I

The west tower garden was quiet except for the slow rustle of leaves and the faint hum of Highcast below. Sage Arcani sat cross-legged on the cold stone bench, a brass telescope braced between his knees. Its once-polished surface was dulled with age, and its lens had long since fractured, leaving it blind to the stars. He didn’t care. He wasn’t looking for them. Through the warped glass, he traced the same stretch of the city’s upper rim, scanning for the pale white doves frequenting the glass towers. Always the same one, or maybe just one that looked like it. He didn’t know why it mattered, only that it did. The ritual kept him still.

Oleander, the cat, was a monstrous coil of fur in his lap, his long tail wrapped like a belt around Sage’s narrow waist. Whenever his breathing tightened—like now—Oleander pressed down. Instinct or not, the animal had a hang for grounding the boy with weight and warmth.

Behind him, the stone doorframe groaned. Nhami stood there, a silhouette cut from cold, purplish granite, the runes etched in her armored forearms faintly lit. They said nothing. Never needed to. Her presence was the only thing in this house that didn’t demand his attention incessantly.

Sage stayed there because he couldn’t stand being anywhere else. His mother’s words still clung to him like burrs: You squander what your father bled for. Even he—quiet as he was—never hid from what was required. She had meant it as instruction, as she always had. It landed somewhere dislodged in his chest, a thorn to his lungs that scraped with every intake of breath.

He pressed his eye harder to the useless telescope. No birds. Nothing but white, distant swirls, afterimages caught in the glare of glass. No doves today.

A flutter of motion cut across the courtyard—paper, not feather. A kite, lopsided and wind-tossed, careened through the broken vines and snagged on a spire. Its string dragged behind it like a tail. Moments later came the sound of boots—quick, small, and uneven.

“Wait, wait, wait—don’t rip—” A boy darted through the archway, nearly colliding with Nhami before sliding to a stop in front of Sage’s bench. He was short, lopsidedly built — no, just tilting. As the boy straightened out he looked much more akin to a stick dressed in heavy reds and ocean greens, with freckles dusted like sand across his nose. The pin containing the tuff of his pale hair had half unraveled, and his white shirt bore a stain shaped like a handprint.

“Sorry! That’s mine,” he blurted, pointing to the kite. “I mean, obviously. You’re not—well, you don’t look like you’re flying it. You look like you’re—uh, spying? No, no, sorry, I don’t mean to imply anything—uh—anyway- hi.”

Sage didn’t move. He tightened his fingers around the telescope until the brass squealed faintly. Nhami’s eyes shifted down at the small-ish intruder, much too unperturbed for Sage's liking.

The boy in question didn’t notice. He was already talking again. “I’m Hemming. Me and my brothers—Leif and Morten, they’re older, you’ll see them—they’re staying here for a bit. Our mothers—…our families know each other, apparently? It’s all very formal and boring but the halls are nice, so I’m not complaining. Your garden’s nice, too. Smells better than the east wing. Do you live here? Of course you do, you’re sitting here like you own the place—do you?”

Sage blinked once, his jaw tight. That was all.

“Right,” Hemming said, not missing a beat. “Anyway, have you ever heard of kelp blooms? Real ones. They happen after storms when the ocean dredges up everything. Apparently you have them here, too, down by the harbor. My brother swears there’s one a few miles from Bara’Soha, growing out of a drowned giant’s ribs. Can you imagine? Just—like—green hair everywhere. Whole villages make rope from it. I wonder if yours are like that.”

Sage kept still. Hemming stayed. He talked as if silence was oxygen, sucking up the room — and Sage’s refusal to answer only made him inhale more.

In the days that followed, Hemming seemed to materialize wherever Sage went—at breakfast, in the academy courtyard, on the narrow stairs to the greenhouse. The only thing that had saved him the first time he showed up was Nhami’s calm guidance to approaching dinner. At first Sage tried to outpace him, to take routes even the stone giant didn’t know, but Hemming was persistent. Not cruelly — just… relentless, unwilling to be anywhere else.

“You like plants, don’t you?” Hemming said one afternoon, following Sage into the greenhouse with a bundle tucked under his arm. “I have pressed ones. Marine flora, mostly. They’re flatter than land plants. Can I show you?”

Sage didn’t answer. That in itself was an answer.

Hemming hesitated for the first time since they’d met, glancing toward the rows of terracotta pots lining the greenhouse walls. “I’ll just… sit here then,” he said, lowering himself onto the nearest bench. He spread his bundle across his lap—a set of worn parchment sheets bound with twine, edges curled from sea air and handling.

He started talking anyway. About the harbor tides that dried the kelp flat before he even pressed it. About a kind of seaweed that glowed when the moon was right. About how he once saw a gull steal a whole sheet of it and use it to line its nest.

Sage knelt by a planter box, his small hands moving soil around the base of a sapling. At first, he didn’t turn his head, didn’t give any sign he was listening. But when Hemming mentioned the glowing seaweed again, Sage’s fingers paused. Just briefly. A beat in the rhythm of his careful work.

Hemming caught it. He lowered his voice, softer now. “Some plants remember things,” he said. “Like—if you hurt them once, they’ll close up faster the next time. My mother used to say they have their own kind of memory. You think that’s true?”

Sage’s head tilted slightly—not toward Hemming, but toward the soil. A faint, almost imperceptible nod.

Hemming smiled, quick and crooked. “Yeah. I think so too.”

For a while, they stayed like that: Hemming talking, Sage silent, the space between them filled by the sound of wind against the glass and the soft scrape of Hemming’s fingers as he unfolded one of the pressed specimens. He slid it carefully across the bench, not toward Sage exactly, but just far enough that if Sage wanted to look, he could.

Sage’s eyes flicked to it once. Then twice. Finally, after a long pause, he rose, padded over, and sat down at the farthest edge of the bench. Oleander leapt up beside him, tail curling over Sage’s knee like a boundary line.

Hemming didn’t move the specimen closer. He just said, “This one’s called tidefern. It’s stubborn. Hard to pull from the rocks. Smells like lavender.” He waited. “You can touch it if you want.”

Sage reached out, hesitated, then let the pad of one finger graze the brittle edge. He didn’t say anything, but his hand lingered. It reminded him of the Athervines across Highcast. Nothing more than invasive weed, but people let it grow freely for its faint smell of something earthy and spiced. Kind of like lavender.

Hemming’s grin softened. He turned another page. “Want to see more?”

“…One,” Sage murmured, so quietly Hemming almost missed it.

And for the first time, Hemming didn’t fill the silence with words. He just handed Sage the next page and let him look.

When Hemming ended up following Sage into his study, a sort of mundanity had come over their routine. Sage hated people. He was not shy, not concerned with their moods or how he appeared — he simply disliked how difficult they were. Talking involved a network of gestures and words and tones were a language he held no literacy in, nor did he have any interest to learn it. Hemming, though, stayed around. And weirdly enough, his lively chattering on marine plants made for a mildly interesting backdrop.

So it was inevitable, perhaps, that Hemming would stumble across Sage’s notebook. His hands settling on the dark, leather back of it, tracing the arcane lines and prying it open without a second thought. Its pages were a private catalog: sketches of birds with broken necks, butterflies with their wings half torn, flowers blooming crookedly from the cracks of plaster where something laid smeared under a wagon wheel. Hemming froze mid-step.

Sage noticed instantly, the silence deafening as he had grown used to the low hum of Hemming. He stepped over to him, snatching his book and snapping it shut with deliberate care.

Sage waited for the recoil—the questions, the frown, the retreat. Pinning the other boy there under the hard and glowing pin-pricks of his eyes.

“Sorry,” Hemming said softly instead, “Sorry,” and sat down beside him on the stone floor. He didn’t leave. He didn’t ask.After a long pause, he glanced at the cat curled beside Sage’s knees.

“What’s his name?”

“Oleander,” Sage said. His voice came out flat, unused.

“Isn’t that-” He stumbled. “Poisonous for cats?” Hemming asked, his laugh catching like a loose hinge.

Sage blinked. He knew that. He hadn’t expected Hemming to know that.

They stayed like that until the pale sky began to yellow. Sage turned the broken telescope toward the garden’s edge, scanning for his bird again. Behind him, Hemming kept talking—softer now, the words heavier between bursts of humor.

“I don’t like sleeping,” Hemming said suddenly. “There’s a ghost in my doorway. Keeps coming back. So I’d rather talk to plants. They don’t interrupt. Or… look at you like that.” He tried to laugh, but the sound faltered.

Sage didn’t speak. Hemming didn’t stop.

After that day, words became optional. A pressed flower left on a bench. A dead moth pinned to velvet. A coral spiral placed carefully on a windowsill. Objects turned into sentences neither of them could say aloud.

They learned things together. That kelp regenerates even when cut. That some roots can carry memory through an entire grove. Hemming taught Sage dwarven nicknames for seaweed. Sage didn’t correct him when he mispronounced elvish plant names.

Nhami watched from the shadows—guardian, witness, stone-faced and unmovable.

By the end of the month, the boys had claimed the rooftop garden as their own. It became their high perch over Highcast, where the air thinned and city noise softened.

Sometimes Hemming brought his mother’s journal. He read her notes aloud—tides, currents, the anatomy of marine kelp—his voice steady even when his hands shook.

Sage didn’t interrupt, but he inched closer to look at the pages, save them to memory.

It became their language. Objects instead of words.

One overcast afternoon, they sat on opposite benches while Nhami stood by the glass doors, her stone face unreadable but her gaze softening. Hemming traced the lines of a kelp frond and said, almost to himself, “My brothers say plants are useless. That I’m a ‘botanist of barnacles’. Like that’s some kind of insult.”

Sage glanced up. “They’re wrong.”

It was the first time he’d spoken to Hemming without being asked. His own voice startled him. Oleander’s tail flicked, sensing the shift.

Sage’s words came halting at first, but then like water released: “Everyone here… they call necromancy strength. But if I use magic to make something grow, they say it’s… ordinary. A child’s trick.” His fingers tightened on the rim of a clay pot. “They want me to raise what’s dead or burn what lives. Everything else is a waste.”

Hemming went quiet, for once. No rambling, no quick joke to fill the air. He just nodded slowly. “I get it.” he said.

They sat in stillness for a moment, the glass dome above them humming faintly as doves skimmed over it, their shadows flickering like moving clouds. Then Hemming grinned—not the forced grin he wore when deflecting his brothers’ mockery, but a small, careful one. “What if we made our own academy?” he said. “One with no loud spells. No people yelling about whose magic’s the strongest. Just… roots. Leaves. Us.”

Sage blinked. “An academy?”

“Yeah. We’ll make rules.” Hemming began counting on his fingers. “Rule one: no shouting. Rule two: no parents. Rule three: no… uh… big glass chandeliers.” He looked up, remembering the suffocating brightness of the council hall, how Sage had stared at the floor. How his eyes had been shut for most of the duration, even behind the dark tint of his glasses. “And…rule four: you’re the teacher. You know things I don’t.”

Sage considered him for a long time. Then, without a word, he moved to a corner table, scooped soil into a shallow dish, and gestured for Hemming to follow. “Lesson one,” he murmured.

He showed Hemming how to place his hands above the soil, how to breathe slowly and think of warmth—not fire, but the way sunlight feels through a windowpane. “No words,” Sage said. “Plants don’t need them.” He didn’t give him an incantation.

Hemming frowned in concentration. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. “Maybe I’m bad at this,” he muttered. “Maybe I’m just…” He stopped, biting back whatever he almost said.

Sage tilted his head. “Talk,” he said softly.

“About what?”

“Anything.”

Hemming hesitated for a long while, face shifting as he searched for something that felt right, and came up empty handed. Then he sighed.

“I miss my mom. She… she kept journals about kelp tides. Said the sea would always remember her. But I don’t think it does. Not really.”

The soil shifted. A small vine, pale and tentative, curled up and brushed against his knuckles. Hemming froze, eyes wide. “I—did I do that?”

Sage nodded once. “Plants remember.” he said. The last words caught in his throat, unwilling to flow.

After that, their “academy” became real. Each day, Hemming learned to coax herbs into sprouting while Sage quietly charted which blooms appeared when Hemming spoke of certain memories: marigold for a funny story, muted poppies for grief, something nameless and bright teal when Hemming laughed without explaining.

One night, after their lessons, Sage led Hemming to the western wing. They stopped before a mural: a grand, oil-painted portrait of House Arcani. Louvine, regal and unyielding; next to her a man with sharp and dark features Sage could not recall except in paint; and between them, a boy — smaller, softer, almost swallowed by the frame’s gold trim, too young to carry his own weight, sat like a doll in the man's arms.

“That’s your father?” Hemming asked gently.

Sage didn’t answer, not right away. His eyes stayed on the man’s face, unreadable.

“He died in the war,” he said finally. “I don’t remember him. Only this. And when Mother says I’m like him,” his head cocks. “Usually when she’s angry.”

Hemming shifted, uncomfortable but steady.

“Mine drowned,” he admitted. “When — the dead came from the sea...2 years ago. She’s why I like plants. They...last longer.”

Sage glanced at him—quick, almost sharp, but not unkind. Just startled by how plainly Hemming said it.

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Sage turned away from the mural, leading Hemming back to the greenhouse. Oleander padded ahead, tail held high like a banner.

When they had returned to the greenhouse was bathed in unnatural silence. The usual soft cooing of doves from the glass rafters above had stilled. When Sage pushed open the door, Oleander slipped past him, tail flicking low. Something was wrong—he felt it before he saw it.

Near the far corner, beneath the high dome, a dove lay crumpled against the tiles. Its wings were still spread, as though trying to catch the wind even in death. A faint, dusty print marked where it had struck the glass. It must have flown too fast, chasing its own reflection, and broken its neck on impact.

Hemming, who had followed Sage up from the hall, stopped short. “Oh,” he whispered. “Poor thing.”

The sky over Highcast burned a dusky violet, low clouds stirred with drifting motes of gold — candlelight, memory-spells, the silent march of the mourning.

Below the floating gardens and pearl-domed towers, a procession passed: cloaked figures walking single file along the skybridge. Torches were held high. Silver trays floated at shoulder height, each bearing a single glass orb — some filled with smoke, some light, some filled with flickering scenes of battle or domestic peace. Enchanted recollections, fed by spell and memory. One by one, they lifted into the sky, pausing midair, then bursting in slow, luminous blooms.

From the great windows of the High Council’s dining hall — like stars were fleeing the city.

Inside, it was colder.

The dining hall of the Highcast Council sat atop the tallest promontory of the floating city — a chandeliered spine of white and onyx marble, too high for birds to reach, too vast for warmth to gather. The grand hall was strung with gold-threaded banners, each emblazoned with sigils of the council families. Crystal chandeliers hung from ribs of enchanted ivory, chiming in the filtered light. Voices echoed there like ghosts too stubborn to leave.

Below the grand vaulted ceiling, a great blackwood table stretched between gold-banded pillars. Councilors and heirs sat at long it, the small tables framing it in a crescent. Some spots, too many to count on your hands, were carved with the names of the fallen. The name staring back at Sage had felt foreign as he looked down, not 10 minutes ago now. ‘Antonis Arcani’.

Tonight, those names felt heavier.

Each one a weight. A reminder. A wound pulled tight in ceremony.

Sage stood near the edge of the gathering, half-silhouetted by the glow of the windows. His ceremonial sash — the Arcani white and silver — itched against his collarbone, stiff with embroidery. His shoes had laces he hadn’t known how to tie. Nhami had helped him without a word. The sigil of his house, a pale white star caught in a dark outstretched hand, was pinned over his heart like a warning.

Louvine stood behind him moments earlier, adjusting the sash with long, deft fingers. Her voice never raised, but it cut anyway.

“Stand straight. You are Arcani.” She didn’t mean to be cruel. Yet that had never stopped her words from cutting the way they do. Her son was a vessel as her child. A mouthpiece. A promise signed in blood. No, maybe the parts were not as equal.

Sage hadn’t spoken. He never did, when he knew his reply would be agitating.

The hall was too loud. Knives scraped across glass. Goblets clinked. Dignitaries laughed like mice being squashed underfoot.

He watched them from the shadow of one of the many marble pillars, fingers tight around a scroll his mother had pressed into his hands with a single command: “Wait until the bell. Then walk. Do not deviate.”

The scroll itched too. The words inside weren’t his. They said nothing he believed in — just the clean, polished image of a word spelling ‘grief’, something that meant nothing to him. Something about honor. Sacrifice. Legacy. He didn’t know his father, and he didn’t know second-hand sympathy.

He hadn’t said he didn’t want to do it. He never said such things. People didn’t listen when he did.

Instead, he watched. The way the vines had curled up the trellis in the upper garden this morning. The way the frost lingered on the ivy at dawn. The way Hemming had snuck one last pressed sea-leaf into Sage’s coat pocket when he wasn’t looking.

Across the hall, Hemming sat between his brothers, his elbows on the table, whispering something too fast and too bright. Leif elbowed him. Morten ignored him altogether. The younger dwarf slouched further, chewing on a slice of sugared fruit with a kind of quelled intensity, eyes flicking toward Sage again and again. Like he didn’t know where to put them, but needed them glued somewhere.

The bell tolled.

Voices fell quiet. The air tightened, like thread pulled meticulously through a needle.

His name was spoken like a declaration itself. “Astraios Sage Arcani.”

His eyes darted to the clock, big and high above the ebony table — inlaid into the wooden wall high above. It was the exact hour the war had been declared over, one year ago.

He moved. Slow. No drama, no flare. Just the small sound of boots on marble and the swish of a sash too large for his frame. He walked alone up the narrow path between tables and dignitaries, toward the low dais where the children of council families took turns honoring the war dead.     

His feet made no sound on the tiled floor. There were hundreds of eyes on him, and they were like bugs on his skin — pricking and biting his skin, trying to burry deep. The heat of the chandeliers made it feel like he was intended to cook alive — too warm, too close, bright as the sun. The scent of lilies in the centerpieces made the inside of his nose ache.

He stepped up to the dais. Did not look at his mother. Not at Nhami. Not at the long stretch of strangers waiting to hear him echo their grief in language that flattered them.

The scroll was trembling now.

He thought about the greenhouse. The little vines. The drawings he and Hemming had left between the planter boxes. The green buds rising from a broken ceramic bowl.

He let it drop.

Not to the floor, but onto the lectern, gently — as if it no longer concerned him.

He looked at his hands, then ahead at the intimidating table, eyes burning in his periphery. Then pressed one palm to the carved surface of the wood, his moon-lit eyes fluttering shut.

No words.

Just the faint scent of soil.

A pulse — subtle, but distinct — surged outward from his fingertips. His lips never moved. But the spell obeyed him anyway.

The wood, where he had been seated, next to his mother’s taught hands, groaned.

Thin green vines, delicate as hair, began to thread out from the curved letters ingrained within the wood, there. They reached out toward the ceiling, the hidden sky above — growing, curling. A single bloom pushed its way from the center — not a lily, not a dark rose, but a scrappy wildflower. Yellow. Slightly wilted at the edge, the leaves sharp and pointed.

His voice — when it came — was soft. Odd in its cadence. No rhythm, no flourish, the kind of flatness people called rude and unflattering. He was being truthful. There was only one thing he hated more than lies, and that was liars.

His eyes open.

“He grew wildflowers.”

That was all.

No legacy. No names. No glory. Just dirt. And something fragile that managed to grow anyway.

Silence blanketed the room like frost. Not offense, not exactly  — confusion, more so.

Louvine’s fingers curled tighter around her wine glass, the stem threatening to snap. But it wasn’t her place to speak.

Sage stepped back, quiet. His head dipped, not in apology —in simple farewell. His performance was done. Then came a sharp, stifled laugh.

Hemming.

At the far end of the room, seated awkwardly between his two older brothers, he’d half-stood. Morten tugged him back down. Leif muttered something under his breath. But Hemming clapped once. Then again. A third time. Slow. Off-beat. Unsure.

Sage’s gaze found his — and held it.

He didn’t smile. But he didn’t look away either.

Someone ushered him down, away from the dais. The spell had already faded. The flower was gone. Just a dark line remained where the roots had pressed through, distorting the name before him beyond legibility.

He didn’t speak another word the rest of the night.

But neither did Louvine.

He liked the silence better.

Louvine’s voice still echoed behind the heavy doors.

She had not raised it. But her words struck like iron on cold stone.

“You embarrass yourself. You embarrass us.”

Sage hadn’t answered. He didn’t cry. He didn’t even look away from where his eyes needled into the clavicle peaking from her gown.

Instead, he’d simply said — quiet and even:

“This is the magic I care about. Not the one that buried Father. The one that keeps things alive.”

She had stared at him, searching for some version of herself. She found none. And left.

Nhami hadn’t said a word. It wasn’t their place. But more over: she never needed to.

After the doors fell closed again, the sentinel had reached out — that ancient hand of hewn stone, carved long ago by artisans beyond this realm. Their palm settled on Sage’s shoulder, heavy with certainty. With care. With a vow they swore before him years ago.

And for the first time that night, Sage leaned — just a little — into her touch.

Later, in the still-dark rooftop garden, the sky hung like a wine-stained cloth above the estate, stars caught in it like glass shards. Soft lights bobbed overhead from the procession’s tail end below — memory spells let loose with names murmured under wet breathes. Violet flickers, copper-silver flares, notes of lavender, ozone, and rain-soaked stone drifting up from the city’s lower ring.

Sage sat at the ledge, bare feet pressed against the rooftop tiles— a kind, cooling sensation, gentle on his mind. The wind combed through his hair, sweet and salt-laced from  the high seas miles to the west. His ceremonial sash was gone now, discarded somewhere behind the greenhouse door, left at the threshold of his sanctuary. The crisp white collar of his tunic had wilted under agitated fingers, popped open and undone to relieve the itching skin beneath.

Beside him sat a simple terracotta pot. Inside it: a single sprout. Pale. Reaching. Fragile.

Stubborn to a fault, maybe.

He didn’t look up when Hemming joined him, shoes scuffing faintly, carrying the smell of candle smoke, lemon cake, and something unnamable — sorrow folded into laughter.

They didn’t speak, not at first.

The wind moved. Doves shifted in the rafters. Somewhere inside, Oleander stretched and yawned at the other boy’s approach— but he did not flee.

Then: “That was weird,” Hemming said. “I know.” “I liked it.” “I know.”

The young dwarf, only about an inch shorter than Sage, flopped down beside him, their elbows not quite touching. He leaned his head slightly, squinting at the sprout. “Is it… for your dad?”, he mumbled, as though doubting if he should ask.

Sage shook his head, just once. Curt. Decisive. “It’s for us.”“…Us?”“Things that grow anyway.”

The boy beside him didn’t answer, but something in his breath caught — like it had snagged on a thread of meaning too heavy to name aloud. They sat in silence, until the cold bit their knuckles and the stars spun quietly on overhead, side by side but worlds apart — the air between them crackling with something neither had named aloud. Grief, perhaps. Or the uncomfortable ache of wanting to stay, and knowing when morning came, they would part. A strange little thing they didn’t quite know if it was a goodbye.

And then — without warning —the sky cracked.

A thump.

Followed by a sound like shattering breath.

Both boys flinched. Sage looked up first.

A streak of motion had cut across the violet sky — sharp and feathered — and collided with the greenhouse dome behind them. The glass had actually cracked — shattered — but the sound of the impact rang out like a muffled bell when the shards hit the green lush below. The momentary fluttering that came after was silence compared to the sound of that pale shadow hitting the old telescope, leaving a grotesque smear on the table it was place on, even as the thing wobbled and fell to the floor.

Sage stood slowly, moving toward the spot where the impact mark still glistened with oil and blood across the wood. Below the frame, here at the edge of the garden, a dove twitched in the small pocket of moss and foliage — pale white next to the dark oak of the desk.

It had broken one wing in the fall. The other was twisted beneath its body. Its chest still rose, barely — like a breath caught between this world and the next.

Hemming came up behind him, impossibly quiet.

The dove didn’t move again.

It lay in the soft moss as if it had fallen there just for them — not a metaphor, not a sign, just a small fragile life that had collided with something it couldn’t see, and paid for it.

Sage crouched slowly, hands in his lap. He had seen it before. So many times. And yet tonight, here with Hemming over his shoulder, it felt oddly brutal. An odd urge in Sage’s body to shield the small thing from view — Hemming’s view, as if it bared a secret of the moon-eyed boy.

“Oh,” Hemming whispered. “Poor thing.”

Sage knelt beside the bird. His face didn’t shift, didn’t break into grief or softness. He stared at it with a strange, calm intensity—as though studying something inevitable rather than tragic. His fingers hovered just above the feathers, careful not to touch yet unwilling to pull away.

“It’s not… gross to you?” Hemming asked cautiously.

“No,” Sage said, quiet but firm. “It’s just what happens.”

Hemming crouched next to him, hugging his knees. “It’s like the sketches in your book.”

Sage didn’t answer right away. Instead, he finally reached out, smoothing one finger along the bird’s bent wing. “A lot. Birds, mice, insects. They crash, get caught, crushed, trapped. They stop moving. People say it’s sad. But…” He glanced at the soil beds nearby. “Things go into the ground. Then something else grows. It’s just what happens.”

Hemming watched him, uneasy but listening. Sage seemed almost distant, not cold exactly—more like he was speaking from some private logic no one had ever asked to hear.

“Even beetles deserve a proper grave,” Hemming murmured, repeating what he’d once told Sage, he remembered faintly. He looked at him, then, prompting the paler boy to stutter to life.

“It’s — a saying, back home. Lots of people die at sea, so…saving the body to be buried back home is really important.”

For the first time since they found the dead bird, Sage’s eyes flicked toward Hemming — not a full look, but enough to register the words. He shifted, then stood and crossed to the potting bench. “Help me,” he said.

Hemming blinked. “Help you… bury it?”

“Plant it.”

His mouth did not move, but his hands did. Dark, knobbly vines against the sullied petals that were the dove’s body, picking it up in his hands and standing with a almost mechanical inclination. They worked in silence, hollowing out a space in the warm soil bed beneath the hanging ferns. Sage placed the dove carefully inside, arranging its wings as though folding a letter. Hemming crouched low, digging with both hands, his large red coat balled at his waist. From its inner lining, he pulled out the journal. Then a slip of sea-softened parchment — his mother’s handwriting still visible, ink stubborn against time and tide alike. A kelp-pressed prayer from her sailor’s journal, little fudges and lines at its corners born of familiar fingerprints.

Sage had straightened, and with a hesitant hand, curled his index and thumb around the fallen telescope on the ground. The broken lens popped from it without fuss, the crack in the glass spidering an inch further.

Together, they laid them in the soil. The parchment. The glass. Then, with a simple gesture, Sage coaxed a fragile shoot to curl over the buried bird, wrapping around the carcass like a gentle embrace, and placed a single seed in the center of it all — from a pouch he’d been keeping on him all day. An anchor, a little piece of home to ball in his fist as he stood far from it, surrounded by people that did not care to understand, and probably never would.

Then they waited.

A moment. A breath. A bloom.

A flower unfurled from the black earth. White, with dusk-blue streaks like ink spilled across paper. At its center, a faint shimmer — veined with silver like breath caught in frost . It was soft, right were dark red stem met pale blossom. As if it remembered being a wing, downy like a feather.

Sage pressed his fingers into the dirt, an extension of him.

Hemming stared. “What kind of flower is it?”

Sage hesitated. “…doesn’t have a name yet.”

“Then name it.”

The boy paused for a long time. Naming wasn’t something he usually did. Finally, he said, “Skydove.”It was the first plant he ever wanted to name.

Hemming smiled faintly. “Good name.”

And Hemming, sitting cross-legged beside the new bloom, pulled off his coat and leaned back on his hands. He didn’t say anything. He just smiled — strange and shy and quiet in a way he hadn’t been until this moment— and looked at the bloom as if it might fly away.

Neither of them said anything more that night.

They sat like that until the moon sank, and Nhami finally moved, ushering the tired boys inside without a word.

By dawn, Hemming was gone.

Not a goodbye. Not directly. Just a sailor’s journal, pressed into the soil beside the flowerbed. A leaf tucked inside it, folded like a boat. And carved into the wooden railing by the garden’s edge, in a crooked little scrawl: “Tell the plants I said thank you.”

Sage sat alone in the greenhouse. The rooftop garden was different in the morning light. Where last night had held the hush of ceremony, this hour belonged to dew and breathing moss. The flower from the burial — the Skydove — had opened fully, its white petals curling toward the warm glass ceiling, already bending with new light.

Oleander purred beside him, tail flicking rhythmically against the edge of the soil box.

Tucked between the garden stones, where vines met pale sandstone — laid the book.He hadn’t touched it, only stared holes in the battered, corner-worn thing wrapped with red ribbon. The cover burning into his mind with a persistent afterimage.

When he finally reached for it, hands wrapping around the thing with an apprehension, it settled in his lap rather easily. He remembered the pages he read aloud, searched for the passages exactly. His mother’s writing made chaotic with margin notes.

He just… sat. Let the silence settle around him like a second skin. Then reached for the soil with one hand, touched the patch where they’d buried the dove. The flower leaned toward his fingers. Not magic — not overt. Just present. Alive.

The page of Hemming’s journal lay open beside him, fluttering faintly in the breeze. He turned to it again. Flipped a few pages. His thumb found one where the ink had bled in seawater. He tore it out with care, folding the soft edge into a little square.

Then, pressing his palm flat to the dirt, he whispered something.

The little sapling they’d planted days ago had grown another inch — stronger now. The leaves trembled softly beneath his hand, their shape shifting, just enough…

…to look like wings.