We didn't take the vial.
Not yet. We told Kerra we needed time to think, to understand what consuming our own voice might mean, to prepare for whatever transformation or dissolution might follow. She accepted this with a nod that suggested she'd expected the hesitation, tucked the vial back into her coat, and told us where to find her when we were ready. Then she left, picking her way through the cathedral's ruins, disappearing into the grey streets beyond.
We sat alone in the rubble for a long time after she'd gone. The silence was different now. Lighter somehow. Less oppressive. Without all those trapped voices screaming from the walls, without the weight of our imprisonment pressing down on the architecture, the space felt almost peaceful. Just stone and dust and the faint whisper of wind moving through empty window frames.
But we couldn't stay. The Hushed was coming, and this place offered no shelter anymore. The acoustics that had once protected it were shattered along with the walls. It was just another ruin now, no different from the rest of the dying city.
We needed to move. Needed to find somewhere we could exist for whatever time we had left. And there was one place we'd been avoiding since the moment we'd merged, one location that called to both halves of our consciousness with equal measures of longing and dread.
The western gardens. Where Lysisite had died.
Where Ardyn had killed her.
Where this entire horror had begun.
The journey took hours, or perhaps minutes. Time continued its elastic behavior, stretching and compressing without warning. We walked through streets that looped back on themselves, past buildings that remembered being something else, through plazas where fountains had run dry and birds lay preserved in the moment before their final fall. Other survivors moved through the grey occasionally, keeping distance, avoiding eye contact, each person an island of desperate isolation in a world that was slowly erasing the possibility of connection.
None of them could see us clearly. We were too far gone now, too transparent to register as fully real. They looked through us more often than at us, their gazes sliding past as if we were just another trick of the light, another hallucination in a city full of them.
Maybe we were.
The western gardens occupied what had once been the city's green heart, a sprawling park where ancient trees provided shade and carefully cultivated flowers bloomed in patterns that changed with the seasons. Ardyn remembered bringing Lysithe here on summer evenings, remembered the way golden light filtered through leaves and painted her face in shades of amber and honey. Remembered her laugh when he'd tried to explain the mathematics of petal arrangements, the way she'd teased him for finding equations in beauty instead of just accepting beauty for what it was.
Lysisite remembered differently. Remembered cold. Remembered fear. Remembered Ardyn's hands on her shoulders and his voice in her ear speaking words that were supposed to be comfort but felt like cage bars closing. Remembered the moment she'd realized he wouldn't let her go, wouldn't let her fade naturally, would consume her rather than lose her.
Remembered dying while the one person she loved watched and did nothing to stop it.
Both memories were true. Both memories were lies. We carried them together now, unable to separate them into his truth and her truth, unable to decide which version of events deserved belief.
The gardens were dead.
Not metaphorically. Not gradually dying like the rest of the city. Actually dead. Every tree stood grey and brittle, branches snapped under their own weight, trunks hollowed out by something that wasn't quite rot. Every flower had fossilized in bloom, petals turned to stone mid-unfurl, colors leached away until only grey remained. The paths that had wound through greenery were visible now as dark lines cutting through ash, and the fountains that had once sparkled with water held only dust and the desiccated bodies of things that had tried to drink.
It looked like a garden painted by someone who'd forgotten what gardens were supposed to be. A memory of green translated into shades of ending.
We walked the familiar paths anyway, our feet remembering the turns even when our eyes couldn't recognize what we were seeing. The western gardens weren't large, maybe ten acres total, but they felt vast in their emptiness, in their silence, in the complete absence of any life that wasn't us.
And even we were questionable.
"This is where it happened," Lysithe's voice said as we reached the garden's center, a circular clearing where a massive oak had once spread branches wide enough to shelter fifty people. The oak was still there, but transformed, its trunk split down the middle and hollow, its branches reaching upward like hands frozen mid-prayer or mid-plea.
"I don't remember," Ardyn's voice responded. "I try to remember and there's nothing. Just grey. Just absence. Like someone carved that memory out and left a hole."
"Maybe you carved it out yourself. Maybe that's what consuming my echo did. Replaced the truth with the version you could live with."
"What is the truth?"
Lysithe's consciousness within our shared awareness went quiet for a moment, gathering itself or perhaps deciding how much honesty was survivable. When she spoke again, her voice was soft but steady.
"The truth is you brought me here on the day the silence came. The day voices started disappearing. You were terrified. Not for yourself but for me. You'd already figured out that you could hear echoes, that you had this terrible gift, and you'd realized that when I died, when my voice was taken by the Hushed, you'd be able to hear my echo. Preserve it. Keep some part of me alive."
Our body moved closer to the dead oak without conscious decision, drawn by something deeper than thought. We could see it now, faint traces in the ash at the tree's base. The outline of two bodies. One standing. One kneeling.
"I told you no," Lysithe continued. "Told you I'd rather fade completely than exist as your ghost. Rather be forgotten than consumed. But you didn't listen. You said it wouldn't be consumption, it would be preservation. You said you were saving me. You said—"
"I said I loved you," Ardyn's voice finished, the memory returning in fragments, in pieces that cut. "I said love meant never letting go. Meant holding on even when holding on becomes violence."
"Yes."
"And then?"
"Then you waited. You held me while the Hushed came. Held me while my voice faded. Held me in that last moment when my echo formed and hung in the air between us. I begged you not to. I screamed at you to let me go. But you opened your mouth and you swallowed me anyway. You ate my voice while I was still aware enough to feel it happening. Still conscious enough to experience being consumed by the person I loved."
We fell to our knees in the ash, in the exact spot where Lysithe had knelt three months ago, and the memory was complete now, undeniable, playing out in our shared consciousness with brutal clarity. We could feel both sides of it simultaneously. Ardyn's desperate love and terrible certainty that this was salvation. Lysithe's terror and betrayal and the slow dissolution of self as she was digested into something that was no longer her.
"That's why I appeared faceless," Lysithe's voice said. "That's why I couldn't tell you the truth directly. Because I wasn't real. I was constructed from your guilt and the fragments of my echo and your desperate need to believe you'd done the right thing. I was the version of me you could live with. The version that would forgive you. The version that would love you back instead of screaming accusations until you broke."
"But you're more than that now," Ardyn insisted. "You're not just my guilt. You fight me. You argue. You have your own thoughts and desires. You're real."
"Am I? Or am I just the argument you're having with yourself about whether what you did was love or murder? Maybe I'm just the part of your psyche that still knows right from wrong, personified as the woman you killed to make the truth easier to swallow."
"No." The word came out fierce, certain, both our voices speaking in perfect unison. "No. You're real. You have to be real. Because if you're not, then I've been completely alone this entire time. Then every conversation, every moment of connection, every time I felt less monstrous because you were there to share the weight, all of it was just me talking to myself. And I can't. I can't accept that. I can't survive that."
Lysithe's consciousness within ours softened, some of the harshness leaving her tone. "Maybe survival isn't the goal anymore. Maybe we need to stop running from the truth and just accept what we are. What we've always been. One person who broke themselves in half because whole was too painful."
Around us, the garden began to change. The grey flowers started to move, petals uncurling slightly, stone becoming something more flexible. Not alive exactly, but less dead than they'd been. And from beneath the ash, from the roots of the dead oak, something was pushing upward. Something that glowed with soft rose-gold light.
New flowers.
Impossible flowers.
Growing in a place where nothing should grow, blooming in colors that shouldn't exist, their petals made of sound somehow made visible. We could hear them as much as see them, each blossom singing a single note, and together they created a melody that was familiar and heartbreaking.
The lullaby. The four-note sequence Lysithe had been humming when she died. The song that had followed us through every chapter of this nightmare.
The flowers spread outward from the oak's base, multiplying and growing and filling the clearing with their impossible beauty. They climbed the dead tree's trunk, wrapped around its hollow branches, covered the ash beneath our knees. And where they touched our body, our failing transparent flesh, they left traces of color behind. Rose and gold and all the shades between, painting us in hues that made us look almost alive again.
"What is this?" Ardyn's voice asked, wonder mixed with fear.
"I think," Lysithe said slowly, "this is what happens when guilt and love grow in the same soil. When the place where someone died becomes holy not because of martyrdom but because of the refusal to forget. These flowers aren't real. They can't be real. But they're blooming anyway."
We reached out and touched one, felt the petal soft against our palm, felt it vibrate with the note it was singing. The contact sent a shock through our system, not painful but intensely present, a reminder that we still had nerves that could feel, still had awareness that could register sensation, still existed in some form that mattered.
The flower opened wider at our touch, and from its center emerged something small and bright. An echo. A fragment of voice that wasn't ours, wasn't Lysithe's, wasn't any of the voices we'd consumed. This was something else. Something new. A sound that had never existed before, born from the garden's impossible blooms.
It said: Remember.
It said: Choose.
It said: Become.
Then it dissipated, absorbed back into the flower, and we understood with sudden clarity what this place was. Not just a garden. Not just the site of Lysithe's death. This was a threshold. A space between what we'd been and what we might still become. The flowers were offering us something, though we couldn't quite parse what.
A choice. Always a choice.
"If we stay here," Lysithe's voice said, "if we let these flowers grow through us and around us and eventually over us, I think we could become part of the garden. Part of this threshold space. We'd stop being human or ghost or whatever we are now. We'd just be memory made permanent. Sound made visible. Love preserved in a form that doesn't hurt."
"That sounds like dying."
"Maybe. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe it's finding a way to exist that doesn't require consumption or violence or the constant struggle to maintain coherence. Maybe it's peace."
Ardyn's consciousness resisted the idea immediately, instinctively. He'd spent three months fighting dissolution, fighting to maintain some form of existence, refusing to accept that endings were real. The thought of surrendering now, of letting the flowers consume what little remained of their shared body, felt like giving up. Like admitting defeat.
But another part of him, the part that was so tired of fighting, so exhausted by the weight of guilt and hunger and the terrible mathematics of survival, that part whispered: Yes. Please. Let me rest.
"Not yet," we said aloud, our dual voice cutting through the flowers' song. "We're not ready to become garden yet. There are still things we need to do. Choices we need to make. Truths we need to face."
The flowers didn't wilt or retreat, but they stopped spreading, as if acknowledging our decision. They remained where they'd grown, creating a circle of impossible bloom around the dead oak, a reminder that this option existed, that this threshold would wait for us when we were ready to cross it.
We stood, our legs shaking, our body more transparent than solid but still managing to hold shape. The rose-gold color the flowers had painted on our skin was already fading, retreating back into grey, but for a moment we'd looked almost alive. For a moment we'd felt almost whole.
That would have to be enough.
We turned to leave the clearing, to make our way back through the dead gardens toward whatever came next, when we heard footsteps behind us. Not Kerra's measured tread. Not the shuffling gait of other survivors. Something else. Something that moved with deliberate grace, with purpose, with the kind of confidence that came from knowing exactly what you were and what you wanted.
We turned and saw him standing at the clearing's edge, silver hair catching what little light filtered through the grey sky, dark coat pristine despite the ash covering everything. Sahrin Korr smiled at us, and his eyes reflected the garden's impossible flowers, turning his gaze into twin mirrors of rose and gold.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" he said, gesturing at the blooms. "Beauty born from guilt. Life from death. Sound from silence. It's almost poetic. Almost makes the horror worth it." He took a step closer, and the flowers nearest him withered, their petals turning grey and crumbling to ash. "But poetry doesn't survive in the real world, does it? Eventually, everything returns to silence. Everything gets consumed. Even impossibilities like this."
"What do you want?" our dual voice asked, wary, remembering how he'd saved us from the Hushed but still uncertain of his motives.
"I want to make you an offer," Sahrin said. "A real one this time. Not the pretend bargain we made before, the one where I pretended you had a choice and you pretended you weren't already mine. I want to show you something. Something that will make you understand what you really are and what you can become if you stop fighting your nature."
"We're not interested in your offers."
"No?" His smile widened. "Not even if I tell you that I know how to make Lysithe real? Not just a voice in your head or a projection of your guilt, but actually, physically real? A body of her own. A consciousness independent of yours. Everything you've been trying to achieve through consumption, I can give you through synthesis."
Our heart, the one we weren't sure we still had, began to race. "That's not possible."
"Most things aren't possible. And yet here we are, standing in a garden of flowers that sing, talking to each other through voices that belong to people who are either dead or were never alive to begin with. Possibility is just a word we use for things we haven't figured out how to break yet." He held out his hand. "Come with me. Let me show you my real collection. The one I don't advertise to desperate echo eaters looking for quick fixes. The one reserved for those who understand that survival isn't enough. That some of us want to transcend what we've become and become something else entirely."
We looked at his outstretched hand, at the fingers that were too cold, at the palm that reflected light strangely. Looked at the flowers around us, at the threshold they represented. Looked at the dead gardens stretching away in all directions, at the grey city beyond.
Lysithe's voice spoke in our shared awareness, uncertain for the first time since we'd merged. "What if he's telling the truth? What if there's actually a way for me to exist separately? To not be part of you anymore? To be my own person with my own body and my own choices?"
"Then we'd lose each other," Ardyn's voice responded. "Lose this connection. Lose being we."
"Would that be so bad? Being two instead of one? Being able to talk to each other instead of at each other? Being able to love without it being self-love in disguise?"
We didn't know. Couldn't know. The thought of separation was terrifying and tempting in equal measure. Terrifying because we'd gotten used to never being alone, to always having her voice in our head, to existing as plural. Tempting because maybe she was right. Maybe real love required separation. Required the space to see each other clearly instead of looking at each other through the distortion of shared consciousness.
"One hour," we said to Sahrin. "Show us what you're offering. Then we decide."
"Fair enough." He lowered his hand but didn't seem disappointed. "Though I think once you see what's possible, the decision will make itself. It always does." He turned and began walking back through the garden, and the flowers withered in his wake, leaving a trail of grey ash marking his passage.
We followed, the impossible blooms closing behind us, the clearing growing smaller in the distance. The dead oak stood alone again, hollow and reaching, guarding a threshold we'd chosen not to cross.
Not yet.
But we knew we'd return.
Eventually, everyone returned to the place where they'd died.
It was just a question of whether they came to remember or to finally, properly rest.