Zekai's hand closed on the door of the house his parents had left behind, and he pushed it open.
Dust coated everything inside, two years of stillness thick enough to blur the outlines of the furniture underneath it. He stepped in anyway, one hand covering his nose and mouth against the haze.
Every object sat exactly where it had been left, untouched, unstolen. Nobody had come through here since.
He crossed to the staircase on the right and climbed.
Three rooms waited on the upper floor. The middle one had belonged to his parents. He stood in the doorway a long moment, working out whether he actually wanted to open it.
He steadied his breath and pushed the door open, hinges shrieking through the empty house. Inside, less had fallen apart than he expected.
A large bed sat centered in the room.
He crossed to the window and pulled the curtain back. Sunlight flooded in, and the room looked less dead for it.
He scanned the room, then opened the small wardrobe on the right. His parents' clothes still hung there, folded and untouched — and one coat caught his eye. His father's.
He lifted it out and pressed it briefly to his face. Faint, but his father's scent still clung to the fabric. He pulled it on over his shoulders. It fit like it had been tailored to his exact measurements.
For a moment, he looked less like himself and more like someone he had spent years trying not to remember.
Storage boxes sat stacked beneath the wardrobe. His eyes drifted past them, up to the photograph mounted on the wall — his mother, violet eyes and dark hair, joy caught permanently in the frame. Beside her, his father, dark-eyed and black-haired, a sharper look behind them. And next to that photo, a second frame: the three of them together, his parents' arms wrapped around him in the middle, a family held together in one frozen afternoon.
His mother had always looked at him and his father like nothing else in the world mattered. The image flickered behind his eyes and faded just as fast.
Something warm rose behind his eyes, tangled up with guilt he couldn't put words to.
"Mom. Dad. Sorry." His voice barely carried. "Right now I'm fine. But not really."
"You died, and I ran. I've been running ever since." He wiped at his eyes before the tears could fall.
"You always told me I wasn't a loser. Everything around me keeps trying to prove you wrong."
"I wanted to see your graves one last time. Instead, fate dragged me back here."
His fist came down on the storage table before he'd decided to move at all.
BOOM.
The whole table shuddered. Wood groaned under something that had nothing to do with muscle — his Authority, leaking out with the grief he couldn't hold flat anymore. A crack split down the drawer's face.
Click.
The lock gave. The drawer slid open on its own, no resistance left in it at all.
He stared down at it, breath still uneven. "...Sorry." He didn't know if he meant the table or the drawer or the room itself. "Didn't mean to do that."
It wasn't locked. He stared at it, surprised.
She'd never let him near this drawer as a kid. He could still hear her exactly, clear enough that for a second the room didn't feel empty. "If you open this, a monster will come and carry you away!"
"A monster? What kind of monster lives in a drawer?" he'd asked her, six years old and certain he already had the world figured out.
"Skeleton monsters. Hollow eyes. Rows and rows of teeth."
"So it's bad if you open it?"
She'd pulled him close instead of answering directly. "That's exactly why I'm protecting you from it." She'd tugged his nose, gentle. "Kids who ask questions like that are always the first ones the monsters take."
Back then, he had believed her.
Now, standing in the same room two years after her death, he wasn't sure whether the joke had ever been a joke.
He'd met worse than skeleton monsters since. None of them had ever felt as dangerous as this drawer did right now.
A small smile crossed his face at the memory. He turned back to the drawer, curious now what it actually held.
Cosmetics filled most of it, along with a pendant resting near the top — hollow at its center, like it was built to hold something specific.
"So that's what the drawer was hiding." A faint smile.
He dug his hand in deeper, fingers brushing something soft. He tried pulling it free — and something sharp caught his skin on the way out.
"Ouch!"
He kept pulling anyway. What came free in his palm was the same blue flower from his dream, his own blood now smeared faint across one petal.
'This.'
'Is this the exact flower I saw?'
He lifted it to his face. It smelled like the inside of her closet, years ago — cedar and something floral underneath. His breathing slowed without him meaning to.
It hadn't wilted. All these years, and it still looked freshly cut.
His eyes dropped to the blood beading on his fingertip, and a colder thought pushed through the warmth of the moment.
No Frost Heal left. No healing at all, from here on out — whatever came next, his own hands would have to be enough.
'Guess that means there's nothing standing between me and whatever's out there now.'
He held the flower up against the pendant. They matched perfectly — like the pendant had been shaped around this exact bloom from the start.
Built to preserve it? Or just a coincidence?
He'd seen pendants like this hold souls before. He wondered, distantly, what this one had been built to hold onto instead.
He didn't stop to work out an answer. He tucked the flower inside, sealed the pendant shut, and sat back onto the edge of the bed. He held it up in both hands, studying it a few seconds longer, then looped the chain around his neck.
His mother's voice surfaced again, unbidden. "Remember this flower."
'Yeah. Whatever it takes — I'll survive to keep that promise, Mom.'
He looked toward the window one last time. The back of his neck prickled — the specific, unshakeable sense that the house wasn't done with him yet.
—
Zekai left the house behind and kept walking through the open streets. For the first time in weeks, the walk felt almost ordinary.
A scream cut through the distance, sharp enough to stop him mid-step.
✦ End of chapter Chapter 76 — Blue Flower ✦