The garden was gone. The figure had disappeared into the ether, leaving behind only the echo of its final words: You are no longer of the world you knew. Elara stood in the fading mist, her heart heavy with the cost of her choice.
Cassian walked beside her, a distance between them now that had never been there before. The warmth of their shared history, the unspoken connection they had once had, was no longer there. She could still see his face, still hear his voice, but the memories of their past felt as distant as a dream she could no longer reach.
"What now?" Cassian asked, his voice distant, hollow.
Elara looked at him, but the woman standing beside him was no longer the same. He had returned, but a version of him that was both familiar and strange. He had not been untouched by the garden; something had shifted in him, too. But she couldn't find the words to say it - how much he had changed, how much they both had lost.
"I don't know," Elara said, her voice trembling with a truth she hadn't wanted to admit.
For a long time, they stood there in the quiet that stretched between them, unsure of what to say or do. The world they had once known, their home, their family - it was all slipping further from her grasp. She could no longer place her memories with clarity. There was a void in her mind, an emptiness where their shared past had been.
As the fog began to lift, the city loomed in the distance - distant, forgotten, and strange. The skyline shimmered like a mirage, as though the world beyond the garden had shifted, too.
"We're back," Cassian whispered. "But we're not back."
Elara nodded, a tear slipping down her cheek. She had saved him, but in doing so, had lost something far more precious. He was here, standing before her, but the bond they once had - the unbreakable thread between them - had frayed, weakened by the very garden that had promised her brother's return.
They began to walk toward the city, no longer sure of where they were going, but certain they couldn't stay in this in-between place forever. The garden's price was steep, but the real cost was one neither of them had understood until it was too late: the unspoken truth that, even when you save someone, sometimes you lose yourself in the process.
And as they stepped back into the world they had once known, it felt as though they were strangers - connected by the faintest threads of a past that had already begun to fade into the shadows of a forgotten garden.
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