Chapter 12: The Garden Beneath War – Where Flowers Bloom in Blood
Beneath the war-torn skies of Mirajh—the realm caught between the breath of giants and the whisper of old ghosts—there lived a myth no soldier dared speak aloud. They said that when the land bled enough to drown its own kings, when the thunder of steel no longer echoed above but below, then the Garden would awaken again.
Zayan stood atop the scorched ridge, where the wind carried the scent of iron, ash, and something older—something sweet, like a memory wrapped in myrrh. His armor, though light, bore scratches from unseen things. Not demons. Not jinn. But time itself, clawing at his soul through sleepless nights and visions he did not summon.
The valley below had once been called Al-Matar As-Sakin—The Silent Rain. But now, silence had become myth. Artillery had carved canyons through ancient vineyards, and only the bones of fruit trees remained, reaching upward like forgotten prayers.
Zayan was not alone.
Beside him stood Yurei, the Seer from the Wastes, draped in layered veils woven from obsidian thread and the silks of starlight spiders. Her eyes—when revealed—shifted like ink in water. She spoke in riddles, but tonight her voice was clear as wind over a grave.
"Beneath this war lies a womb," she said. "A place that remembers what men forget. This earth does not forget blood, Zayan. It gardens with it."
He knew this place had to be reached—not to find life, but to understand death. The Council of Ashes had pointed him here, and the Book of the Hollow Voice had left the final page blank, etched only with a single line:
"Where blood pools longest, the Garden shall open."
But how does one enter a place that does not exist in space, but in memory?
Yurei extended her hand. In it: a root, twisted and blackened like charcoal, but alive. It pulsed with a heartbeat.
"Plant it," she said. "And kneel."
The ground accepted the offering like a thirsty beast. The moment the root touched earth, the sky fractured. Clouds peeled back. Stars bent into spirals. And the ridge fell away—not crumbling, not disintegrating, but descending, as if the entire world had always rested on a hinge.
Zayan fell with it, the world tilting inward, gravity flipping like pages in a book too ancient to read.
He awoke in twilight.
Not night, not day. Just… dusk.
He stood now in a labyrinth of low stone walls covered in vines of impossible flowers—petals like stained glass, stalks like braided hair, thorns that hummed in forgotten tongues.
He had entered The Garden Beneath War.
Zayan stepped lightly between rows of monstrous flora, each bloom larger than a man's head, each exhaling a breath that smelled like memories—not his own, but of every soul who had once bled their regrets into the soil above.
The air shimmered, heavy not with heat, but with weight—the gravity of remembrance. In this strange Garden, time did not flow in straight rivers. It curled like smoke, folded in on itself like dying stars.
Ahead, a trail of petals—deep crimson and veined with gold—marked a path. Not a clear road, but a whisper. A beckoning.
Zayan placed a cautious hand on the nearest vine. Instantly, visions flooded him—too fast to name, too raw to ignore:
A young soldier weeping into his mother's wedding veil.
A king dying not on a throne, but cradled in the dirt by strangers.
A healer poisoning her own hands to end suffering she could not cure.
Each thorn on the vine was a memory, sharpened by time, softened by sorrow.
Yurei's voice echoed inside him, though she was nowhere visible:
"Here, sorrow is the soil. Pain is the water. Guilt is the sun."
He withdrew his hand, breathing heavily, sweat cold on his brow.
The Garden was not meant merely to be seen. It demanded participation.
He continued deeper, boots sinking slightly into blood-rich loam that gave way like old velvet. Strange creatures skittered at the edge of sight—half-formed things made of petals and bone. They did not attack. They simply watched, like memories that refused to be forgotten.
Finally, he came to the heart of the Garden: a clearing where a gnarled tree stood—its trunk pale as old bone, its branches hung heavy with what looked like fruit… but were not. They were hearts—still beating, still warm, still mourning.
Beneath the tree, arranged in a perfect circle, lay thirteen stones, each engraved with a sigil older than any known tongue. One stone, however, was broken, its rune cracked and bleeding black mist.
Something was wrong here.
The balance had been shattered.
A voice rose—not from a throat, but from the very roots beneath him:
"To heal the world, healer… you must first taste its oldest wound."
A low rumble vibrated the ground. The tree quivered, and from its hollow trunk a figure emerged.
It was not human. It was not jinn. It was Memory itself, stitched together from regrets and hopes, love and hatred, victories sung and losses wept into silence. Its face was a mirror, and in its reflection, Zayan saw every failure he had ever known.
Every patient he could not save.
Every friend lost to time and distance.
Every prayer answered with silence.
The creature approached, its mirrored face rippling with visions. When it spoke, it was not with one voice, but thousands—all whispering different regrets, yet harmonizing into one terrible music:
"You carry the seed of the world's healing… but also its final rot. Choose, Zayan: to prune the past, or to feed it. Both are acts of mercy. Both are acts of war."
Zayan dropped to his knees. His hands instinctively sought the satchel at his side—the one containing the Scroll of Soulweaving entrusted to him by the Skyborne Order. But the scroll burned against his skin, warning him: This choice must come from the marrow, not the mind.
He closed his eyes.
He inhaled the thick, sorrow-sweet air.
He let the memories flood him—not to drown, but to understand.
And then he spoke, not with pride, but with humility, voice cracking under the weight of ancient sorrow:
"I will prune, but I will not destroy. I will bleed, but I will not wither. I will remember, but I will not despair."
The mirrored figure shuddered—once, twice—then shattered into a thousand silver motes that danced upward like fireflies ascending into stars.
The broken stone at the tree's base pulsed, then sealed its wound. The black mist recoiled, sucked back into the earth. Balance, tentative and trembling, was restored.
The Garden around him shifted. Flowers once muted in mourning now flared with impossible color—violet suns, scarlet moons, rivers of golden sap running along petal-veined roots.
The Garden did not vanish.
It sang.
For the first time in millennia, the Garden of Blood had birthed Hope.
The Earth trembled beneath Zayan's feet as the ground began to shift, the once serene Garden now a battlefield. The petals that had once dripped with sorrow now seemed to hum with a strange and haunting energy—an energy that was not entirely peace, but the reverberations of a war still being fought.
The air grew thick. The garden, once a sanctuary for memory, began to stir with dark intentions. The sky above darkened as ancient shadows stretched long across the land, their tendrils whispering, curling into the underbrush, and out again. The song of life had become a distant murmur, drowned beneath the din of something far older.
Zayan looked around, his heart tightening as he felt the tension thickening like the storm clouds overhead. The war was not just of this world. It had spilled over from the fabric of time itself, from places deep within the earth—places where the dead still fought.
A voice, soft yet commanding, echoed across the garden, weaving through the whispering leaves and branches:
"You have freed the Garden. But you have not yet freed yourself, Zayan."
He turned, searching for the source of the voice, and there, emerging from the shadows, stood a figure garbed in ancient armor. His face was covered with a helm of dark iron, and his posture exuded the weight of centuries. He was not quite a man, not quite a ghost, but something in between—a soldier who had never put down his weapon, a warrior whose battle never ceased.
"Who are you?" Zayan asked, his voice tight, the words barely more than a breath of wind.
The figure raised his head slowly, revealing a face as old as the stones beneath their feet. His eyes glowed faintly with the same dark energy that coursed through the Garden.
"I am one who was lost before the dawn of your time. The memories of all warriors who died in vain have fused into me. We never rested, not even in death. The war… it continues in us, within the bones of the earth."
Zayan stepped back, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of his sword. The weight of the weapon comforted him, but it was a fleeting comfort. This was no battle fought with steel.
"The war has not ended," the warrior continued, his voice tinged with the bitterness of old wounds. "You cannot defeat what is already dead. You must understand it, Zayan, for it is your war now."
Zayan's mind reeled. Was this some kind of test? A trial to prove his worth? Or was this a darker force, one of ancient power, trying to pull him into its endless cycle of conflict?
"I don't understand," Zayan murmured, his brow furrowing. "The battle is over. The Garden is healed. Why does it still hurt?"
The warrior moved closer, his steps silent on the blood-washed soil. He reached out, laying a hand on Zayan's shoulder with surprising gentleness for such an ancient being.
"Because, healer, this world was built on battles. Every memory, every soul that comes to this Garden, brings with it the remnants of conflict. You have healed one small part, but this war is woven into the very fabric of the earth. You cannot fight it. You can only choose to remember it or let it continue its endless march."
The weight of the warrior's words settled over Zayan like the heavy sky. He realized then that the war was not just an ancient conflict between men or gods—it was something far older. It was a battle between light and shadow, between creation and destruction, between forgetting and remembering.
"But there is another choice," the warrior continued, his voice now more of a whisper, as though the air itself had become a delicate thing, fragile and prone to breaking. "You, Zayan, can break the cycle. You can lay down the sword of memory, cast away the chains of history. The garden can remain… peaceful."
Zayan's breath caught in his throat. A peaceful garden… He had always believed that healing came from peace. From making the world still, from quieting the storm inside. But peace, as he now realized, was not the absence of conflict—it was the courage to face it, to stand against the dark waters without losing oneself.
Zayan looked at the warrior, who had once been a soldier. The eyes behind the helm were filled with sorrow and a distant, hopeless yearning.
"Tell me," Zayan whispered. "How do I choose peace without destroying the memory?"
The warrior's form flickered, as though uncertain whether to respond. Then, in a voice that held the weight of untold histories, he said:
"You must wield the knife of mercy, Zayan, not as an executioner, but as a surgeon. You must extract the poison without severing the veins that connect it to the heart of this land. Heal the wound—but understand that it is a wound of the soul. It will always exist, and you must always choose to tend to it. You will have to choose peace every day."
Zayan closed his eyes, the warrior's words sinking deep into his soul. Every day. Was that what healing truly meant? Not an end, but a beginning—a daily choice to step into the garden of thorns, to tend to the roots of ancient pain without succumbing to it.
He looked down at the earth, feeling the pulse of the world beneath him. He could feel it now—the pulse of a living thing, thrumming with both the pain and joy of existence. The Garden had not been a place of healing alone. It was a place of growth—even through pain. Even through war.
The warrior's voice cut through the silence once more.
"Remember, healer: it is not enough to cleanse the world of its poison. You must also bear the burden of its presence. The war will never end, but you will learn to live with it. And in living, you will find the strength to heal those who come after you."
Zayan's chest tightened as he turned to face the warrior, finally understanding. The war was not something he could fix with a single touch of magic, nor could it be healed in one sweeping act. It was a constant companion, one he would face until his last breath. But in this understanding, he had also found a new strength—the strength to live with the scars, to continue healing, to walk with those who carried their own wounds.
The warrior stepped back, slowly fading into the mist that had begun to coil around them. His form grew dimmer, his voice softer, but still echoing in Zayan's mind.
"It is time for you to return, Zayan. Your journey has only just begun. The Garden will remain, but you must take what you've learned and walk forward. There are others waiting for you."
And as the warrior disappeared, the first rays of dawn broke through the clouds, casting light upon the blood-soaked soil of the Garden.