Jace remembered the scream before the silence.
He remembered his brother's voice calling his name, the heat of the lights after the football game—and then nothing. Darkness swallowed everything.
When he woke, he wasn't sure if he was buried or born.
He lay suspended in a sphere of glass and green light. Thick vines coiled around his arms and chest, humming softly, pumping warmth through his veins in rhythm with his heartbeat. Above him, faint silhouettes moved—a dozen figures tending to a circle of glowing roots. The air shimmered like liquid gold.
It didn't feel like death. It felt like dreaming inside a pulse.
"He stirs," a woman's voice said. "The bond favors him."
Jace turned his head, groggy. A figure leaned close—a woman with eyes like molten silver and hair the color of bark polished by moonlight. When she smiled, the ground itself seemed to breathe with her.
"Where am I?" His voice was hoarse, thin.
"Home," she said. "Or what will be, once the old world stops choking on fear."
The vines loosened just enough for him to sit up. Beyond the glass walls, roots stretched endlessly in every direction, connecting pods like his—each one glowing with faint human silhouettes curled inside. Some whispered in their sleep. Some screamed.
"What is this place?"
The woman knelt in front of him and placed a hand over his chest. "You're inside Eden's Vein, child of the bloodline. Chosen of the Tenth Bloom."
At her touch, images rushed through him: forests burning, oceans turning silver, his grandmother's lifeless eyes—and above it all, a towering shape made of light and vines watching from beyond the stars. His breath caught.
"I can feel you," came a voice, distant yet intimate, female, ancient. "You are the second heart. The counterpulse."
Jace looked up. He wasn't speaking to the woman anymore. He was hearing Mother Nature herself.
"Your brother's hands tremble with mercy," she whispered, "but mercy repeats the cycle. You must be his balance."
His throat tightened. "Cobi—where is he?"
A tremor rippled through the room. The woman's expression softened, but her eyes glowed brighter.
"He walks the path of the vessels," she said. "But you… you will walk the path of the blade."
Days—weeks—passed in half‑remembered sequences. Jace drifted between fevered dreams and lucid lessons. The caretakers in the Garden whispered to him about the world's decay and how humanity's greed had poisoned Mother Nature beyond repair. They called Cobi The False Vessel, prophesied to undo what little balance remained.
Food tasted like ash. Water glowed faintly when he drank it. He watched the pods around him grow—inside each, sleepers began to awaken, eyes silver like his. The plants were making people, vessels stitched from organic memory and bone.
When he slept, he dreamed of his brother standing across a burning field. Every time he called out, Cobi turned away, eyes like mirrors, whispering something Jace couldn't hear.
The day came when the woman returned—her name now clear in his mind. Seraphiel, Keeper of the Tenth Bloom. She carried with her a curved fragment of vine hardened into something like a blade.
"This is your inheritance," she said. "Born of the same root that made your brother. Two halves of one body can't coexist forever. One must prune the other before the garden devours itself."
The weapon pulsed. It thrummed in his hand like recognition.
Jace looked into the reflection of its edge—and for an instant, saw roots weaving through his own pupils.
"Does he know?" Jace asked.
Seraphiel smiled, soft and sorrowful. "He will. When it's too late."
That night, Jace defied instruction and pressed his hand to the glass barrier. Visions erupted—flashes of Cobi walking through stormlight, clutching a map dotted with luminous symbols. Their senses collided across time and distance.
"Jace?" Cobi's voice echoed faintly inside his head.
"Brother," whispered another, older voice—the same one that now shared his bloodstream. "Find him. End him. And free us both."
Jace gasped, torn between terror and longing. The blade pulsed once more, responding to both.
For the first time, he realized the truth.
He wasn't a prisoner anymore.
He was an heir.
And even the plants had started to fear what kind of god he might become.