Kaelen and the Children of the Shadowseed

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The roots beneath her feet pulsed like sleeping thoughts, and the ground seemed to breathe as Kaelen followed the narrow, damp passage. The light from Varaan's glowing horn tip shone barely further than an arm's length, but the scent of earth, moss, and something ancient guided her deeper. Time dripped from the cracks in the walls—not as water, but as emotion, slow, heavy, like a sentence never spoken. The Children of the Shadowseed waited for her. They weren't really children—more a memory of what plants dream when they germinate. Their forms seemed woven half from roots, half from mist. Eyes like spore pods, hands like leaf-bearing branches. They didn't speak, but their presence sang in Kaelen's mind like a wind that blows only in old stories. "You have come," something whispered inside her. Not with sounds, but with moss. On the wall beside her, words formed from green fluff: Every truth takes root. Every lie grows differently.They entered a vast hollow, more alive than built. An underground greenhouse, overgrown with light-glowing ferns, phosphorescent foliage, and on the floor, a flat, velvety moss in which words curled. Sentences someone had thought but never spoken. Stories that wrote themselves. Names that had fallen from dreams. Kaelen read: I never wanted to leave. It wasn't my fault. She never asked. And in between, in sickly brown, with trembling letters: I lied. "What is this?" Kaelen asked, her voice swallowed by the moss. Varaan stepped cautiously behind her, his slate-colored skin gleaming in the diffused light, his eyes watching silently. A child of the Shadowseed touched the ground, and from the moss grew a new word: Wordroots. Then another sentence: What you conceal reverberates here. Kaelen felt a tug in her chest. An old thought, thought forgotten, began to stir within her. She had carried it with her since the lost city beneath the rivers, but had never spoken it out loud: the fear that her search was only a circle. That the compass found nothing because she herself was the goal she was avoiding. A sentence grew at her feet: You are running away from yourself. She wanted to stamp it out, crush it. But the mossy letter wouldn't budge. Instead, it began to glow. "Why are you showing this?" she asked. The children of the Shadowseed didn't answer. But their forms began to dance, slowly, like leaves in the wind of a knowledge that needs no judgment. One of them handed her a small bowl, carved from translucent root. Inside lay a seed that whispered. Not aloud, but in images. If she planted it, it would grow—but only if she spoke the truth. And every time she lied, the little plant would twist until it broke. Kaelen accepted it. Not out of courage.