Chapter 10: The New Normal

Chapter 10: The New Normal

Three weeks can be an eternity. Long enough for a child’s night terrors to fade to whispers, for a detective’s fabricated report to be filed and buried, and for the phantom ache in a psychic’s skull to recede into a low, persistent hum, like the ghost of a struck tuning fork.

The café was aggressively normal. The air smelled of dark roast coffee and toasted bagels, a welcome and mundane replacement for the cloying sweetness of otherworldly blossoms. Sunlight, warm and unfiltered by a canopy of enraged foliage, streamed through the large front window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. For Kaelen Vance, it felt like visiting a foreign country.

He watched Izzy Rossi take a sip of her black Americano, her movements as precise and economical as ever. But the tension that had once radiated from her like a force field was gone, replaced by a quiet weariness that mirrored his own. Her dark hair was down, falling softly around her shoulders, and the severe, professional mask she wore had been replaced by the unguarded face of the woman who had stood with him in the heart of a primordial nightmare.

“I saw Sarah’s foster mom yesterday,” Izzy said, her voice low, meant only for him amidst the café’s gentle clatter. “She said Sarah’s drawing again. Lots of pictures of flowers. Roses, mostly.”

“Are they… red?” Kaelen asked, already knowing the answer.

Izzy gave a small, slow nod. “Blood red. Her therapist thinks it’s a healthy way to process the trauma.” She let out a short, humorless breath. “If she only knew.”

The lie they had built was both a shield and a cage. The official report was a masterpiece of creative redaction, a document that spoke of an unhinged botanist, an unstable structure, and a tragic but explainable accident involving a cocktail of experimental chemicals. It was a neat, tidy story for a world that demanded neat, tidy answers. It mentioned nothing of the impossible rain, the whispers on the wind, or the nine-foot-tall god made of soil and vengeance. Only two people in the world knew the full truth, and they were sitting across from each other at a small, unassuming table, trying to pretend the world still made sense.

“How’s the… noise?” Izzy asked, her eyes searching his. It was her new way of asking if his mind was still screaming.

“Quieter,” Kaelen admitted, tracing the rim of his own mug. “The echoes in that nursery were so loud, everything else seems muted now. It’s almost peaceful.” He gave her a faint, tired smile. “My new normal is just regular-level haunted.”

A comfortable silence settled between them, a luxury they hadn’t known before. The snark and skepticism that had defined their first encounters had been burned away in the greenhouse, calcified into a bond of shared trauma. They were survivors of a secret war, and it had redrawn the map of their lives, placing them on the same, lonely island.

Izzy tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, the familiar gesture now seeming less like a sign of intense focus and more one of quiet introspection. “Writing that report was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my career. Every word was a lie. A necessary one, but…” She trailed off, her gaze distant. “I look at a crime scene now, and my first thought isn’t about forensics or evidence. It’s… what if?”

“What if the world is bigger and stranger than the manual says it is?” Kaelen finished for her, his voice soft.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “That.”

He reached across the table, his fingers gently brushing against hers. It was a simple, hesitant gesture, but it was charged with everything they couldn’t say. A spark, not of static or psychic energy, but of simple, human warmth, passed between them. Izzy didn’t pull away. Her fingers curled slightly, a silent acknowledgment. In that small touch, the fragile, unspoken thing growing between them—a connection forged in fear and tempered by a shared secret—began to feel real. A bloom of hope in the ashes of what they had endured.

The bell over the café door jingled, and the moment was broken. They pulled their hands back, the space between them suddenly feeling vast again. They finished their coffee with the easy small talk of people learning each other for the first time, all over again. They talked about his art, her running schedule, the shared desire to sleep for a week. When they left, standing on the sun-drenched sidewalk, the promise of seeing each other again hung in the air, unspoken but absolute. This coffee was not an epilogue; it was a beginning.

When Kaelen got back to his apartment, the faint scent of ozone that always clung to his space felt more like a familiar blanket than a warning. He dropped his keys in the bowl by the door, the exhaustion of the past few weeks finally settling deep into his bones.

And then he saw it.

Sitting directly in front of his door, on the worn welcome mat, was a small, square package wrapped in plain brown paper and tied with simple twine. There was no return address, no postage, no markings of any kind. It hadn’t been delivered by any mail carrier. It had simply been… placed there.

A cold prickle of unease traced its way up his spine. He knelt, his senses on high alert. He reached out a hand, not to touch the box itself, but the air around it. There was no echo of a human touch, no psychic residue of a delivery person. There was only a faint, deep hum. A feeling of damp earth, of ancient patience. The feeling of a root, deep underground, connected to everything.

With a sense of grim inevitability, he brought the package inside and set it on his small kitchen table. His fingers, now trembling slightly, worked at the knot of the twine. He peeled back the brown paper.

Inside was a small, simple wooden box. He lifted the lid.

There, nestled on a bed of rich, damp black soil that smelled powerfully of petrichor, lay a single seed. It was the size of a small pebble, and its surface was a deep, impossible crimson, swirling with patterns that looked like the grain of polished mahogany. It felt alive in his hand, humming with a latent, dormant power.

He knew, with a certainty that bypassed thought and went straight to his soul, where it had come from. This was not a threat. It was not a warning. It felt… like a message. A reminder.

Driven by an instinct he didn't understand, Kaelen closed his fingers around the seed.

His mind exploded.

Not with pain or terror, but with a single, overwhelming psychic impression. It was not a vision, but a feeling—the sensation of immense, slow, silent growth. The feeling of roots pushing through miles of earth, of a consciousness that measured time in seasons and centuries, not minutes and hours. He felt the vast, interconnected network of the Sower’s domain, a silent, sleeping kingdom beneath the feet of an unsuspecting world.

And then, a single, clear thought, not in words, but in pure intent, bloomed in the center of his mind.

A gardener is needed.

His hand snapped open, and the seed dropped to the table with a soft click. He stumbled back, his heart hammering against his ribs, gasping for air.

The case was closed. The official report was filed. But his connection to the Sower of Sorrows, the ancient, territorial god of the Florida soil, was far from over. He had not simply been a witness. He had been anointed. And now, a seed had been planted.