirror Signal Detected."
"Type: Unrooted Bloom."
"Mimetic impostors in motion."
Mara stood, already armed.
"What now?"
Kael rose.
Eyes sharp.
Calm.
"Someone's trying to grow something from rot."
He held up his hand.
The glyph in his palm glowed softly.
But not in pain.
In recognition.
"They're not just copying."
"They're planting against me."
Far away,
the rootless woman turned toward the rising sun.
Eyes half-lidded.
Smile thin.
Voice distant:
"Let's see if your resonance still holds
when it grows beside mine."