The cathedral's once-shattered arches now twisted with thorned roses, their petals dripping a viscous, memory-laced nectar. Kael stepped through the overgrown ruins, each bloom pulsing with echoes of his mother's laughter and Lira's final scream. The air reeked of decay and longing.
Lyra awaited him at the altar, her bone wings hunched like a skeletal halo. Time-rot seeped from her fingertips, corroding the stone beneath her. "You shouldn't have come back," she rasped, her voice a discordant blend of Gideon's malice and her own fraying resolve.
"You're my sister," Kael said, shard in hand. "I'm ending this."
Her laugh cracked the air. "We're both his experiments. You just don't know it yet."
The roses lashed out, thorns carving gashes in Kael's arms. He sliced through them, but the vines regrew instantly, fed by the garden's corruption. Lyra's wings shuddered, unleashing a wave of time-rot. The ground aged centuries in seconds, nearly swallowing Kael into a fissure.
A figure emerged from the thorns—his mother, or a grotesque mimicry of her. The hybrid's face mirrored her warmth, but its eyes glowed cobalt, and its limbs ended in razor-sharp brambles. "This garden is sacred," it intoned. "You will not defile it."
Kael froze. "Mother…?"
The hybrid struck, thorns piercing his thigh. "I am the Gardener. Gideon's first truth."
Lyra watched, her expression torn. "Kill it!" Gideon's voice roared through her, but her trembling hand betrayed her.
The Gardener pinned Kael, thorns circling his throat. "Your blood will nourish the roots."
"No!" Lyra's bone wings snapped forward, deflecting the blow. Time-rot consumed the thorns, reducing them to ash. "He's… mine."
The Gardener recoiled, its face flickering between Kael's mother and a snarling void. "You defy your purpose."
Lyra's wings wilted, the effort draining her. "Kael… the heart of the garden. Destroy it."
The Gardener lunged again, but Kael plunged his shard into its chest. Instead of ichor, memories spilled out—his mother singing to him as a baby, Gideon sharpening a scalpel in the shadows, Lyra's first breath in a lab of roses.
The hybrid disintegrated, whispering with his mother's voice: "Burn it all."
The garden trembled, roses shrieking as they revealed a pulsing core: a massive, crystalline heart woven from thorned vines and Lira's golden hair.
Kael raised his shard.
Lyra collapsed, her wings disintegrating. "Too late…"
The heart awoke.