Daun’s 10th birthday is tomorrow. When February 1st rolls around, she excuses every action with, “It’s my birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to.” They point out she isn’t crying. “You wouldn’t understand me tomorrow!” she argues. For the rest of the year, this is her favorite phrase: you wouldn’t understand me tomorrow. 

Xiumin speculates puberty hit early; he isn’t looking forward to her teenage years. D.O asks her what she means at every utterance. “Try again!” she reprimands. His 10th year come and gone, he didn’t know where to begin. 

Chen nicknames her “brat.” Stop smiling at me like a dope, brat. Lay guesses he’s going soft in his old age. Brats are not birthed from the Tree of Life — they’re molded by doting parents. 

But there’s something in her shaped by someone else. A nugget of wisdom. A meaning behind her favorite phrase. Daun hides these secrets behind buck teeth and whispers under the shade of trees. Maybe they’ll never understand her. 

“Try again!” she challenges the conception of fixed being.

“You’re hesitating.” Victoria noted, foreseeing a plot twist in her stuttering stride. “Do you plan on dying a second time, your highness?”

“The Bloom Project is causing plant roots to rapidly engorge. An abandoned city, hundreds of thousands of refugees, it won’t end here. Tectonic plates will crack. Serum will seep through. After the rainy season, the Tree of Life won’t be big enough to contain the planet’s unnatural growth,” she recited. 

Each word was timed to perfection. For all the hours spent traversing sewage tunnels and surviving alleyways, she was more than a being. She was a solution; she was the Seeress of Exo. 

“If it isn’t the worst of times, can we even hope for the best of times?” Victoria helped her up stairs turned cliffside. Rocks slipped under their combined weight. Another hand steadied them.

“I cannot die here. I will not die here.”

“You don't have to convince us, your highness.” Luna laughed. Whether a Board, a Councilwoman, or a friend, her name wasn’t what made her so similar to the child birthed from an undeserving weed. “Your Guardians, your family, deserve a heads up this time.”

Goodbyes are difficult by default. Selfish, selfless, everyone has good intentions. Vernon Milford. Henry Lau. Luna. Power hangs good Beings like a noose. In the relief between struggled breaths, we say goodbye to who we could become and embrace who we are. What we want now. 

Riding this morbid segue, what do you want tomorrow?

“I don’t know yet.”

So you’ve said for the past 10 years. I have a suggestion: share a cookie in the park. You might find something you didn’t know you where looking for. If I tell you the answer, you’ll regret it. Trust me. See the future as we may, there’s no predicting a Being’s possibilities. 

“Will you be there?”

“I’m staying here.”

Twelve Guardians turned at the statement. Twenty-four eyes studied her to her smallest pore. They were mere minutes from Sector E’s outer ring. News that the brush thinned out near the Capital’s southeastern gate passed through the crowd. Happy chatter and peaking sunlight masked the gravity of her suggestion. 

They spent twenty-three years waiting. Waiting for moments like these: briefly and breathtakingly unbelievable. They spent three years second-guessing every briefly and breathtakingly unbelievable moment. Right and wrong became indistinguishable. Tied into a Gordian knot she somehow knew the steps to undo.

Very little gave the same satisfaction as watching her work. The one thing that did was dinner. Sitting at a round table. Forgetting they were all threads in the great ropes of being. Insignificantly significant to her. 

But the 70th Seeress of Exo was staying here.

“Okay,” Kris said first. 

Suho said second, “Promise you’ll come back.”

“It’s time to head home, Daun.” Luna extends a hand towards the squatting girl. “Finish talking up the berry bush tomorrow.”

“What’s a Gordian knot, Aunt Luna?”

Luna thinks for a moment.

“I’m just another unlucky soul stuck in your orbit,” Luna mused as she navigated torso-high grass. 

“I’m sorry, did someone ask you to come along?” Victoria scoffed.

“And the streak of bad luck continues; I never did like your head-to-toe pomp, Vicky.”

Further bickering gave descending into the sink hole that was now Sector A a, unpomp, light-heartedness. Girl friends like these are hard to find at the end of the world. Promises? I’ve had a bad track record. Luna and Victoria followed me anyway. “Why” didn’t cross my mind. It didn’t cross theirs either.

Two hundred and two days, five hours, and thirty-nine minutes left. 

Cera said I accomplished in 163 days what she couldn’t in 69 lifetimes. She’s not found of giving answers, so I’ve only inklings as to the supposed “gold mine” I’m sitting on. They say some mysteries are best left unsolved — there’s an almost attractive ambiguity in this un-ness. What do you think?

I was nothing but uncertain when I lay in the middle of the Capital. Whispering secrets under the shade of the largest tree. Sleep lulled my exhaustion into a sweet respite. Berry bushes are therapeutic to we seeresses. 

Her debate for Beings took two days to settle. The Tree of Life withdrew its roots to Alberos, and the Sun didn’t rise for the month that followed. Exotians fleeing the Capital found homes in Flior and Dunai to weather the stormless nights. Nothing grew but a collective anticipation. They had gotten used to waiting; a few more days was worth the morning’s bright blue winter sky.

The Bloom Project’s growth was stunted temporarily. The 70th Seeress of Exo ruled from her green throne in the Capital. Surrounded by good intentions, she counted her seconds. Thirty days, two hours, and twelve minutes left, she set off to say a difficult set of goodbyes.

Maybe they’ll never understand her. 

“Well, what do you think?” Luna asks.

“I wouldn’t understand it tomorrow,” Daun says proudly from between buck teeth.

A/N: Two chapters and an epilogue left.