The moment Kael touched the black book, the air shifted.
It wasn't a gust of wind or a tremor beneath the stone floor—no, it was subtler. Like the world inhaling.
The book was cold to the touch, yet alive. Its surface pulsed once, as if acknowledging him.
And then it opened on its own.
Pages turned rapidly, faster than Kael could read, flipping as though searching for something. Finally, it stopped. A single word burned itself into the parchment in crimson ink:
"Accepted."
Before Kael could react, chains of ink lashed out from the book and wrapped around his arms. They didn't bind—they sank into his skin, seeping like liquid shadow. Visions flashed in his mind: ancient wars, forgotten gods, and fields of black roses growing over the corpses of kings.
And at the center of it all…
A cloaked figure standing before a dying sun, holding the same book in hand.
Kael staggered back, gasping.
The book slammed shut.
He wasn't alone anymore.
> "Binding complete."
"You are now the Archive Bearer."
"Category: Soul Gardener."
"Gardener?" he murmured. "Of what?"
But he already knew.
Behind him, one of the glass caskets cracked.
Then another.
And another.
The dead were waking. But not as mindless corpses. Their eyes opened slowly, not with hunger—but with awareness. Recognition.
Kael stepped back toward the pedestal, his voice shaking. "What are you?"
One of the revenants bowed.
"You are our keeper," it rasped. "And we… are your roots."
Suddenly, the garden wasn't just metaphor.
It was real.
Buried deep below the world's surface, forgotten by time, tended by silence—
and now blooming under his shadow.
Kael didn't yet understand the rules of this power.
But the world had cast him into its graveyard.
And he was going to make it grow.