The Bloom of Silence - 24" x30" Mixed Media on Canvas

The world had forgotten how to listen.

Wars were no longer fought with weapons—but with noise.

Endless, blaring, manufactured noise: headlines, algorithms, sirens of synthetic urgency. Words lost meaning. Beauty became blur. People stopped hearing each other. They stopped hearing themselves.

But deep within the Threshold Lands—where the edges of time burned red and memory cooled blue—Selira stood, silent. Her face carried the storm of two worlds, her expression carved from shadow and fire. She had returned from the Veilline, the ancient path of stillness and transformation, not with swords or speeches—but with a single rose.

No one knew where the rose had come from. It had never been seen before, nor had it bloomed since. Painted in tones that echoed her own duality, the rose shimmered with both decay and rebirth. And inscribed gently across its open petals, in veins of color that only revealed themselves in light, was one word: "Swift."

Some believed it was a warning. Others, a name. But Selira never said.

She simply walked through city after city, holding the rose, never speaking, her presence alone enough to hush crowds, calm riots, and stop bullets mid-flight. She became a myth—a mirror. In her presence, people heard their own truths. Some wept. Some ran.

A few stayed long enough to bloom again themselves.

And still, Selira walks.

Where silence is needed, where truth is buried beneath too much sound, she appears—half light, half flame—with the rose of contradiction, healing the world not with answers, but with quiet.