The world did not heal.
The cities remained scarred, stitched together with crumbling memories and broken people.
Governments collapsed.
Nations splintered.
What rose in their place were survivor enclaves, isolated, suspicious of outsiders, bound by their shared trauma.
They called it the Age of Ash and Bloom.
The Thorned disappeared into legend, their methods condemned as brutal but undeniably effective.
And at the center of this fractured world walked Sam Parkour and Wang Siam, survivors of a war no one would believe, carrying the scars of a nightmare that refused to die quietly.
Sam often found herself staring at the flowers.
They grew everywhere now.
Silent.
Observing.
Beautiful.
Threatening.
She knew better than to trust them.
But she also knew… they were part of the world now.
Part of her.
Part of Wang.
Some days, they would sit in silence, watching the sun set over fields of alien petals.
She would wonder if she was still human.
If any of them were.
And she would whisper to herself:
"Not food.""Not a vessel.""Not a flower."
But the words tasted hollow.
Like the old world.
One night, as they camped in what used to be a library, Wang woke from a restless sleep.
His eyes glowed faintly in the dark.
Not the Bloom's glow.
Something… other.
He turned to her.
"You feel it, don't you?"
Sam didn't answer.
She didn't have to.
They both knew the truth.
The Bloom had not been defeated.
It had merged with them.
Altered them.
They weren't human anymore.
Not completely.
They were hybrids.
The first of their kind.
Harbingers.
Maybe guardians.
Maybe something worse.
Sam finally whispered, "We're the last bloom."
Wang smiled sadly."We are."
In the distance, in lands untouched by the Bloom's initial wave, new civilizations began to rise.
They didn't remember the Bloom.
They called it myths.Superstition.
They rebuilt their cities.
They planted gardens.
They invited the flowers back.
And Sam and Wang watched.
Silent.
Knowing what the others refused to know.
That the Bloom never forgets.
It never stops.
It waits.
And when the time came again…
They would be ready.
Or they would be the first to fall.
As Sam stared at the horizon, a single question lingered in her hollowed-out heart:
Are we the protectors?Or the heralds?
She smiled bitterly.
Maybe it didn't matter anymore.
Because in the end…
The Bloom always wins.
THE ENDof THE BLOOMING MIRAGE, the series....