The white bell bloomed only once.
Eliah carried it in his palm like a fallen star—its glow gentle, pulsing faintly with each heartbeat. He did not know what it meant, only that it had come after her name returned. After her voice sang from the edge of forgetting.
He could no longer see Amara's face clearly when he closed his eyes—but he could feel her.
She was stitched into the silence. Into the pauses between breaths.
Marell waited for him when he returned to the forest glade. She did not ask what he had seen, only reached out and closed his fingers gently around the bell.
"Keep it safe," she whispered. "Sometimes memory is more powerful when it's fragile."
Eliah nodded.
He walked for days after that. Through hollow-rooted hills, across streams that shimmered with unseen currents. Every path felt like it was stitched with pieces of her—fallen ribbon in a bush, the faint shape of a handprint in the dew.
And then, one night, he returned to the place he feared most: the Firelight Tree.
It had been their sanctuary once.
Now it felt like a wound.
The tree stood tall, as always, bark aglow with veins of orange light. Beneath it lay an old circle of stones where they'd sat and told truths they didn't know were lies.
Eliah knelt there.
He took the white bell and placed it gently in the center of the stone ring.
The air changed.
The tree's glow pulsed once, and from the branches fell a single crimson leaf. It landed in his lap.
When he touched it, his vision spun—and suddenly, he was there again.
---
They were younger.
Laughing.
She had just pricked her finger on a briar, and instead of flinching, Amara laughed.
"I always choose the flowers with the sharpest thorns," she said, holding up her hand.
Blood shimmered on her fingertip.
"Why?" he asked.
She smiled, sitting beside him, that mysterious look in her silver eyes. "Because they remind me that even beauty can wound."
He took her hand, gently dabbing her finger with the edge of his sleeve.
"I'd rather you be careful."
"I'd rather feel everything," she said.
Her voice was soft but fierce.
"I don't want to grow up into someone who forgets how to bleed."
He remembered that moment now like it was stitched into his bones. That fire in her. That quiet defiance.
Back in the present, Eliah opened his hand.
The leaf had turned silver.
---
That night, as he slept beneath the Firelight Tree, the forest dreamt with him.
In his dream, Amara stood barefoot in a field of roses—each with thorns sharp enough to slice the moonlight. She held one in her palm, bleeding from the stem, but smiling.
"Do you still remember?" she asked.
He stepped toward her. "Every part of you."
She held out the flower. "Then take this. Even if it hurts."
He did.
And when he woke, the rose lay beside him.
Real.
Sharp.
Alive.
---
The next morning, the forest shifted.
Paths once hidden opened. Trees whispered names. Magic no longer shied away from him. It was as if by accepting the pain—by accepting her—the woods had begun to return what they had taken.
He returned to Marell one last time, the rose in hand, its thorns pressing into his skin.
"I don't want to forget again," he told her.
She nodded. "Then you must carry her through every hurt. Not just the memories that bloom, but the ones that burn."
He understood.
Love was not just the flutter or the warmth.
It was the thorn.
The ache.
The part of you that changed forever when someone's name became a wound.
---
He left the glade that evening with the silver-thorned rose tucked into the folds of his satchel, and the white bell pressed near his heart.
She was gone.
But she was everywhere.
And he would carry her—
In the thorns she gave him.
In the bloom she left behind.