Chapter 14: Evergreena's Echoes Part Two

The air wasn't just humming anymore—it throbbed. Not with fear, but with heat. Charged, tingling, undeniable heat. That same ancient oak that had once whispered sorrow now stood pulsing like a heart, its twisted limbs twitching in anticipation. Even the leaves seemed to glisten with a suggestive sheen of dew, as if the forest itself knew something deliciously wicked was about to begin.

Grin's voice broke through the thick tension like a blade. "Nightshade's influence is metastasizing," he said, gaze low, tone bone-dry. "Like a disease with ambition. If we don't excise him soon, the Veridians and Sapphires won't just hate each other—they'll forget why peace ever seemed worth it."

He closed his tome with a decisive thump, the impact oddly satisfying.

Antic stood in the half-shadow, shirt clinging to his back, fingers strumming a tune that made the bark of nearby trees shiver. His usual impish smirk had cooled into something far more dangerous—something that made his female companions side-eye him when they thought he wasn't looking.

"We can't outfight him," Antic said, his voice like dark honey poured over a blade. "But we can outplay him. I'll weave the truth into their bones until even his lies taste bitter."

He brushed his thumb across his lute strings and let the note linger. Pecola stiffened. It wasn't pain—it was pleasure. A low, pulsing, intimate sensation that reverberated through her body like a remembered kiss. The kind you dream about. The kind you wake up blushing from.

She didn't look at him. She didn't need to.

"No Eyes," he murmured, softer now, "You with me?"

Pecola knelt in the moss. Her skirts bunched at her thighs, dirt painting faint stories up her calves. Her hands—steady, nimble—brushed over herbs like they were velvet, like she was coaxing secrets out of lovers who'd long since sworn to stay silent.

"Nightshade's woven fear into the roots," she muttered. "But I'll brew clarity so potent it'll slap the lies right out of their skulls."

Antic raised an eyebrow, his grin returning with just enough smug to earn it. "Careful," he said. "Talk like that and I might fall harder."

"Fall faster," Pecola shot back, not even glancing up. "You're already ankle-deep."

Dolly made a noise halfway between a laugh and a purr. "Get a room," she said, strutting toward them in a gown so obscenely slit it functioned less as clothing and more as a threat. Her hair was piled high in a chaos of curls and pins, one dagger glinting from between her shoulder blades like a seductive secret.

"We're wasting time," she said, stretching her back like a cat. "Let's seduce the truth into the open and ruin Nightshade's week."

Grin didn't look up from his tome. "You mean life."

Dolly winked. "Tomato, tomahto."

Her plan was as reckless as it was genius. She'd infiltrate Nightshade's core group using her mimicry—steal his voice, alter his messages, whisper betrayal into the ears of his own men until they were chasing ghosts and turning on each other. Chaos, she explained, was just another kind of justice.

While she plotted, Grin traced sigils into the ground. Ancient ones. Forgotten ones. The kind of symbols that made the very soil tremble. "He's not after territory," he said. "He wants the nexus. The forest's spine. If he takes it, he controls time and memory."

Pecola scoffed. "So he's just another man terrified of irrelevance."

"Basically," Dolly chirped.

They worked. Gods, did they work.

Antic's music became something holy. His melodies soaked into stone and skin alike. At times soft as kisses, at times sharp enough to draw blood. He performed over secret campfires, through windows, beneath trembling balconies. Some listeners wept. Some broke into fights. One couple reportedly ran off into the woods mid-makeout and haven't been seen since.

Pecola's potions? Pure scandal. People drank them and remembered everything Nightshade made them forget—including who they loved, who they wronged, and why they'd stopped dancing. The air around her stank of crushed petals and possibility. She was a walking apothecary of truth and punishment.

And Dolly? Dolly whispered so many fake Nightshade orders that half his men were paranoid the squirrels were spies. (She may or may not have enchanted a few squirrels to wear little robes and follow his men around muttering nonsense.)

The confrontation came like thunder. Beneath the oak, Nightshade emerged—slick as oil, sharp as envy. "You think love wins," he said, voice curling around them. "You think it matters."

Antic stepped forward, lit from beneath by the glow of glowing rootlight, hair mussed, eyes wild. "No," he said. "But it ruins tyrants."

He played a single note.

The cursed oak split.

Pecola hurled a vial of liquid fire. The flame danced like it had a grudge.

Dolly whispered directly into Nightshade's shadow, turning it against him. He screamed. And Grin's final spell—old as gods and twice as bitter—undid centuries of corruption in a single word.

Then silence.

A hush thick with breathless awe.

The Breaths stirred. The clans woke. The curse broke. Peace didn't roar—it sighed.

Later, back at camp, Antic found Pecola by the stream. Her skirt was off, legs submerged in the cold water, moonlight tracing lazy silver down her bare back.

He didn't speak.

She looked over her shoulder, water trickling down her collarbone. "You owe me a kiss."

He knelt behind her, close enough to smell the crushed lavender in her hair. "I owe you the world."

He kissed her shoulder first. Slowly. Reverently. As if undoing every wound that had come before. She didn't stop him. Not this time.

The air, still thick with the lingering scent of battle and the faint echo of Antic's triumphant melody, felt... strange.

Like the forest had exhaled something private. Something meant for two.

Pecola stood there, one hand braced against the ancient oak, her fingers curling into the bark like it could explain what had just happened. The adrenaline was draining from her limbs in slow, electric waves. Her body ached in new ways—deep ways. Not bruises. Not wounds. Just... newness. A pressure in her chest that made her feel breathless and too full at once.

She couldn't tell if it was the magic of the Breaths or something Antic had done with his music, but she was humming inside. Her skin felt aware.

Antic sat a few paces away, his lute resting on his lap like an exhausted animal. His shirt was half-untucked, streaked with dust and shadow-blood, the buttons at his throat undone enough to hint at collarbone and a smirk. He looked like he'd just rolled out of bed after seducing chaos itself—and then offered it tea.

And he was watching her.

Not like he usually did—mocking, playful, bratty. There was weight in the silence now. Heat, too.

"Don't make that face," Antic said, finally breaking the hush with that familiar voice: half mischief, half moonlight. "If you keep looking like someone just kissed you unexpectedly, I'm going to start getting ideas."

Pecola blinked. Her voice was slow to catch up. "I wasn't... making a face."

"You were. It was adorable."

He stood, dusted off his knees, and walked over with casual confidence, like his body always knew exactly where it belonged. Right now, apparently, that was two inches too close.

"You okay, No Eyes?"

Her throat caught. "Yes. I think."

He smiled. Not his flashy smile—the other one. The one he only gave her after a good fight or a bad scare. The one that meant: I see you. I'm here. Don't look away.

Pecola didn't.

Not even when he reached out and brushed a curl behind her ear, his fingers just grazing her cheek. Her skin lit up like he'd whispered a spell into it.

Antic tilted his head, eyes narrowing slightly in amusement. "Huh. Either you're radiating leftover forest energy, or you're... blushing."

"I don't blush," she lied, entirely red.

"You do," he said softly. "You're doing it right now."

His hand lingered. Her heart didn't just flutter—it full-on hiccupped. Pecola didn't know much about romance, or what a kiss was supposed to feel like, but she suddenly understood why people wrote entire poems about shoulders and necks and the way someone said your name like it mattered.

She didn't want to move. Didn't want him to stop touching her, either. It was confusing. Like wanting to run and stay at the same time.

She cleared her throat. "You... played well. Back there."

"Mm. I always play well. But thank you." He gave a dramatic bow. "Your herbal chaos was pretty hot too."

"It wasn't meant to be hot," she mumbled, flustered.

"Too late," Antic murmured. "Everything about you is hot right now."

Before she could parse what that meant—or escape it—he took her hand. Just took it. No big flourish. No sly grin.

Just warm fingers wrapping around hers like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Come with me," he said.

"Where?"

"Away from the aftermath," he replied. "To somewhere stupid and quiet, where I don't have to pretend I'm not thinking about kissing you."

Pecola tripped on the air. "What?"

"I said trees are neat," he lied, already pulling her along.

The dawn broke like a drunk goddess tripping into the sky—smearing the heavens with streaks of rose and gold that melted over the scorched trees and cracked vines of Evergreena. The shadows that had long clung to the land like mildew on a cursed scroll finally peeled away.

The air was different now. Sweet and charged. Like the forest itself had just had a really satisfying scream.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Pecola stood in the aftermath, shoes wet with dew and moss blood, her hair tangled and lips slightly parted as if trying to catch the tune of the Breaths' song still humming through the soil. Her senses, already strange from birth, were overwhelmed. Magic pulsed everywhere. But it wasn't hostile anymore—it felt like a warm hand sliding under a cold shirt.

She turned her head and there he was.

Antic, standing against the sunrise, shirt hanging open like a romantic threat. His cheeks were scraped, his hands filthy, and his smile…

Unbearable.

She wasn't sure when he'd stopped being just Antic—the trickster with too many opinions and no sense of timing—and turned into this radiant, almost criminally attractive creature forged by chaos and poetry.

Pecola's eyes drifted to his neck. Why did he have to have that neck?

"Don't look at me like that," he said, voice low and wicked. "Unless you're ready to deal with the consequences."

"What consequences?" she asked, too genuinely.

He blinked. Then exhaled a sharp laugh and dragged a hand down his face. "Oh, gods, you're lethal."

Their victory had been real. Tangible. Messy. It didn't feel like the dramatic final scene of an opera—it felt like crawling out of a collapsed temple with just enough energy to flip the bird at fate.

Still, they had done it. Together.

And even though the families were gathering now in awkward, twitchy clusters—Veridians and Sapphires standing across from one another like nervous cats in a bathtub—something had shifted. The war was over. Sort of.

Elara approached, her usual dagger-sharp presence strangely softened. There was still blood on her collarbone, and her eyebrows were permanently set to "judgmental," but something gentler moved behind her eyes now.

Beside her, Orion wore a cloak that had clearly once cost more than Pecola's entire wardrobe. He looked exhausted and smug. Classic.

"We… need to talk," Elara muttered. It sounded like she was chewing nails just to say it.

She glanced at Orion—who gave her a lopsided, annoyingly smoldering look—and then back to Pecola and Antic.

"We chose each other," she said. "Despite… everything."

Orion nodded, hands folded like a repentant choir boy. "You cracked us open. Showed us there was more than vengeance and political foreplay."

Antic made a soft gagging noise behind his hand.

Elara ignored him. "We're not going to pretend it's easy. But we're done with the feud."

It was bizarre watching Elara say something that wasn't a threat. Pecola stared, half-expecting her to explode. Instead, she saw something else: Elara and Orion standing side by side like a glitch in the universe. Love, but the messy, growling, back-alley kind. And it had somehow stuck.

Their declaration cracked through the silence like thunder in a ballroom. The forest listened. So did the families.

Soon, murmurs began to ripple outward. Not of fear, but of—gods forbid—possibility.

And then the real work began.

Pecola, Antic, Grin, and Dolly—Evergreena's most chaotic therapy group—became the core of the reconciliation movement.

Grin, despite being a borderline grave-addict, spoke with such eerily calm wisdom that people couldn't help but listen. "You're not angry," he told them, tapping a bony finger to his temple. "You're traumatized and bored."

Dolly—wearing a corset too tight for negotiation and a smile too sharp for politics—used her mimicry to spread just the right rumors. She could end a feud with a well-timed whisper and a slap that sounded like a kiss.

Antic's music? Obscene. Not in words—but in what it did. Notes slid between ribcages like honeyed knives. His lullabies made grown men cry and suspicious fathers drop their crossbows. Every time he played, it felt like he was slowly undressing the forest.

And Pecola—sweet, oblivious Pecola—walked among them like a gentle storm. She didn't tell people what to do. She simply asked strange questions, brewed potions that made enemies hallucinate their best memories, and nodded wisely when people broke down sobbing mid-sentence.

Her vision let her see where the magic clung, where the wounds ran deepest. She didn't fix it—she guided people to see it themselves. She did it all with such guileless clarity that even the bitterest elders lowered their weapons.

But peace was messy.

Old wounds screamed. Some families sabotaged their own reconciliation just to prove they were still in pain. Children cried when they saw cousins they'd been taught to hate smile back at them.

And still… something worked.

It wasn't diplomacy. It wasn't spells. It wasn't Antic's ridiculously well-timed hair flips.

It was the weird, wild honesty of it all. The chaos. The vulnerability. The moments that couldn't be orchestrated—only witnessed.

Antic played under starlight while two old matriarchs shared wine and trauma. Pecola coaxed poisonous mushrooms into glowing with healing light. Grin refereed arguments with curses carved into bread loaves. Dolly hosted a dinner disguised as a rival house's dead uncle, just to make a point.

The children, of course, got it first. They didn't care about past blood. They played in the rivers together, told ghost stories, painted mud onto each other's cheeks, and dared one another to touch Breaths (which backfired hilariously).

Even Queen Sentient and the Soul Keeper made a dramatic reappearance, standing hand-in-hand like immortal wedding cake toppers. Their love, scandalous and oddly parental, became the final stitch in Evergreena's heart.

The blossoms rained down.

It was quiet, but not empty.

Thousands of golden-pink petals drifted in slow motion through the air like they'd forgotten how gravity worked. They spun and danced above Elara and Orion, drawn into their orbit like stars lured to a new constellation. Their figures, no longer flesh and blood, shimmered—woven from moonlight and something older, something too sacred to name.

And yet, their eyes were very human.

Locked. Lit. Bare.

No one spoke. No one breathed. Pecola stood motionless, her hands clenched tight around the edges of her sleeves. Her skin prickled, her vision—always stranger than most—caught the way Elara and Orion pulsed. Not with magic exactly, but emotion. Buried generations-worth of it. Pain, longing, the sharp ache of forgiveness when you're not sure you deserve it.

It was beautiful.

And also a little terrifying.

A low hum rolled through the clearing. Not a sound so much as a pressure, blooming in her chest like a second heartbeat. The air thickened—jasmine, wet moss, something warm like burnt amber. Beside her, Antic shifted. He wasn't smiling for once. His flute dangled at his side, forgotten. She could feel him watching them, too.

No jokes. No offhand comments.

For a boy who talked nonstop, Antic was very good at shutting the world out when it mattered.

Suddenly, Orion reached for Elara's hand.

The movement was slow, aching. Like even in this new celestial body, his nervousness remained. She met him halfway, fingers intertwining like it was muscle memory.

And then, they began to dissolve.

It didn't look painful. It wasn't some flashy magical explosion. They simply shimmered—bodies softening like candlelight in water—until their forms broke apart, not vanishing but becoming. Petals swirled into the shapes of their limbs, vines tangled through their outlines, and suddenly—

Elara was the trees.

Orion was the light.

The forest bent as if exhaling. Every blade of grass caught their glow.

"...They're not gone," Pecola whispered.

She hadn't realized she'd said anything out loud until Antic touched her arm. She turned her head toward him. He didn't flinch away from her tears—he just looked at them like they were strange flowers he didn't know the names of yet.

"You always say the weirdest crap when you cry," he murmured. His voice was warm, soft-edged. "But I guess you're right. They're everywhere now. So uh… if the trees start yelling at us for kissing, I'm blaming Elara."

She blinked.

"Kissing?" she asked, voice flat. "When did that come up?"

Antic grinned like he'd caught her in a trap.

"Didn't. Just planting the idea. Good gardeners do that, right? Plant things."

Pecola rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

A gust of wind blew through the grove. More petals floated down, catching in Antic's wild curls and clinging to the edges of Pecola's sleeves. Behind them, Grin and Dolly stood quietly—Dolly uncharacteristically silent, a single cherry blossom perched right on the tip of her porcelain nose. She didn't swat it away.

"I always thought love was just… theater," Dolly muttered, almost to herself. "Overproduced and overly wet."

Grin glanced down at her, his face unreadable. "Still do?"

Dolly shrugged. "The jury's drunk."

As the last of the blossoms fell, the air shifted. Not in a loud way. Just a collective softening, like a massive muscle finally unclenched.

The watching families—Sapphires, Veridians, others whose names Pecola didn't know—slowly stepped forward. Old enemies standing next to each other without snarling, flinching, or flinging curses. A ripple moved through them, tentative and strange.

Like no one knew whether they were allowed to feel relief.

Or happiness.

Or peace.

Then a child giggled.

Just one. Loud and unafraid. Somewhere deep in the crowd, a little Sapphire girl tossed her handful of petals into the air and screamed, "Wheeeeeee!"

Pecola turned toward the sound, startled. Then she laughed. An unfiltered, slightly-snorting laugh that cracked right through her throat before she could stop it.

She clapped a hand over her mouth.

Antic was grinning. "There she is. Took you long enough."

"I wasn't gone," she said defensively.

"You always leave when stuff gets too soft. Your brain just throws up a big DO NOT COMPUTE and poof—you're gone."

"I do not 'poof.'"

"You totally do. I watch you do it."

"Please fall down a well."

He leaned in, just a hair too close, and whispered, "Say that again, but slower."

Her brain short-circuited.

Which, of course, he noticed

The shimmering remnants of Elara and Orion's love faded like glitter caught in slow motion, folding into the breath of the dawn. Evergreena exhaled—every petal and blade of grass flushed with a dewy glow, like the entire forest had just gotten out of an enchanted steam bath. The Breaths hummed, soft and sweet, a celestial massage to the nerves. But Pecola—No Eyes, now—stood still, her arms stiff at her sides.

The others basked in the afterglow of victory. She felt like the only one who hadn't been kissed by the sunrise.

Her fingers twitched.

The scent of jasmine lingered like a cloying secret, and her mind kept returning to that damn kiss. That stupid soft-lipped, annoyingly-perfectly-timed kiss. A kiss among falling blossoms, stolen in the middle of magic and mayhem, like a punctuation mark on their shared madness. She hadn't even processed it in real-time. Her body had gone on autopilot—lips tingling, chest tight, head spinning like someone had poured honey over her brain and whispered, "Feel something, you coward."

She had felt something. Too much of something.

That kiss had been…warm. Too warm. His lips, annoyingly soft. His scent—forest bark and mischief. His hands, steady on her shoulders. His breath brushing her ear after. And worst of all, that maddening pause when he pulled back—waiting, hoping—watching her like she was the punchline of his favorite joke and he was daring her not to laugh.

But this wasn't a joke. This was… real.

And real was terrifying.

Now, standing in the radiant hush of Evergreena's peace, she felt like she'd been left behind at the party, holding the emotional leftovers. She couldn't stop remembering the pressure of his fingers brushing her cheek when the petals fell. How he looked at her like she was the last song in his symphony.

She shouldn't be thinking about his hands. Or his mouth. Or how he'd whispered her name like it was a spell he half-expected to backfire.

She should be thinking about… responsibility. Clarity. Destiny. Whatever.

Instead, her pulse thundered in her ears. Her throat ached from words she hadn't said.

She turned her face to Antic, who stood a few feet away with a crooked grin still playing on his lips, as if he knew she was about to run and was perversely curious to see how she'd trip over herself doing it.

He was fiddling with his lute like it was a nervous tick, strumming nonsense chords that still somehow sounded seductive. He looked like a romantic disaster waiting to happen—hair tousled by the wind, cloak slightly askew, eyes practically glowing. The kind of man you fall for in one scene and regret two chapters later. Except… she didn't regret it. That was the problem.

He caught her staring.

"Something wrong, No Eyes?" he asked lightly, voice soaked in sugar and sarcasm. "You've been glaring at me like I stole your favorite herb."

Pecola blinked. Her jaw tightened. Then, exhaled too loudly.

"I—no—I mean… yes. Kind of."

Antic tilted his head, amused. "Be gentle. I'm still emotionally vulnerable from saving the universe with a flute solo."

She didn't laugh.

That wiped the grin off his face.

"I need to talk to you," she said, and the moment the words left her lips, her chest pulled taut.

He set his lute down gently, his entire expression sharpening like a knife being slid back into its sheath. "Oof. That's the tone people use right before telling me they're joining a monastery."

Her lips twitched—barely. "I'm not joining anything."

A long beat. The forest breathed around them. She could feel the petals crunching softly under her boots.

Then she whispered, "I'm not ready."

He didn't pretend not to understand.

Antic's grin melted completely, replaced by something soft, unreadable. His eyes flicked down, then up again, as if mentally calculating where the joke should go—and choosing, for once, not to deliver it.

"Ah," he said finally. "The speech. Alright. Hit me."

"I mean it," Pecola said. Her voice trembled in a way she hated. "I'm not ready for… for this. I can't—" She struggled to find footing. "It's not that I don't feel… something. I do. That's the problem. It's just—it's a lot."

Antic raised one brow, then did something dangerous: he stepped closer.

Not too close. Just enough that she could smell him again—spiced wood and reckless promise.

"Too much feeling is the problem?" he said quietly. "That's new."

She scowled. "Stop trying to flirt your way through this."

"I wasn't. That was sincerity. It happens once a century."

She tried not to smile. Failed. Then dropped her eyes. "You don't get it. You've always been… fearless."

He snorted. "Fearless? I've been winging it with rhythm and dumb luck. Do you think I planned to fall for a blind girl who talks to invisible wind gods and dodges affection like it's venom?"

Her head shot up, mouth open.

He shrugged. "What? Too real?"

The flush crept up her cheeks before she could stop it. "You don't love me."

He smirked like it was cute she thought that mattered.

"Doesn't have to be love yet," he said. "Could just be… inconvenient obsession."

"Antic…"

He leaned in, voice low, magnetic. "You kissed me back."

"I panicked!"

"You tasted like moonlight and sass."

She let out a sound—part groan, part laugh, part mortified gasp—and buried her face in her hands. "Gods, you're insufferable."

"But you like me insufferable."

"I liked you better when you were unconscious in the mushroom field."

"Ouch."

He stepped back finally, sighing dramatically. "Look. I get it. You're scared. I'm terrifyingly charming. It's a lot."

"Antic."

He quieted.

Pecola's voice softened. "I just… I need to figure out who I am before I figure out who I can be with you."

Antic didn't joke this time. He studied her face. "Okay."

Just that. No argument. No guilt. No dramatic confession.

"Okay?" she echoed.

"I'll wait," he said. "Just… don't make me wait silently. That's cruel."

A small, startled laugh bubbled up. "I make no promises."

He grinned again—just a flash. "That's my girl."

The air thickened around them, still sweet with jasmine and dusklight, but now pulsing with unsaid things. The tension didn't disappear. It just morphed. Charged. Waiting.

She turned away before she changed her mind.

Antic let her go.

But as she walked, she could feel his gaze on her back like warm fingers tracing secrets down her spine.