The sun rose soft and amber over the edge of the garden, light catching in the dew-speckled leaves like threads of gold woven into green. The old birch by the stream was the first to stir, creaking slightly as if waking from a long, still sleep. But this morning was not like others. Lyra stood by the edge of the garden, her back to Elliot, unmoving, silent, as if listening to something he could not hear.
"It's happening again," she said quietly.
Elliot, kneeling by the rows of softroot beans, looked up. "What do you mean?"
Lyra didn't turn around. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, and her fingers twitched with an almost imperceptible rhythm. From the nape of her neck, vines were slowly forming—thin, silver-veined tendrils that looked like trailing roots, weaving themselves down past her shoulder blades.
"The pattern's returning," she whispered. "I saw it in my dreams last night. This growth—it's not mine. It's... older."
Elliot stood slowly, brushing soil from his hands. He walked toward her carefully, stopping just a step behind. "Does it hurt?"
"Not exactly." Lyra finally turned, and for the first time, Elliot saw the shift clearly. Her eyes shimmered more green than gold now, and her skin bore faint glyph-like markings that pulsed beneath the surface like sap moving through bark.
They'd talked before about her changes—small things: a leaf-like texture to her fingertips, moments of stillness that seemed unnatural. But this, this was different. Something old had been stirred. And with it, a memory neither of them had known was there.
"I think," Lyra said slowly, as if picking her words from the wind, "my body remembers a time before Stillfall. Before everything changed."
A silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft rustle of the wind.
Elliot looked toward the outer edge of the garden, where the old hedgerow twisted inwards like a question with no answer. "We've found things here... fragments, memories in soil, ruins beneath roots. Maybe this change in you is part of that. The land remembering."
Lyra nodded, eyes distant. Then, suddenly, she flinched. Her right hand rose sharply, pressed to her temple.
"Something's growing inside me," she said, voice strained. "Not just plants. Visions. Memories. And they're not mine."
Elliot led her to the small stone bench they had placed beneath the moonleaf tree last summer. The leaves hummed softly in the breeze, a calming presence. As Lyra sat, he pulled a blanket over her shoulders.
"Tell me what you saw."
She closed her eyes.
"A field of stalks taller than houses. Trees whose roots reached across rivers. People made of bark and breath. And a great tree—its heart hollowed by time, but still alive, beating like a drum. I think… I came from that place. Or was born from its echo."
A chill crept along Elliot's spine. "You don't think that tree still exists somewhere?"
"Maybe not as it was. But its memory lives here. In this land. And maybe in me."
That night, Lyra didn't sleep. She walked the garden's edge under the light of firefruit lanterns. Elliot watched her from the window, heart tight with worry. He could see the glow from her fingertips now—green, luminous, with patterns forming like rings of age in old wood.
And as the wind passed through the garden, it whispered her name.
The garden was changing again. And this time, it began with her.