The seed pulsed in Kael's palm, its rhythm syncing with the grind of his clockwork heart. The Dawn Pirates crowded around him on the Argent Whisper's deck, their hybrid forms tense with anticipation. The Zmey's island had vanished behind them, swallowed by the First Tide's wake, but the relic in his hand hummed with a language older than the giant-kings.
"It's the same as hers," murmured Lysandra, the navigator, her storm-cloud eyes flickering. "The flower Sera planted—this is its twin."
Kael nodded. After months of sailing unwritten seas, they'd learned to read the relics of dead worlds. This seed was no mere plant; it was a anchor, a knot in reality's fabric. But to what end?
The answer came at dusk, when the seed sprouted.
One moment, it lay dormant. The next, obsidian roots speared through Kael's glove, burying into the deck. The crew recoiled as the ship shuddered, timbers groaning like a beast in labor. Vines of liquid shadow coiled up the mast, blossoming into flowers that wept silver pollen. Where the droplets fell, the world softened—the sea turned to glass, the sky to parchment.
"Get it off!" roared Garvin, the cook, batting pollen from his bark-skinned arms.
But Kael stood transfixed. The pollen wasn't destroying the ship—it was rewriting it. The Argent Whisper's shadowy sails hardened into crystalline sheets, their edges cutting the light into prismatic shards. The helm, once worn smooth by phantom hands, now bore carvings of a three-headed dragon.
The Zmey's voice slithered through his mind: "Every garden needs a keeper, wind-up man."
Then, pain—white-hot and precise—as the roots burrowed deeper into his wrist. Kael's vision fractured, showing him a shore where Sera stood, her form woven from starlight and static.
"Plant it where the tides collide," she whispered, her voice fraying. "Before they return."
When the vision faded, the seed had settled, its vines dormant. The crew stared at Kael, their distrust palpable.
"Well?" Lysandra demanded. "What did it do?"
He flexed his metal hand, gears grinding. "It gave us a heading."
They sailed for seven days and seven eternities, the pollen warping time like wet ink. Kael's map—now tattooed in shifting silver across his chest—led them to a chain of islands floating in a sea of molten glass. Each isle was a shard of a dead world: a frozen battlefield here, a drowned library there, all orbiting a central vortex where the tides collided.
The Zmey's riddle echoed in Kael's dreams: "The end that births beginnings."
He found his answer in the vortex's eye.
A city floated there, its architecture a spiral of contradictions—spires of bone fused with engines of light, bridges of song connecting towers of silence. At its heart stood a garden, overgrown and humming with the same obsidian flowers that now infested the Argent Whisper.
"The Garden of Unmade Promises," Lysandra breathed, clutching her charm—a shard of the shattered moons. "My grandmother told stories. They say the giant-kings buried their regrets here."
Kael adjusted his goggles, lenses filtering the garden's dissonant light. "Then let's unbury them."
The garden rejected them violently.
Vines lashed like whips, thorns biting through Garvin's bark armor. Flowers exhaled spores that dissolved steel and sanity. Lysandra navigated by throwing storm-marbles—tiny tempests that ripped through the foliage—but even her fury had limits.
At the garden's core, they found the Keeper.
Or what remained of her—a woman fused with the roots, her body a lattice of amber sap and fractured memories. Her eyes opened, pupils shaped like hourglasses.
"You're late," she croaked.
Kael raised his sword, a jagged piece of Tidecaller bone. "Who are you?"
"The First Weaver. The one who planted the garden before your Sera." She laughed, sap bubbling at her lips. "The Pact you carry—it was mine, once. My crew… my family… I wove them into its pages to save them."
Lysandra froze. "You're lying."
"Am I?" The Keeper's gaze drifted to the flowers. "Check your map, storm-child. Look at the names."
Lysandra unrolled the blood-map, its constellations shifting. There, etched in godblood: Marina of the Fractured Tides—the Keeper's name.
Garvin stepped back, horrified. "You're saying we're… what? Repeats?"
"Not repeats. Reflections." The Keeper's voice softened. "The Dawn Pirates, the Starweavers, the giant-kings—all of you dancing the same steps, season after season. The Old Ones don't corrupt reality. They revel in it."
Kael's clockwork heart stuttered. "How do we stop the cycle?"
The Keeper smiled. "You don't. You break it."
She dissolved then, her body crumbling into pollen. Where she'd stood, a new seed glinted—obsidian veined with gold.
They fled the garden as the islands collapsed, the vortex churning into a hungry mouth. Back on the Argent Whisper, Kael stared at the two seeds—one silver, one gold—pulsing in sync with his heartbeat.
Lysandra joined him at the prow, her storm-eyes dim. "She was right. My grandmother's stories… they're in the Pact's margins. We're just ghosts with new names."
Kael gripped the seeds until their edges drew blood. "Then we'll be better ghosts."
He planted them both in the ship's hull. The crew protested, but Kael was done with caution. The roots spread rapidly, merging with the Argent Whisper's bones. The ship shuddered, then changed—sails becoming wings, hull melting into something fluid and feral.
Garvin fell to his knees. "What have you done?"
"What Sera did," Kael said. "What the Keeper did. What we've always done."
The ship moved, not through water, but through possibility.
They came at midnight—not as whispers, but as a symphony. The Old Ones rode the tides in vessels of frozen light, their forms flickering between beauty and blasphemy. At their helm floated a figure Kael knew too well.
Elara.
Or a shadow wearing his face.
"Little mechanic," the figure cooed. "You've brought us a gift."
The Argent Whisper's wings flexed, the crew arming themselves with weapons forged from garden thorns and regret. Lysandra's storm-marbles swirled like miniature hurricanes.
Kael stepped forward, seeds burning in his chest. "You don't want the ship. You want the cycle."
Elara's shadow smiled. "The cycle is life. Break it, and you break yourselves."
"Then we'll break."
Kael slammed his fist into the deck. The seeds erupted, vines engulfing the ship, the crew, the sea itself. The Old Ones screamed as the garden's roots pierced their hulls, drinking their light.
But victory, as always, was a lie.
As the last Old One dissolved, Kael felt it—the seeds' roots inside him, twisting through his clockwork heart. Lysandra gasped, her storm-eyes blooming into flowers. Garvin's bark skin cracked, sap pooling like blood.
The Zmey's final rogue echoed as the world went dark:
"What is a story's end, but a new beginning… poorly told?"