She came on foot, the morning after the road stood still.
No vehicle.
No escort.
Just a cane carved from blackthorn, a shawl the color of dried moss, and eyes that had seen too many springs turn to ash.
She didn't knock.
Didn't call out.
Just stood at the gate, staring at the oak — not like it was a tree, but like it was a long-lost child.
I felt her before I saw her.
The network twitched — not in warning, but in recognition.
Like a dog remembering its first master.
I stepped outside.
She didn't look at me.
Looked past me.
At the sapling.
At the vine curling around the drain.
At the dandelion that had started calling itself Thistle.
Then, in a voice cracked with age but sharp as thorn, she spoke — not in modern tongue, but in the Old Speech.
The one the plants whisper in.
"You are late."
I froze.
No one outside the garden should understand that language.
No one alive.
And yet — she had spoken it flawlessly.
"Who are you?" I asked, in the same tongue.
She smiled — just slightly.
"I was the last to tend the northern grove.
Before they cut it down.
Before they called us witches.
Before they burned the books."
She tapped her cane on the soil.
"They called us the Green Tongues.
The Root Speakers.
The ones who remembered how to listen."
I didn't need to ask.
I knew.
"You were a Voice."
She nodded.
"And you are the next.
Though the line broke long ago.
I thought it dead.
But the land… it never forgets."
Thistle swayed, unusually still.
"She's telling the truth," he murmured.
"The old one. We remember her scent.
Like rain on stone."
The woman — Maren, as she later said — didn't come to teach.
Not yet.
She came to warn.
That night, by lantern light, she told me what no System notification ever could.
"The Green Heart does not give power.
It tests it.
And it does not forgive those who flee."
She spoke of the Voices before us.
One who tried to rule, and was swallowed by the roots.
One who hid, and woke to find her garden ash.
One who loved too fiercely, and became a tree to stay with her children.
"The Heart does not care for good intentions.
It cares for balance.
And if you fail — not out of weakness, but out of fear — it will take the power back.
Not gently.
It will unmake you.
And the land will sleep again."
I thought of the child.
Of the vine on the road.
Of Kael, lowering his sprayer.
"Then why return?" I asked.
"If the last Voices failed?"
She looked at me — long, deep, like she was measuring my soul.
"Because the Heart is waking.
Not because of you.
Because the world is dying.
And nature does not save what is not worth saving.
You are not its savior.
You are its witness.
And if you do not stand —
no one will."
She stayed that night.
No bed.
Just a mat beneath the oak.
And before she slept, she pressed her palm to the soil, whispered in the Old Speech:
"I am home."
And the tree — for the first time since I'd known it —
sighed.