I. A Story Beneath Her Skin.
The girl was ten when she first heard the garden whisper.
Not in words.
In feeling.
A shift in her stomach when she walked past the old ruin. A flicker at the edge of her eyes that made her stop mid-sentence, as if someone had gently tugged on her spine from the inside.
Her name was Junia.
She was quiet like her father, wild like her mother, and dreamt in black-and-white visions of people she couldn’t name: a boy born in bone, a girl wrapped in firelight, a house that bled from the mouth.
The elders called her odd.
But the roots called her home.
II. The Keeper and the White Tree.
Every spring, Junia visited the garden on her own. It had no gates, no signs. Only a sloping hill where grass never grew the same way twice, and in the center—one solitary white tree, tall and still.
They said the Keeper tended it. An old man with a book of blank pages and black rings around his eyes. They said he used to be mad, once. Or cursed.
But Junia didn’t believe that.
Because when she stepped beneath the branches… the tree purred.
Like it knew her.
Like it remembered.
III. The Thorn Whispers Begin.
It happened one night—storm-light flashing against the old glass of Junia’s attic window. She had fallen asleep tracing a line from her elbow to her wrist where she always felt the strange warmth bloom after visiting the hill.
And then, in her dream—
A voice.
Not frightening. Not sweet.
Just waiting.
“Do you know what grew us?” it whispered.
“Blood,” Junia replied, uncertain why.
“No,” it corrected. “Devotion.”
She awoke with her hand pressed to her chest and dirt beneath her nails.
The roses had begun blooming outside her window, though it was still winter.
IV. The House That Returned.
One morning, Junia followed the tree’s hum to a patch of earth beneath its roots—and there, she found something impossible.
A floorboard.
Weathered. Oak. Burned with a sigil she didn’t know how to read, but could feel.
She dug with her fingers until the nails bled. Until the soil loosened with grief.
And beneath, she uncovered a hollow door.
It creaked open into darkness that breathed.
Not down.
Not up.
But inward.
Like the land had folded around a secret that never wanted to be forgotten.
Inside waited a voice.
Hers.
“I’ve been waiting to become you.”
V. Who She Really Was?
Junia found a mirror inside the hollow chamber. Not reflective. It showed her other versions of herself:
A girl drowning in black petals
A woman walking into flame and emerging with silver eyes
A child who whispered to the wind and made it weep.
And above all, an inscription:
All gardens remember who fed them.
She wasn't just born near the old place.
She had bloomed from it.
The Keeper had lied.
There was no madman.
Only a father waiting for permission to believe his daughter had come home in pieces.
VI. Thorne’s Final Message.
Outside, the white tree cracked.
And the Keeper—older now, slower—approached with trembling hands. He placed a black-stained page in her palm.
“It’s time,” he said.
It was blank.
Until her tears hit it.
Then words unfurled like vines:
Junia—
You are the last of us.
Not because you end the story, but because you begin it correctly.
Without chains.
Without fear.
You are not cursed.
You are the answer to a question we didn’t know how to ask.
When they speak of me, let them forget.
But when they ask about you—
Tell them the garden once loved a girl so much
It made her a god.
VII. The Thorn That Wears Her Name.
They say the ruins are quiet now.
But sometimes, in early dusk, you can see a girl with her hands in the earth, singing lullabies with no melody.
And around her, the white tree leans.
Not toward the sun.
But toward her heart.
Because some curses don’t devour.
Some plant.
And when the time is right, they bloom in someone brave enough to answer back.
Junia smiled then.
And the garden exhaled her name.
Once.
Then again.
Then forever.
Write a comment ...