Amira's daughter, Nima, never knew war.
She knew the garden, the petals that sang, the stories etched into the bark of old lantern trees. Her hair smelled of lavender root, and her fingers were always ink-stained from copying legends by hand.
But on her seventeenth birthday, she found a letter in the hollow of a tree.
The handwriting was Amira's—but it was sealed with a symbol Nima had never seen:
A mask split in two.
The letter read:
"If you are reading this, the wind has turned again.
And the past we buried may no longer sleep.
Go to the Tree That Waits.
Bring no light.
Only memory."
That night, the stars dimmed.
And the violet flame that had never flickered—
went out.