Maquia When The - Promised Flower Blooms -2018- B...

Then came the crimson dragon—the Renato—shattering the peace. Its roar tore the sky, and with it came the armored knights of Mezarte, desperate to capture the last of the ancient bloodlines. They wanted the Iorph’s immortality, their ageless bodies, to graft onto their dying king.

Maquia never approached. She only left small gifts on his doorstep: a blanket for the baby, a pair of gloves for Dita, and always, a single woven flower.

“You’re crying,” Maquia whispered, touching the tear on his cheek. She realized, with a strange pang, that she was crying too.

“For saying you were nothing.” A tear slid down his temple. “You were… everything.” Maquia When the Promised Flower Blooms -2018- B...

A lance of fire. A collapsing tower. Ariel, pinned beneath a beam, his leg shattered.

Maquia didn’t understand loneliness. Not yet.

“Stop treating me like a child,” he snapped, his voice cracking into a man’s baritone. He stood a head taller than her now. She still looked fifteen. “You’re not my real mother. You’re… you’re nothing .” Maquia never approached

“I will weave you into every cloth,” she promised. “Until the last thread snaps.”

She picked him up. “You are my Ariel ,” she said, the name coming from nowhere and everywhere. “You are my morning star.” Years bled like dye in water. Ariel grew. Maquia did not.

The sky above the Iorph village was a tapestry of endless, lazy clouds. Maquia, though seventy years old, still had the face of a girl. She sat by the loom, her fingers tracing the ancient threads of the Hibiol , the fabric that recorded the passage of human hearts. But her own cloth was empty. “You must not fall in love,” Elder Raline had warned, her voice as soft as falling snow. “It is the loneliness that will destroy you.” She realized, with a strange pang, that she was crying too

And for the first time in over a century, Maquia let herself weep. Not because she was immortal. But because she had finally learned what love truly cost—and found it worth every tear. The loom of Iorph weaves no lies. Only the truth of those we dared to hold.

Maquia stayed until his hand grew cold. Then she walked out into the meadow where the dandelions bloomed—the promised flowers that carried wishes to the sky. She blew on a seed head, watching the white fluff scatter.

Maquia fled. She didn’t remember running. She only remembered falling—tumbling through a roaring river, emerging in a forest thick with the smell of pine and mud. And there, in the hollow of a dead tree, she found him.

Maquia watched from the forest’s edge as Ariel became a soldier, then a captain, then a husband. She saw him marry a gentle woman named Dita, who laughed like a bell. She saw him hold his own daughter—a tiny, squalling thing with his fierce eyes.

She knelt beside him, taking his wrinkled hand in her smooth one. “For what?”