The hunter

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The fortress is no longer a fortress—it’s a *nexus*.

The oak’s roots have grown beyond the crystalline forest, threading through the fabric of reality itself. The flowers bloom in every color imaginable, their petals shimmering with fragments of timelines both lived and unlived. The Forgotten who remain have become something else entirely—guardians, gardeners, or perhaps prisoners. Their mutations have stabilized, but their eyes hold a distant, almost reverent glow. They call the oak **the Worldheart** now, and they speak of it in whispers, as if afraid it might hear.

The Hunter is more root than man these days. His voice echoes through the fortress, a low hum that vibrates in my bones. He rarely takes physical form anymore, preferring to exist as a presence, a pulse within the oak’s vast network.

“It’s changing,” I say to him one evening, as the sky fractures into a kaleidoscope of stolen sunsets.