The air in the garden hung thick with the scent of blooming memory-flowers, their petals shifting through colors no human eye had names for. Jax knelt in the soft earth, his fingers buried in soil that remembered the fall of civilizations. The golden filaments beneath his skin pulsed in time with the garden's slow, steady heartbeat—a rhythm that wasn't just sound, but something deeper. Something alive.
The Architect's words still burned in his mind.
*The garden was never just a refuge. It was always meant to fight back.*
He flexed his marked hand, watching as delicate threads of golden light extended from his fingertips, sinking into the ground like roots seeking water. The moment they connected, *knowledge* flooded into him—not as thoughts or images, but as pure, unfiltered understanding.
He saw:
The vast network of golden roots stretching through dead worlds, drinking in their memories, their sorrow, their defiance.
The creeping black infection spreading through distant branches—not random corruption, but something purposeful. Something *hungry*.
And the war—not cycles of separate battles, but one endless, grinding conflict stretching across the corpse of eternity itself.
"You're adapting faster than any Gardener before you."
The Architect's voice pulled him back. She stood beside a tree unlike the others—its bark bone-white, its leaves shimmering mirrors that reflected nothing but empty sky. When he reached out to touch it, the contact sent a shock through his system.
**Memory:**
*A world of crystal and liquid light.*
*A people who built not with stone or steel, but with solidified thought.*
*Their greatest creation—the egg—meant to birth a new kind of reality.*
*Their fatal mistake—not realizing it was already alive.*
*Already starving.*
Jax jerked his hand back, gasping. "They *made* it?"
The Architect's golden eyes darkened. "And when it turned on them, they created the Spiral to contain it. But containment was never permanent. Only... digestion."
A scream tore through the garden.
Jax spun to see the Martyr collapse, golden blood turning black as it spilled from a wound that pulsed with infection. Above her, one of the hatched entities floated—larger now, its multifaceted surface shifting through visions of terrible futures:
- The garden in flames.
- The Spirals shattered.
- The egg's cracks widening at last.
The Warden lunged, her blade a silver arc in the air—only for the entity to *reverse* her strike, turning time itself backward around its form. The Scientist threw up barriers of twisted physics, but the creature simply stepped between dimensions to evade them.
Jax didn't think.
He *moved*.
Not through space, but *with* it—his body fracturing into golden afterimages as he crossed the distance in a single heartbeat. His filaments lashed out, anchoring the Warden's blade in the flow of causality, reinforcing the Scientist's failing barriers with the dying screams of dead worlds.
The entity turned its gaze on him.
And Jax *looked back*.
What he saw in its core wasn't just a scout.
It was a bridge.
A connection straight to the egg itself.
The vision hit like a hammer to the skull:
**The egg's surface, webbed with cracks.**
**Something moving in the dark between realities.**
**A great eye, lidless and knowing.**
**And the terrible, gut-churning realization—**
**—it wasn't alien.**
**—it was *familiar*.**
The connection severed with a snap that left Jax's ears ringing. The entity shrieked as his golden filaments *pulled*, unraveling its existence strand by strand until nothing remained but the fading echo of that terrible eye.
Silence fell.
The Martyr's wound slowly knit itself closed with threads of golden light. The Warden retrieved her blade, its edge now humming with new power. The Scientist recorded everything with eyes that saw in dimensions beyond counting.
And the Architect—
She looked at Jax with something like grief.
"You felt it," she whispered. "You *understood*."
Jax's marked hand trembled. "It knows us. It's not some mindless horror. It's—"
"Our child," the Architect finished. "The first and last creation of a dead civilization. And it will consume all we've built to finish its birth."
Above them, the sky's tapestry of memories shifted—the cracks in the egg's surface spreading wider.
Time was running out.