Instead, he grabbed the whisper. He trained it.

“A Trainer doesn’t just preserve,” his master, Valeriana, had told him on the day she’d given him the Sphragis. Her own arm had been a ruin of Blight-touched flesh, crystallizing into violet glass. “You are a gardener of reality. The Genesis Order fell because we hoarded seeds while the field burned. A Trainer plants .”

So Kaelen gave the Blight his memory of the first sunrise he’d seen after surviving the war that had killed his family. He gave it the sound of his little sister’s laugh. He gave it the terrible, beautiful ache of missing someone so much it felt like dying.

Kaelen stood up, cradling the silver acorn in his palm. He was the last Trainer. The Sphragis was cracked, the Order was gone, and the world was a husk. But he had one seed. One new pattern.