Chapter 6 #2
Out of habit, my gaze drifted over him, tracing the line of his sleeve, the shape of his hands, the tilt of his posture—searching, as always, for the fragments a person carried, clues they didn’t know they wore.
I was tempted to reach out and allow my powers to explore these stories…but I didn’t dare reveal my magic. Not to mention I had no reason to want to learn more about a man who would vanish the moment I awoke.
Then again, this was only a dream—a world of flickering shadows and possibilities, where mistakes didn’t bear the same consequences as the real world. I didn’t touch him, but reached out with my senses curiously, drawing back hastily as he met my eyes.
“Whoever I am doesn’t change the fact that I reside within this garden as its tender.” As he spoke he traced the curve of a rose petal—gaze reverent, his movements slow and deliberate, almost hypnotic. “I take it you have no trouble remembering your own identity?”
I proudly lifted my chin. “I’m a thief.”
“A thief?”
Instead of reacting with wariness as many did when learning my profession, he only looked puzzled, his brow lifted in mild skepticism. “You claim this is a dream, yet you choose that as your role? I thought dreams allowed us to be whatever we wished.”
“The choice has always been mine since the day I made it.”
The memory of that moment tugged at the edges of my mind, an unwanted recollection I had buried with painstaking care. I’d discarded every token that might recall it, desperate not to relive what my magic might unearth with a careless touch.
The way his eyes lingered on mine made me uneasy, as if he could see the vulnerability I’d worked so hard to conceal. “That explains how you came here.” His gaze flickered to the high wall of brambles that enclosed the garden, thorny and impassable. “I doubt even thorns would stop a thief.”
“Nothing can stop me.” While this resolve was true, for once the words felt like a lie. In every previous exploit, locked doors and high walls served only as obstacles to overcome rather than a hindrance to whatever path I was determined to forge.
But I hadn’t scaled any walls or picked a lock to get here; I had simply appeared through no volition of my own…
and that unsettled me. I slowly looked around again, taking in every rose and bramble.
I was certain I’d never dreamt of such a place before, yet it contained an air of familiarity, similar to a memory I’d visited that wasn’t my own.
When my gaze returned to the stranger, I found him studying me again. “You appear disturbed. Did you not climb the wall?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Interesting.” His tone was musing. “That makes your presence here all the more peculiar, especially considering there’s nothing worth stealing.”
“Perhaps at first glance,” I said, stepping past him and letting my gaze drift over the tangle of briars. “But a well-trained thief finds value in the most unexpected.”
I should have left the conversation at this natural conclusion, but I didn’t seem to be showing any sign of waking. After the adrenaline-filled dreams I was accustomed to keeping me entertained throughout an otherwise uneventful night, being confined to a single setting was proving rather dull.
I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to wake. In ordinary dreams, that was usually enough—disinterest alone could unravel the illusion and draw me back to the waking world. But this time…nothing happened.
I opened my eyes. The garden remained. The scent of roses still hung thick in the air, almost cloying now, the man watching me as before. The light dimmed by a fraction, shadows drawing closer at the edges of the thorns, as though the moment I tried to leave, the dream had noticed…and responded.
I tried again, reaching for that invisible thread that usually tugged me back to consciousness. But it wasn’t there. How curious.
I sighed. Nothing to do but await for the unfolding dream to play out. Perhaps I could at least use the time profitably; my dreams were always creations of my subconscious, so perhaps I could find a clue for escaping not only this mysterious garden but the tower prison where my body slept.
Whether this was a dream or an extension of the real world, I searched the same way I navigated any other place in preparation for a heist. I didn’t know what I hoped to find—proof this was a dream, a way out, a reason for why I’d been drawn here at all.
The stranger cocked his head curiously as I began to explore, offering neither guidance nor remonstrance.
He simply watched as I prowled along the edge of the path, then moved after me—whether for companionship or mere curiosity I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t need to concern myself with the motives of fictional dream-characters.
With the brambles creating a lattice similar to ivy over the hedges, there was no way to climb over and investigate another corner of this dreamscape.
As if the surreal environment had sensed my unspoken desires to explore, the landscape suddenly shifted, almost imperceptibly.
Behind the nameless stranger, a thorny hedge seemed to draw back slightly, revealing a glimpse of path that hadn’t been there before.
A breeze stirred the thorns, and for a moment I could’ve sworn they whispered.
The garden appeared small at first glance, but it seemed to have no end, turns and bends unfolding as I walked deeper into the labyrinth of thorn-laced arches and pale buds that never seemed to open, drawn to something just out of sight—a glimmer that, from a distance, almost appeared like a shape of memory.
My senses tingled and I began to walk more quickly. I told myself I was only passing the time in this strange dream until I woke. But the longer I wandered, the more I felt as if something in this garden was calling to me, waiting and watching.
He followed silently. I could sense him behind me, hear the faint shuffle of his cloak brushing the path as he matched my pace, though he stayed a few steps back. “Do you always study gardens this intently?” he asked.
“Only the ones that feel like they’re hiding something.” The fact that a figment of my own imagination desired to conceal something from me was just the sort of mystery that would pass the time until I finally awoke.
I turned down a path that shimmered oddly in the light, colors bending in the corners of my eyes. Somewhere ahead, a flicker of red bloomed like a heartbeat. I was no longer sure if I wanted to wake up—or if I was meant to find something first.
The thorns reached higher than I could see, their shadows pooling unnaturally where light should have fallen. Rather than the sun warming the garden, there was only a soft golden glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, like candlelight trapped inside a dream.
My footsteps left no trace; each step felt strangely weightless as they brushed the mossy cobblestones without a sound. Yet the petals I brushed with my fingertips trembled, as if responding to my presence.
Behind me, the soft footsteps followed, a quiet guide in this strange realm. Silence stretched between us, as if the garden itself were holding its breath, waiting for something to happen…or for someone to find the right key.
I paused at a crossroads, waiting for the next breadcrumb to guide me to my unknown destination.
As if in response, something tugged at the edge of my senses—faint as a whisper, warm as a half-remembered name.
I followed it without knowing why, answering the same siren’s call I did for the secrets I made it my living to acquire.
I paused at a rose caught mid-bloom, its edges silvered as though kissed by frost, though the air felt more like a summer evening than the bite of winter.
Curious, I leaned closer. Inside the petals, nestled like a secret, was a glimmer of a memory, beckoning my touch that would unfold its contents.
My fingertips caressed it, but it seemed to withdraw, as if afraid to reveal the story it harbored. I frowned. That had never happened before, further confirmation that however real this place felt, I was no longer in the waking world.
“There’s something strange about this place,” I murmured, more to myself than to him. “It feels like a forgotten memory. This place…it isn’t just a dream, is it?”
My companion didn’t answer. I turned to find him watching me—not with suspicion, but something quieter, almost wondering, as if not quite sure what to make of my presence.
“Does it feel like one to you, or do you only wish it were?” He tilted his head. “Why are you studying a rose that hasn’t yet bloomed?”
“There’s something hidden here.”
His gaze settled on the rose he’d been tending and his expression softened, touched with something like reverence. I recognized that look—it was the same one I wore when I brushed against an object full of stories, of secrets only I could hear.
He turned and knelt beside the thorned bush growing wild and misshapen from cracked stone.
Its gnarled, ancient branches twisted in unnatural shapes, the withered blooms choked with brambles.
Some of its blooms had withered entirely; others clung on stubbornly, half-open, curling brown at the edges.
He moved carefully, like someone tending a wound, not pruning so much as comforting. “I don’t know why I keep doing this,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “It always looks the same. No matter how much care I give it, it never fully blooms.”
I stepped closer, eyes drawn to the single blossom that had defied the rest. Blood red, its petals perfectly symmetrical.
A vision of beauty in full bloom that clung to life amid the thorns.
I reached out, letting my fingers trail along the curve of the rose—drawn not just by curiosity, but by something deeper. Recognition.
Its velvety petals unfurled just slightly beneath my touch, as if listening. The moment my fingertips brushed the bloom, the air shifted. Not the way it usually did when I touched an object—no familiar tug of memory pulling me into its story—but something stranger.
It wasn’t a vision, not quite. More like a breath shared between worlds—an echo of emotion that belonged to neither of us…and yet somehow to both. A flicker of warmth pulsed through my chest, faint as the last ember in a dying fire as fragmented images played across my mind.
A silhouette framed by thorns. A hand reaching through darkness, searching. A whispered name that vanished before I could hear it. Two figures passing each other like ghosts, always turning a heartbeat too late. A rose blooming out of season, its petals falling upward instead of down.
The sensation vanished like mist scattered by wind. I gasped and jerked my hand back.
My companion turned sharply towards me. “What did you do?”
It took a moment to push through the haze left behind by the incomplete memory enough for his words to settle over me. “Did you see—?”
He hesitated before slowly nodding. My breath caught, but I had no response. The memories and secrets my powers revealed had always belonged to me alone.
He turned his stunned expression to the rose, as though seeing it for the first time. “I’ve tended to these flowers every day. Nothing ever happens.” His gaze snapped to mine, intense and searching. “Who are you?”
I opened my mouth to lie, but though I was a master weaver of deceit, none were forthcoming.
Suddenly, the rose beside us shuddered. One dying bloom drooped toward me, its color leached to near-grey, as if the vision extracted from it had robbed it of its color. A horrified gasp escaped the man’s mouth, and he turned accusing eyes on me, more emotion than I’d seen from him so far.
Years of taking the objects whose history interested me compelled me to move without thinking. Dream or not, I was unsatisfied with the incomplete story the rose had shown me, and was desperate to explore it further.
In one quick movement, I reached out and gently plucked it. He lurched forward. “Don’t—” But it was too late.
The moment the stem left the branch, the withered petals stirred. Color bled back into them—first a blush, then a deep, velvety red. The bloom opened fully in my palm, beautiful and impossibly alive.
His breath caught. “How…?”
But before either of us could speak further, the garden suddenly pulsed. A tremor rippled through the thorned vines, the wind rising in a sudden, unnatural gust.
A deep pull tugged, and the world around me began to blur. Petals tore free from their stems and spiraled upward in a soft, frantic whirlwind, lifting around us. The man’s voice cut through the dream-thick air, but it was already fading, the shadows swallowing the sound.
My hand closed around the flower’s velvety petals as the garden dissolved under my feet, brambles and roses all collapsing into pale mist as my consciousness gradually faded.