No one saw her for a long time.
Seasons forgot her name. Kingdoms rose and fell, arguing over ruins, over frost-scorched soil, over a throne that no longer existed. And through it all, somewhere far north where maps turned white, a single garden grew.
Rheya tended it with her bare hands.
The garden obeyed no season. Frost flowers bloomed beside wild violets; snow fell in midsummer and melted by dawn. Each petal shimmered faintly, as though remembering the light of another world. The air hummed with old power the kind that no longer belonged to gods or kings.
The villagers who wandered too close never stayed long. They spoke of whispers in the branches, eyes in the mist, a woman with silver scars tracing her arms like rivers.
They said she never aged.
They said she spoke to the earth as if it could answer.
They said sometimes it did.
But Rheya knew the truth.
The garden was alive because he was.
Kael's body was gone, his name buried under a dozen false legends but his soul was not gone. It had become the cold breath between her flowers, the frost that kissed her skin at night, the pulse she still felt beneath her ribs.
The Hollow Crown had devoured him.
And she was its keeper now.
One morning, as dawn spilled pale light across her garden, the silver bloom nearest the heart of the glade began to tremble.
Rheya knelt beside it. Her hands brushed soil soft as silk, and beneath her fingers she felt the faint tremor of life or warning.
"Not again," she whispered. "Please."
The flower unfurled. But instead of petals, a mirror surface spread outward like rippling glass. The reflection staring back was hers but not her now. Her reflection wore a crown of frost. Her eyes were pale blue instead of gray. And behind that reflection stood Kael.
He looked… almost alive.
"Rheya," he said softly. His voice came through the glass like wind through ice.
She fell backward, heart hammering. "No. You can't be..."
"I'm not," he said. His smile was faint, sad. "Not in the way you mean."
She reached toward the surface. It rippled beneath her fingers, cold but not solid. "Where are you?"
"In between," he said. "The Hollow Crown is a gate, Rheya. You didn't destroy it. You opened it."
She closed her eyes. "Then what is this place?"
"Your garden?" His smile faltered. "It isn't part of the living world anymore. You've built it on the seam between realms."
Her pulse stuttered. "You mean..."
"Yes," Kael said. "You're standing between life and death."
When she slept that night, she dreamed of the throne room again. Not as it had been, but as it was now: half-buried in frost and root, the walls humming like a heartbeat. The crown hovered over the empty dais, its edges flickering between light and shadow.
"Why did you let me wake it?" she asked the darkness.
The answer came not from Kael but from the crown itself...a voice that sounded like both of them, and neither.
Because the world needed balance.
Because the living forgot to fear the earth.
"Fear isn't balance."
No, the voice whispered, but it is memory.
She turned away, but the crown's light flared. Images flooded her vision: cities rebuilt on scorched ground, rulers wearing mock crowns, children playing in fields still salted with frost.
The world had survived. But something beneath it hadn't.
"Is that what you wanted?" she whispered. "A world that forgets?"
No, said the crown. A world that remembers.
At dusk, the man with the blood-colored hair returned. The same one who had once given her the silver petal and vanished into mist.
"You again," Rheya said as she rose from the soil, dirt streaking her hands.
He inclined his head. "Me again."
"Last time you brought a warning. What now?"
"A choice."
She laughed without humor. "You people and your choices."
He stepped closer, eyes glinting gold in the half-light. "You're keeping the gate open. Whether you mean to or not, your garden bridges both sides. Every bloom you tend bleeds a little more of the living world into the Hollow."
"I can't close it," she said. "It's tied to me."
"Then perhaps you must cross it," he said. "From one side to the other."
Her breath caught. "You're saying I should die."
"I'm saying you should finish what you began."
He held out his hand. In his palm lay a seed half silver, half blue. "Plant this in the heart of your garden, and the bridge will collapse. The dead will sleep. The living will forget."
She stared at it. "And Kael?"
The stranger's expression softened. "He will finally rest."
Her fingers closed around the seed, trembling.
"I'll think about it," she said.
But she already knew she wouldn't.
That night, the door of glass shimmered again. Kael stood within, his form clearer now, almost solid.
"You shouldn't linger here," Rheya told him. "It's dangerous."
He smiled. "Since when have you cared about danger?"
"Since I realized I can't lose you twice."
His expression shifted. "You think I'm trapped."
"Aren't you?"
He shook his head slowly. "No. I'm… tethered. To you. To what you made."
Her throat tightened. "The garden?"
"Yes. It's a sanctuary and a prison both. For us. For what's left of the Hollow."
She reached toward him again, desperate. "Kael, the stranger says if I plant this..." She opened her hand, showing him the seed. "It will close the gate."
He stared at it. Then, softly: "Do you trust him?"
"No."
"Then don't."
She hesitated. "But if I don't, the worlds will bleed into each other. The dead are stirring. I can feel them in the soil."
Kael looked past her, toward the flowers glowing faintly in the night. "Then maybe the dead deserve to wake."
The next day, the garden began to change.
The silver flowers turned darker, their edges lined with frost. The air grew heavier. Shadows moved between the trees too slow to be wind, too soft to be beasts. Rheya stood at the edge of the pond, heart pounding.
The water rippled. Faces emerged within some she recognized from her past: her father, her aunt, even the northern envoy whose rose had begun it all. They weren't alive. But they weren't gone, either.
"Rheya," they whispered in unison. "You opened the way. Let us through."
Her knees buckled. "No."
"You owe us."
Their voices blended with the hum of the soil, with the pulse beneath the ground. The garden shuddered. Roots burst from the earth, coiling like serpents, reaching toward her.
And then the frost came.
Kael's frost.
It swept through the garden like breath gentle, protective, and utterly final. The roots froze mid-lunge. The whispers faded.
When the air cleared, he was there again, half-formed, standing in the shimmer of the door.
"You can't hold them back forever," Rheya said, voice trembling.
"I can," Kael said, "if you help me."
"How?"
"By letting me in."
Her breath hitched. "Into the living world?"
He shook his head. "Into you."
The next night, beneath a sky that had forgotten its stars, Rheya stood before the glass door. It pulsed faintly, like a heart ready to stop.
Kael waited within.
"Are you certain?" she whispered.
He smiled, sad and true. "You once asked if I'd choose you over everything. I did. Now it's your turn."
She lifted her hand. The surface shimmered, soft as breath. For one heartbeat she saw her reflection her silver veins, her tired eyes, the faint shimmer of the flower still sleeping beneath her skin.
Then she stepped forward.
The glass gave way like water.
Cold rushed through her lungs, but there was no pain only stillness. Then warmth. Then light.
She opened her eyes.
Kael stood inches from her, whole again, but his touch was weightless.
"Where are we?" she asked.
He looked around the garden, frozen mid-bloom, suspended between two breaths of time.
"Between," he said softly. "Exactly where we belong."
Together they stood in the center of the glade. The flowers glowed brighter now some frost, some flame, all alive.
"This is what we made," Kael said quietly. "Not curse. Not blessing. Just… balance."
Rheya looked at the seed still in her palm. "The stranger wanted me to end it."
"Then he feared what he didn't understand."
She turned the seed over. "What if he was right? What if this can't last?"
Kael smiled faintly. "Nothing lasts. But some things are worth living and dying for."
She pressed the seed into the soil.
Not to end the garden, but to anchor it.
Light flared, blinding and beautiful. When it faded, the frost and flame had intertwined, the sky a soft gray dawn.
Kael took her hand. For the first time, his skin was warm.
"Rheya," he murmured. "Do you hear it?"
She listened.
The world was singing low, endless, steady. Not a song of war or sorrow, but of rhythm. Of roots and thaw. Of life and death moving in tandem, neither ruling the other.
She smiled. "Yes."
Years later, travelers spoke again of the garden in the north.
They said it was older than memory now. That if you walked deep enough, you'd hear two voices in the wind one of frost, one of thorn speaking as one.
They said the dead no longer feared to sleep.
And the living no longer feared to dream.