Bloom Valley

Wasteland that became a garden, and the place the world chose to build its memory.

What happened here

It is the Ashmark Plains. The archive had this entry starting at "the dead plains" without saying which, and the chain is three chapters long.

Ch. 92 has Nilah crossing empty grassland where wild Celosia grows. Ch. 93 has Polka rise out of it and drain everything for twenty miles, which is what makes it dead. Ch. 97 has her Soul Requiem put the drained life back, and the grass returns "in waves of green that spread to the horizon and beyond".

So the garden the world builds its memory in is the same field a technomancer killed, restored by the thing that killed him.

It bloomed six months before ch. 99, after "the song that shook the world" and "the blade that split the sky", when Nilah learned "that love could be a weapon stronger than any forged in flame or steel".

Pilgrims come from across the continent "to see where death itself had been conquered by collective hope".

What it looks like

Flowers in impossible colours, and the thing the whole war was fought against being simply ordinary:

Human children chased butterfly-winged sprites through meadows where minotaur calves grazed peacefully beside centaur foals. It was the world Icarus had dreamed of when he flew into the sun: a place where differences were celebrated rather than feared. (ch. 99)

What is built here

The Hall of Heroes, funded by donations from every town Nilah ever helped, dedicated on the summer solstice, with delegations arriving from places she has never visited and ships coming from across the sea.

The Council declares the dedication a continental holiday: Heroes' Day.

Open questions

• Where it is. The chapters do not place it on a map.
• What "the song that shook the world" was. Ch. 96 is titled "Melody Carried by the Winds" and ch. 97 "The World Remembers", and neither has been read back yet.