The flower-field spread with terrifying speed, transforming the icy tundra into a glittering, crystalline garden in hours. The "Vaktari Blooms" weren't organic—they were geometric constructs of frozen light, singing a discordant, perfect harmony that made anyone who heard it feel like a flawed sketch.
Skodar, Valeria, Lyra, and a squad of Stonewardens arrived via skiff. The air was bitterly cold, but not from temperature—from absence of noise. The usual wind, the crunch of snow, the distant animal calls—all silenced. Only the flowers' hum remained.
In the center of the field stood a figure. It was Crystalline, like Valeria and Archon Crystan, but its light was blindingly white, without color or warmth. It had no face, just a smooth plane. It was tending the flowers, its long, graceful fingers pruning imaginary imperfections.
"You are the significant variable," it said without turning, its voice the sound of ice cracking under perfect pressure. "Designation: Skodar Vakhas. Hybrid. Anomaly."
"Who are you?" Skodar demanded, his scars already glowing in response to the oppressive stillness.
"I am the Gardener. The First Prism. The one who shattered the light into colors so it could be studied. I created the Crystalline. I sent the Arks. I have watched the experiment." It finally turned. Its blank face was more unnerving than any expression. "The results are conclusive. Sentient emotion is a corruption of pure energy. It leads to pain, inefficiency, and ultimately, the attraction of the Entropy you call the Unraveler. You are a beacon for the end of all things."
Valeria stepped forward, her light dimming in the Gardener's presence. "First Prism… we have evolved. We have found value in the chaos."
"Chaos has no value. It is data waiting to be ordered. Your 'love,' your 'hope'—they are system errors. Vaktari was the first error. You are the cascading failure. This planet is the contaminated sample." The Gardener gestured, and the flowers around them glowed brighter. "I have come to sterilize it before the Entropy arrives. A controlled burn to save the forest."
Lyra had her rifle up. "You'll burn nothing."
"Your weapon is a child's toy. I do not fight. I… conclude."
The Gardener raised a hand. The flowers' hum shifted frequency. Skodar felt it immediately—a simplification field. The complex bond he felt with his brother started to flatten into a basic genetic imperative to protect kin. His love for his Queens began to feel like a biological reproductive strategy. The field wasn't attacking their bodies. It was attacking the poetry of their existence.
The Stonewardens cried out, dropping their weapons, clutching their heads as their hard-won loyalty to Dawnspire felt suddenly like programmed obedience.
"NO!" Skodar roared. He slammed his staff into the ground, unleashing a wave of resonant energy. But the field absorbed it, simplified it, turned his defiant shout into a soundwave of predictable frequency.
The Gardener tilted its head. "You try to fight logic with feeling. It is like trying to melt a diamond with a sigh."
Skodar realized fighting power with power was useless. The Gardener was order incarnate. He needed… disorder.
He dropped his staff. He stopped trying to push back with energy. Instead, he did something irrational.
He began to tell a joke.
A stupid, pointless, twist-ending joke Anya had told him about a one-legged Brute trying to sell boots. He poured his resonance not into power, but into delivery. The timing. The absurd accent. The sheer, ridiculous humanity of it.
The simplification field wavered. Jokes were narrative chaos. They existed only to create a moment of shared, illogical understanding. The Gardener's field couldn't process the data.
"This is… irrelevant noise," the Gardener stated, but its voice had the faintest quiver of uncertainty.
"IT'S FUNNY!" Skodar yelled, laughing manically himself. "Don't you get it? The punchline is he was selling them to a snake! A snake doesn't wear boots!"
He followed it with a memory—not of victory, but of failure. The time he tried to cook for Makosra and burned the Koras fruit to charcoal. The shame, the laughter, the lesson learned. A useless memory with zero survival value.
The flowers around him started to wilt. Their perfect geometry developed flaws. A petal bent. A stem twisted.
The Gardener took a step back. "You weaponize… triviality."
"I weaponize life!" Skodar advanced, not with threats, but with more absurdity. He sang a drinking song off-key. He recounted a dream about flying turnips. He did a silly dance Lyra had taught him when they were drunk one night.
With each irrational act, the Gardener's field weakened. Its perfect white light developed a faint, distressed grey hue. It was trying to compute the incomputable.
Valeria saw her chance. She didn't attack. She did something wiser. She projected a memory—her own. The moment she first felt curiosity about humans. The illogical, unscientific desire to know what it felt like to be mortal. Her first error.
The Gardener recoiled as if struck. "You… my creation… you embrace the flaw?"
"It's not a flaw!" Valeria cried, her light blazing with colors the Gardener had never allowed. "It's the point! You made us to study light! We discovered the study itself is beautiful! The process is the purpose!"
It was too much. The Gardener, the entity of pure conclusion, was being bombarded with unending process. With middles that refused to end.
Its form began to fractalize. It didn't shatter. It splintered into a thousand copies of itself, each trying to analyze a different piece of the chaotic data, each falling further behind.
"The experiment… continues…" its voice fragmented into whispers. "Observation… must… recalibrate…"
With a final flash of confused light, the Gardener vanished. The crystalline flowers turned to ordinary snow, leaving the tundra barren.
They had won. Not by being stronger, but by being too silly to be logically concluded.
Cliffhanger:
Back in Dawnspire,as they debriefed, Elara was monitoring the deep-space sensors. The Gardener's brief presence had sent a shockwave through the local narrative field.
"The Unraveler…" she reported, her face ashen. "It just changed course. Dramatically. It's not just heading for the galaxy anymore."
Skodar's heart sank. "What do you mean?"
"The gravitational waves… the entropy signature… it's not on a path to the galactic core anymore." She looked up, her silver eyes wide with terror. "It's on a direct, accelerated trajectory for Arthoje. Specifically. The Gardener's 'sterilization attempt'… it didn't hide us. It highlighted us. Like shining a spotlight on the most interesting specimen in the lab."
The Gardener had failed to simplify them. In doing so, it had proven to the approaching Entropy that they were the most complex, disordered, interesting thing in this sector of the universe.
They had gone from a potential meal to the main course.
Skodar looked at his scared but determined council, at the faint glow of Vaktari's Seed, at the infinite stars on the viewer. They had twenty cycles before.
Now, they had two.
"Then we get ready," he said, his voice quiet but firm. "We make our story the hardest thing it's ever had to swallow. We give it indigestion."
But in the back of his mind, the Gardener's final fragmented words echoed: "Observation… must recalibrate…"
They hadn't seen the last of the First Prism. And its recalibration would not be in their favor.