The last thing Floresco remembered of Earth was the fire—crimson, furious, swallowing buildings, swallowing screams. It danced along the rooftops like a serpent of judgment. Somewhere amidst the chaos, his hands gripped another's—small, frail, trembling. A child, maybe six or seven. He didn't know her name. He hadn't known any of them, really. Not the mother clutching a half-burnt photo album. Not the boy with the bleeding temple. Not the old man who begged him not to leave, even as the air around them turned toxic with ash and metal and war.
He had been a bystander. A botanist. A lover of lilies and damp soil. He had never once fired a gun. And yet, that day, when the tanks rolled into the square and the buildings began to weep fire, he ran—not away, but toward the suffering.
He remembered shielding the girl as something above them screamed. A flash. A roar. Then—
Darkness.
---
He awoke beneath a sky without stars. A vast white desert stretched around him, grainy and cold. The moon hung in the air, pale and constant, too large, too wrong. His body was light—strangely light. When he looked down, he saw no flesh, no blood, only a spectral glow clinging to pale robes. On his chest bloomed the faint imprint of a hollow flower, five petals wide, pulsing softly with each breath.
He was not alive.
But he was not quite dead, either.
It took days to understand. Or hours. Time didn't seem to move here the way it did before. The desert was always night. The moon never shifted. Hunger gnawed at him, not for food, but for something... else. A hunger that frightened him.
And slowly, memories returned—not of Earth, but of Bleach, the show he'd half-watched in the haze of his overworked evenings. It had been background noise to his research papers, the shuffle of soil samples, the meticulous trimming of bonsai.
Hueco Mundo.
That's what this place was called, wasn't it? A land of monsters wearing masks. A place where spirits ate spirits, clawed and tore and devoured each other to grow stronger.
He hadn't gotten far in the series. Maybe a dozen episodes. He remembered a man named Ichigo, a girl with a ribbon, and a sandstorm of violent creatures. It had all seemed so distant then. Fictional. Meaningless.
Now it was his home.
---
He didn't know how he had become a Hollow. There had been no ceremony, no transformation he could remember. He simply *was*—a wraith-like thing with the faint trace of a mask forming across his jawline, not yet whole, not yet monstrous. His body bore flowers—hollow, ghostly vines and petals blooming from his back and arms like tattoos made of light. When he touched them, they shimmered.
He spent his first weeks hiding. He had no strength, no Cero, no Sonido. Just the clothes on his back, the flowers that pulsed with faint spiritual energy, and a knowledge of plants that, oddly enough, still lingered. He whispered to the strange flora that clung to the edges of the desert—gnarled thorn trees that grew from bones, vines that fed on the blood of lesser Hollows. He learned quickly that everything in Hueco Mundo either hunted or ran.
He ran.
He survived.
Some nights he sat in a crumbled tower of white stone, sketching flowers in the sand. He gave them names. Memory Lilies. Soul Orchids. Hollowbell.
It was almost peaceful.
Until the howls began.
---
The howls came with the wind—long, guttural cries that sent shivers through the bones of the desert. Floresco would bury himself beneath collapsed ruins, holding his breath, praying his faint spirit pressure wouldn't draw attention.
He was no warrior. He had no delusions of grandeur. His dream had once been to open a greenhouse in the mountains, far from cities and their smoke. He had wanted a quiet life. A life of nurturing, of soil and seed.
And now he lived in a world where life was devoured to grow.
Still... he didn't let go of himself.
He made a small garden in the dunes. Just a circle of etched symbols and carefully transplanted bone-vines. He whispered words to them—prayers to a universe that no longer listened.
"I won't become like them," he said one night. "Not even if it kills me."
The sands answered only with silence.
---
It happened on the thirteenth night of his third week.
The wind shifted. The ground trembled. The sky pulsed.
He stepped outside the ruins and stared upward, eyes wide.
Something was falling.
Not a star.
Not a stone.
Someone.
A figure blazing with barely-contained energy, trailing smoke and blood like a comet crashing through infinity.
He didn't know it then, but something had shifted. The stillness of the desert cracked. The hush before the storm was ending. From the sky, a soul was falling—not just through air, but through fate, through time, through silence. And from that fall, something would grow. The garden would awaken. The Espada would gather.
And it would all begin—not with a roar, but with the whisper of petals on ash.