When the Rose Blooms Backward...
The gods do not announce themselves with trumpets. They send dreams. They send ghosts. They send the faceless.
There she stood.
In the alley behind the chapel ruins, veiled in ash and time. Her body was still—too still. As if the wind remembered to dance around her, but not touch her.
She had no eyes, yet watched.
No mouth, yet whispered.
No name, yet Elias knew her.
He had killed her once. In another life. In another war.
Her name had been Veyna, and she was the first soul to be unmade by the gods—stripped of face, will, and voice.
A message. A mirror. A warning.
He took a step forward.
"I buried you too," he said quietly.
Veyna tilted her head.
From the folds of shadow, her hand rose—pale as frost, clutching something that pulsed faintly with violet light.
A second rose.
It hadn't bloomed yet. Just a bud.
And he knew what that meant.
Someone else had been marked.
---
The Awakening Dream
Eira screamed in her sleep.
Not a cry of fear—but memory breaking through bone.
The dream swallowed her:
She was standing in a field of violet roses. Hundreds. Thousands. Each dripping crimson. And in the center, Elias stood with wings of light and shadow, cradling a burning sword.
"Run," he told her, but his mouth did not move.
His eyes were filled with moons.
And then the sky cracked open like an egg, and from it descended the gods.
They weren't human. They weren't beast.
They were questions made flesh.
One looked like a child made of clocks.
Another wore a wedding dress of stitched human hands.
The third had no body, just a voice that spoke directly into her blood.
"Wake, Vessel."
Eira awoke choking on roses.
She vomited petals into her bedsheets—silken, violet, and real.
---
Elias Knows
He felt it.
Across the city, while staring at the second unbloomed rose in the harbinger's hand, Elias felt the petals being born.
"She's waking up too fast," he murmured. "Her soul is remembering before her mind can handle it."
The harbinger stepped back into the shadows. Dissolved like mist.
And the unbloomed rose fell gently onto the ground, untouched.
He didn't dare pick it up.
Instead, he whispered a prayer. Not to God. Not anymore.
To the one thing gods feared:
The Child Without Destiny. Himself.
---
The Pact
That night, Elias visited the abandoned bell tower.
He lit a single candle.
He took a blade to his palm and let the blood fall into a bowl of black water.
"I know you're watching," he said to the stillness. "I know you're already laughing."
The water shimmered.
A voice replied—not with sound, but with gravity.
"You seek to stop fate again."
"I've done it once. I'll do it again."
"At what cost?"
Elias looked up. His eyes were empty of stars.
"Everything," he said.
And the gods listened.
Dreams can be outrun. But fate? Fate has thorns.
The morning came slowly, as if ashamed of what the night had whispered.
Eira awoke with her hand clutching her bedsheet—violet petals still scattered around her like a coronation and a curse. They hadn't withered.
She sat up, breath ragged.
The rosebud on her bedside table—where nothing had been the night before—was now half-bloomed.
It pulsed.
Not with life, but with something older.
She touched it—and saw his face.
---
Flash: Elias
Elias, twenty years younger. Battle-torn. Cloaked in the ashes of an ancient war. His sword glowing, but not clean.
He was carrying her.
Through fire. Through screams. Through a temple that bled like a living thing.
And he whispered to her, not like a warrior, but like a boy:
"Don't forget me, Eira. Even if they erase your face. Even if your name is swallowed by time."
Then everything turned to violet.
---
Back in the Present
She gasped.
The room snapped into stillness. Only the rose moved—swaying gently toward her as if pulled by the memory's echo.
"Elias…" she breathed. "Who are you?"
She didn't remember the war.
But her heart did.
---
Elsewhere: The Watcher Beneath the Glass
Far beneath the city, past rusted cathedrals and forgotten tombs, a figure sat inside a cage made of glass and bone.
His eyes were sewn shut, but he could see everything.
His lips were stitched, but he could sing through silence.
The Gods called him The Forgotten Herald.
And as the rose bloomed, his head tilted toward the surface.
"She remembers," he mouthed, stitches straining.
"Let the second seal break."
The ground above trembled.
---
At the Bell Tower
Elias stood over the bowl of black water.
It had stilled. The gods had gone silent.
But something else had come through.
A single word, written in ash across the surface:
"Soon."
He didn't need to ask what it meant.
He turned toward the broken window. Looked toward Eira's part of the city.
The second rose was blooming.
And when the second bloomed, the first god always arrived.
He sheathed his blade.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to no one.
---
Final Scene: The God in the Café
A child walked into the café on 6th and Vine.
No one noticed he had no shadow.
He ordered a cup of tea but never drank it.
He simply stared out the window.
Waiting.
When the rose bloomed completely—when the third petal fell—the child would stand.
And everyone inside would forget their names.
Because the gods had begun to move again.
And the world had already started bleeding backward...