The Flower That Should Not Bloom...
Time does not heal. It preserves the wound in fresher colors.
The light was wrong.
Too golden, too quiet. The sun draped itself across crumbling buildings that, for now, were still whole. The air smelled of copper and blooming lilacs. Birds chirped, unknowing of gods, of death, of war.
Elias stood at the edge of the school rooftop, breath uneven. He knew this place. Of course he did. The rusted fence, the faded mural of wings behind him, the lonely vending machine humming to itself like a forgotten lullaby.
Three years before the world ended.
He should have laughed. Cried. Screamed. Instead, he sat on the edge, legs dangling over the side, and listened to the wind—wondering if it could carry the weight of memory.
"She dies here," he whispered. "On this roof. In my arms."
But not today. Not yet.
Footsteps echoed behind him—soft, deliberate, familiar. He didn't have to turn to know.
Eira.
She hadn't changed. Not yet. Still wearing that gray jacket with the uneven sleeves. Still clutching a book too thick for her small hands. Still smiling like the world wasn't borrowed time.
"You're crying," she said gently, settling beside him. Her voice cracked the air like a prayer.
"No," he lied, voice coarse.
She tilted her head. "Well… your eyes are leaking."
That made him laugh, painfully. "You always say weird things."
"That's how you know it's me."
He looked at her then, really looked. The sunlight kissed the edge of her lashes. Her heartbeat was alive, alive, alive.
"I had a dream," he said, "that I lost you."
She didn't flinch. She didn't joke. She just took his hand, the way she always did—like it was a promise, not a gesture.
"Then don't."
Elias closed his eyes. If only it were that simple. But in his mind, the clock was already ticking. The gods were already watching. And fate was already sharpening its blade.
---
Later That Day
Classrooms. Hallways. Laughter. The smell of chalk and cold ramen and cheap perfume. Time wrapped itself in nostalgia, pretending it had never broken anything.
Elias walked among ghosts wearing living skin. He saw them all—the ones who would die in flames, the ones who would beg the heavens for mercy, the ones whose names he had long buried.
His friends.
His enemies.
His future betrayals.
But now, every glance felt heavier. Every touch more fragile. He knew what came next.
At lunch, he stared at the blue sky through the cracked window. Eira sat across from him, drawing tiny stars in her notebook.
"Do you believe in fate?" she asked out of nowhere.
"No," he replied too quickly. "Fate is lazy. It's just guilt we give a crown to."
She smiled at that. "Then make your own."
---
Nightfall
The stars returned with their usual silence. Elias stood by the riverbank, clutching a piece of paper—a map he had drawn years from now, scribbled with red ink and regret.
This is where the first god descends.
This is where the resistance begins.
This is where Eira dies, and he forgets how to breathe.
Not again.
He fell to his knees, trembling, and pressed his hand to the cold soil.
"Listen," he whispered to the world. "You took her once. You unmade her heart and called it holy. But now I remember."
A breeze passed, almost like an answer.
This time, he would
Some flowers bloom only in the shadow of catastrophe. And some should never have bloomed at all.
It began with a whisper.
At 3:07 a.m., when the sky was an ocean of ink and the city held its breath, the earth stirred. Not enough to be an earthquake. Just enough for the crows to wake.
Elias awoke in a cold sweat.
His body still hadn't adjusted to being seventeen again. Too small. Too weak. Too unscarred.
He stood by the window of his room, watching shadows peel off the walls. The moonlight draped the city in silver—soft and cruel.
And then he saw it.
A single violet rose blooming in the middle of the street.
No soil. No stem. No explanation.
Just there—a color that bled wrong against the night.
He staggered back, breath shallow.
"It's too soon," he muttered. "This isn't supposed to happen yet."
---
The Rose
He ran.
Barefoot. Pajamas flapping in the wind. No reason to care who saw him. The world was still asleep. But Elias had walked this timeline before.
This rose shouldn't have bloomed until the first divine gate opened.
Until the blood of innocents was spilled like rain.
And yet there it stood, swaying gently in the nonexistent breeze. Glowing faintly, as if lit from within.
He knelt before it, terrified.
"I buried you," he whispered. "I killed the last one with my own hands."
The petals responded—not with movement, but with presence. They remembered him.
The rose exhaled a scent that only one soul could recognize.
Eira's heartbeat.
Elias fell backward. It wasn't possible.
Unless…
She had begun to remember, too.
---
At School, That Morning
He couldn't focus. The chalkboard became static. Voices turned to echoes. The ticking of the clock was the loudest thing in the room.
Tick.
She dies in eighty-nine days.
Tick.
The gods will arrive in sixty.
Tick.
But the rose had bloomed.
It was a signal.
Someone, or something, had interfered with the timeline.
He glanced at Eira. She was staring out the window, a frown tugging at her lips.
That wasn't like her. Not yet.
At lunch, he sat beside her beneath the same tree they always ate under. The sunlight filtered through the leaves like broken memories.
"You okay?" he asked.
"I had a dream," she said softly.
Elias froze.
She looked up at him. "There was a battlefield. Fire everywhere. And you… you were holding a dead body. You were screaming like your throat was breaking."
He couldn't breathe.
She tilted her head. "The weird thing is—I think I was the dead body."
---
Nightfall Again
The violet rose was gone.
In its place, a black feather.
Elias stared at it, then at the sky.
"You know I'm here," he said. Not to the sky, but to something behind it. "You remember me, don't you?"
A soft wind rose.
And in the distance, from the edge of a forgotten alley, a girl with no face watched him with hollow eyes.
She was the first sign of the gods.
But not a god herself.
She was the harbinger...