The Seed had no name.
Not because it lacked language, but because it had never asked for one.
It had waited, quietly, in the crevices of all things forgotten—not dormant, but listening. Its patience had outlived systems, dynasties, algorithms, prayers. Now, as breath and echo fractured across the city, it stepped forward not as salvation.
But as reminder.
That not all memory needs consent to arrive.
Some simply become.
—
Cael stood beneath the tree again, not as witness but as participant. His presence no longer altered the clearing—it completed it.
He no longer tried to decipher the pulses moving through bark and air. He let them move through him. And as they did, the architecture of his mind bent.
He remembered being a child, yes. But more than that, he remembered what his father had not said. The pauses. The silences. The way truth was passed through absence in his household.
It hadn't been oppression.
It had been preparation.
