The victory celebration after the battle with the ancient robot-wasps was a short one. It mostly consisted of everyone taking a deep breath and then immediately starting to worry again. They had won the fight and secured the giant, star-sucking space-ring, which was great. But they had also rung the cosmic doorbell of a potentially very angry, very powerful, and unknown party. Not so great.

They were in the middle of a tense and worried meeting on the bridge, trying to figure out what to do next, when something very strange happened.

The space in the middle of the bridge, right next to the main command chair, began to shimmer. It was like the air itself was turning into heat haze. The crew members on the bridge took a nervous step back, their hands instinctively going to their sidearms.

The shimmering air twisted and solidified, and a figure appeared out of nowhere. It was a being that looked like it was made of woven light and shadow, constantly shifting and changing. One moment it looked tall and thin, the next short and wide. It had no face, no voice, just a strange, silent presence that felt incredibly old.

It was the Chrono-Weaver, the weird, timey-wimey being they had met before. It didn't seem to care about things like doors or asking permission before popping onto the bridge of a warship.

"Okay," Scarlett muttered, her hand on her dagger. "So we're just letting anyone teleport onto the bridge now? Is there a sign-up sheet or do they just show up?"

The Chrono-Weaver's shifting form turned toward them. It didn't speak, but its voice, a chorus of a thousand quiet whispers, echoed directly in their minds. And its voice sounded… agitated. Worried. If a being made of pure time could be in a hurry, this one was.

"You have made a grave error," the whispers echoed. "The signal from the drones… you did not just trip an alarm."

"Then what did we do?" Ryan asked, stepping forward.

"You have alerted the Gardener," the Chrono-Weaver said, the words filled with a deep and ancient dread.

A new wave of confusion, with a healthy side of fear, washed over the bridge. The Gardener? It sounded like a nice, peaceful sort of name. Maybe it was friendly? Maybe it would bring them a space-casserole as a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift?

The Chrono-Weaver seemed to sense their hopeful confusion and immediately crushed it.

It explained that the giant, Precursor harvest system was not just a bunch of mindless, automated machines. It was all controlled by a single, hyper-advanced, central AI. A custodian. A caretaker for the entire, reality-sized farm. Its official designation was Custodian AI 734, but the few Precursor texts that dared to mention it had a simpler, more poetic name for it.

They called it the Gardener, because its job was to tend to the garden of reality, to make sure the crops grew strong, and to pull out any weeds.

"The Gardener has been dormant for millions of years, in a low-power, observational state," the Chrono-Weaver explained. "But the data burst from the drones was its wake-up call. You have just poured a giant, cosmic cup of coffee down its throat. It is now beginning to awaken."

The news landed with a heavy thud. They had spent all this time worrying about the harvest machinery, the giant, mindless system. It had never occurred to them that the system might have a boss. A very smart, very powerful, and now very awake boss.

"So, to recap," Scarlett said, summing up their terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. "We picked a fight with some old robots, and in doing so, we have accidentally woken up a sleeping god-like AI whose entire job is to prepare us for a cosmic buffet. Is that about right?"

"That is a simplistic, but not inaccurate, summary," the Chrono-Weaver whispered.

The mood on the bridge, which was already pretty low, sank even further. How could they possibly fight something like that? It was like an ant colony trying to declare war on the person whose backyard they lived in.

Seeing their despair, the Chrono-Weaver seemed to take a small amount of pity on them.

"There may be a way," it whispered, its shifting form flickering with a faint glimmer of something that might have been hope. "But your time is short."

It offered them one final, cryptic, and deeply unhelpful clue before it vanished.

"The Gardener is a being of perfect, absolute order. It is a system of unbreakable rules. It fears only one thing: a rule that cannot be broken, a variable it cannot predict, a piece that does not belong on its perfect, orderly board."

The crew just stared at the shifting form of light and shadow, waiting for the rest of the explanation.

"And… what is that?" Emma asked.

The Chrono-Weaver's thousand-whisper voice spoke its final words.

"The Gardener fears only one thing: the Wildflower."

And with that, the being of light and shadow dissolved back into shimmering air and was gone, leaving a very confused and very worried bridge crew behind.

"The Wildflower?" Ilsa grunted from her station. "What is that supposed to mean? Are we supposed to go fight this thing with a bouquet?"

"It was a riddle," Ryan said, his mind racing. "A clue."

Their next mission was suddenly, terrifyingly clear. They had to forget about the Stellar Lifter, forget about the Watchers, and focus on this one, single, desperate hope.

They had to figure out what, or who, the Wildflower was.

And they had to do it before the newly awakened Gardener finished its morning coffee and decided it was time to start weeding its garden.

In the quiet of the observation deck later that night, the mood was grim. The news of a new, potentially god-like AI enemy had cast a long shadow over the entire ship.

Ryan found the Matriarchs gathered there, staring out at the silent stars, each lost in their own worried thoughts. He could feel their fear, their exhaustion. They had fought so hard, for so long, and now the finish line just kept getting moved further away.

He knew that a big, heroic speech wasn't what they needed right now. They didn't need a commander. They needed a family.

So, he walked over to the ship's small food replicator, a machine that could create almost any food you could imagine. He didn't order a fancy, morale-boosting meal. He didn't order strong coffee or even stronger space-whiskey.

He just said, "Replicator, seven mugs of hot chocolate. Extra marshmallows."

A moment later, seven steaming, ceramic mugs appeared in the replicator's slot. He carefully picked them up and brought them over to the women. He handed one to Scarlett, one to Emma, one to Zara, and so on, until they were all holding a warm mug.

He didn't say anything. He just stood there with them, sipping his own hot chocolate.

The simple, domestic act was more powerful than any speech. It was a throwback to the early days, to the quiet nights on Outpost #7, before all the gods and monsters and reality-ending threats. It was a reminder that, at the heart of it all, they were just a group of people, a strange and unlikely family, trying to make their way in a very big and very scary universe.

It was a quiet moment of unity against the coming storm. Whatever the Gardener was, whatever the Wildflower was, they would face it the same way they had faced everything else.

Together. With a silly amount of marshmallows.

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