The garden opened again around him without asking.
This time he walked in rather than arriving, boots on luminous moss, and the silver orchard stood brighter than it had. Her work, and his. Three nights of feeding had brought the bloom back into the bone white trees, and the petals drifted down like slow warm snow.
But the sky was worse.
Above the garden's canopy, visible through the silver branches the way a wound is visible through torn cloth, the root-chains had grown. Black veins on the sky now, a strangler's web thickened and multiplied, drawn down toward the tree's heart like the grip of something enormous slowly closing. The siphon was not pulling harder tonight. It was pulling from deeper.
"Your forest is bruised, your Majesty."
