He hadn't planned to return.
But something pulled him.
The botanical gallery had been part of a Novaheim cultural repurposing project. Sawl had reviewed the early reports himself, flagged as inefficient, unpredictable, lacking modernization. His own words, once.
He remembered how the teams wanted to flatten the design. Streamline the chaos. Replace organic overgrowth with light arrays and holoscape gardens.
It hadn't gone through. Something about Earth preservation code. A compromise.
He stepped inside quietly, as if not to disturb the memory of his former self.
The gallery was silent. No visitors today. Just filtered sunlight spilling through cracked domes and tangled ivy reclaiming ancient walkways.
It should've looked like ruin.
But now, Sawl saw something else.
He walked deeper, past wilting flora and cracked mosaic paths. Then he stopped.
There, spiraling up the trunk of a leaning tree, was a pattern he couldn't unsee.
Leaves arranged in perfect spiral formations, not random, but encoded. Vines weaving upward in ratios that repeated themselves again and again. Petal clusters mirrored across separate plants.
His breath slowed.
The geometry wasn't forced. It wasn't crafted by algorithm.
It was written. Intentionally. Elegantly.
He moved further down the path, his eyes wide now. The shape echoed in everything, the spacing between roots, the whorls in the bark, the curves of broken seed pods scattered in the dust.
He looked up, and in the broken lattice of vines hanging from above, the same spiral emerged, clear as any Novaheim design blueprint.
This wasn't disorder.
It was divine intelligence.
He pulled up an old image from his field archive, one from months ago. Same gallery. Same path. Same tree.
He had passed it.
But he hadn't seen it.
Back then, his eyes had been calibrated for compliance. Efficiency. Measurement.
But now?
Now he saw intention. Now he saw art that breathed.
He rounded the last bend, and there, along the curve of a shattered display wall, was a mural.
It had faded under weather and time, partially covered by moss. But beneath it, the shapes remained.
Spirals again. Woven into the background of a starlit valley.
And along the edge of the painting, drawn in delicate gold pigment, a line of text:
"What is hidden in plain sight is waiting for eyes that remember."
He stepped closer.
And in the lower right corner of the mural, almost erased by weather, he saw it:
A faint outline of a landscape. Rolling hills. Light without source. Water running upward as if gravity had been rewritten.
It was unfamiliar.
But something in him ached with recognition.
Not memory exactly, more like a yearning. As though a part of him had always known this place should exist.
He reached out and traced the shape with his gloved hand.
He was not the first to see it.
Someone else had remembered before him.
As he left the gallery, the wind picked up.
Banners fluttered above the city.
And far below, in the corner of a cement stairwell near the exit, a message had been scratched into the stone:
"They will awaken. And when they do, the lie will collapse under its own weight."
Sawl stared at it.
No name.
No insignia.
Just truth.
He looked out over the city, still blinking, still breathing, still unaware.
But now, so much more was visible.
And none of it… was random.