The wind carried a strange scent that morning.
It wasn't rot, nor sweetness, but something older—like dust from a sealed memory. Lyra paused halfway through her morning inspection of the flowering vines and tilted her head toward the sky. The clouds moved slower, dragged as if reluctant.
"It's happening again," she murmured.
Elliot looked up from the compost bin. "The dreams?"
"No. The remembering."
She walked to the edge of the garden where the moss path curved toward the hidden spring. For a moment, she simply stood there, eyes distant. Then she stepped off the path, her bare feet sinking gently into the soft ground. The plants did not recoil from her—they leaned in, brushing her calves like they recognized their own.
Elliot followed quietly, but didn't speak. He could tell this wasn't the kind of moment that needed his voice.
Lyra knelt by a flat, smooth stone beneath an old starlimb tree. She placed her hand against the bark and exhaled slowly. "This tree used to stand in another garden," she said softly. "A long time ago."
"You mean before Stillfall?"
She nodded. "Before even the fractures. I don't know how this one made it here. Maybe its seed drifted through the end of the world and found soil again."
The wind stirred again—colder now. The bark shimmered faintly where her palm touched it, and Elliot could see faint patterns etched into the wood. Not carved—grown. Glyphs in the shape of petals, spirals, tears.
Lyra's eyes flickered gold. "A season before the sky fell... there was music in the roots."
She closed her eyes.
And remembered.
The garden she saw was vast—much larger than the one they had now. But it was enclosed, not wild. Each section bloomed in harmony, maintained by caretakers who whispered to the soil and sang to the leaves.
She was one of them.
Not fully plant, not fully person. A hybrid born of bloom and intention. Her people were called Thalein, and they tended to the World Gardens—refuges of balance between civilization and nature.
But then the sky cracked.
It started with a shadow that moved unnaturally. A darkness that didn't devour light—it unwrote it. Lyra had seen flowers wither before their time, not from rot or frost, but from forgetting how to live.
The elders called it the Silence Before Roots. They said it was a curse born from those who mined too deep, who sought to bend the breath of the earth to their own will.
When the sky fell, it wasn't fire or stone—it was memory. A rain of broken thoughts, stripped from minds and falling like ash.
Lyra had been ordered to flee. Her form was too new, her bloom too young. She was sent to sleep beneath a root-chamber, encoded in seeds and dust, her memories sealed to protect her from the storm.
"I wasn't supposed to wake up," she whispered now, the memory fading but not gone. "Not until balance returned. But something called me early."
Elliot sat beside her, quietly. "The same something that brought me here, maybe."
She smiled faintly. "You dream loud. Maybe the garden heard you and pulled me from the seed vault."
She opened her hand, revealing a small shard of bark she had pulled from the tree. It pulsed faintly with warmth.
"This is a sigil of awakening," she said. "I think more are buried around us. Other memories. Other caretakers."
Elliot's brows furrowed. "Then we might not be alone in this."
Lyra nodded. "Not if the world wants to heal."
They sat in silence a while longer.
Above them, the clouds finally moved on. The sun peeked through, casting a pale golden light over the starlimb tree. The glyphs on its bark shimmered once, like sighing.
That evening, they marked the tree with a woven garland of dawngrass and dewpear leaves—a symbol of remembrance.
And for the first time in many nights, the garden dreamed peacefully.