Chapter 2 The Wardens Garden #2
"The Veil is a boundary, a living membrane that separates your world from this one.
It is not a wall. It breathes. It responds to emotion.
In most places, it is thick enough that nothing can pass through it without extraordinary effort.
But there are points where it has worn thin over centuries of concentrated emotional exchange.
Your town of Ashenmere sits near one of these Thinning Points, and the Twilight Woods where you were walking last night is the thinnest section of the Veil in your region.
" Sera listened. She set her hands flat on the surface of the shelf and leaned her weight against it, because her legs, for reasons she did not want to examine, were not entirely steady.
"You are telling me that I walked through a thin spot in an invisible barrier between worlds and ended up here because I picked a flower.
" "The flower is called a nightbloom. It is an Umbral plant that should not have been growing on your side of the Veil.
" Malakor paused, and something shifted in his eyes, a deepening of the amber light that she was beginning to recognize as a sign of heightened attention.
"The nightbloom is a lure, Seraphine. Someone placed it at that Thinning Point deliberately, cultivated it in soil treated with shadow essence to ensure it would bloom at the precise moment a Shadow-Touched being passed near enough to sense it.
" The word landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water.
"Shadow-Touched," she repeated. "You keep using words that sound very specific.
I am not Shadow-Touched. I am a botanist from Ashenmere.
" "You are a woman who perceived the nightbloom's call from a distance of several hundred yards, in complete darkness, through a forest she had been told not to enter. "
Malakor's voice did not change pitch or volume, but the words carried a weight that pressed against her like a physical force.
"You crossed the Veil without assistance, without preparation, and without the emotional destabilization that typically accompanies an unplanned crossing.
You are standing in the Silver Glade, the heart of the Umbral Realm, and the Garden has not rejected your presence.
The plants you passed on our walk here responded to you as they would respond to one of our own.
And when I told you the name of this place, you felt something.
I saw it." Sera's mouth opened, and then closed again.
She wanted to deny it. She wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that she was an ordinary woman with an ordinary life and an unusual talent for finding rare plants, and that the sense of belonging she had felt at the edge of the Silver Glade had been a trick of exhaustion and disorientation.
But the words would not come, because they would have been a lie, and lying to a man whose eyes glowed with internal light and who could apparently read the emotional weather of an entire realm felt like a singularly bad idea.
"What does Shadow-Touched mean?" she asked instead.
Malakor regarded her for a long moment, and she saw him make a decision, watched it happen in the subtle shift of his posture and the slight relaxation of the tension he carried in his shoulders, as though he were setting down a weight he had been holding for longer than he cared to admit.
"It means that you carry Umbral essence in your blood," he said.
"It means that somewhere in your lineage, a being from this realm crossed into yours and left a trace of themselves in your family line.
It means that the sensitivity you have always attributed to keen observation is not a skill but an inheritance.
And it means," he paused, and the amber light in his eyes dimmed slightly, taking on a quality she could only describe as somber, "that there is a prophecy about you.
Or rather, about someone like you." He said the word prophecy the way a soldier says the word ambush: flat, factual, stripped of romance or mystery, freighted only with the weight of consequence.
Sera stared at him. Her hands, still pressed flat against the shelf, had begun to tremble, a fine, barely perceptible vibration that she could feel but that she hoped he could not see.
"I do not want to be part of a prophecy," she said.
Her voice was quiet, but there was iron in it, the same iron that had kept her standing in the Twilight Woods when every instinct had screamed at her to run.
"I want to go home. I want to finish my specimen log.
I want to sit in Aldric's shop and drink his terrible tea and argue with him about whether the bioluminescent lichen is a new species or a mutation of an existing one.
I want to visit my mother's grave on Sunday and tell her that I found something extraordinary, even though she would not be able to hear me.
" She stopped. The words had come out faster than she intended, carrying more emotion than she usually permitted herself to express, and she was suddenly, acutely aware that she had just revealed more about herself to this stranger in a single breath than she had revealed to anyone in Ashenmere in years.
The fear was not that he would use the information against her.
The fear was that he had seen her, had glimpsed the woman behind the botanist's composure, and that the glimpse had been involuntary on her part and entirely received on his.
Malakor was silent for a long time. The light in the room shifted, the warm dawn tones giving way to something cooler and more silver, and Sera realized that the light in this realm responded to more than just the passage of time.
It responded to emotion. The room had cooled because she had spoken about her mother, and the shadow-plant walls had absorbed the chill of her grief and reflected it back at her in luminescent silver.
*** He took her into the gardens after that.
She did not ask him to, and he did not ask her if she wanted to go.
He simply turned and walked, and she followed, because what else was she going to do, and because the quarters that had seemed like a sanctuary an hour ago now felt like a cage, and she needed to move, to see, to occupy her mind with something other than the prophecy and her mother's grave and the impossible fact of her own blood.
The cultivated gardens of the Silver Glade were unlike anything Sera had ever imagined, and as a botanist who had spent her adult life studying the most unusual and poorly understood flora of the border regions, she had imagined a great deal.
The gardens were organized into terraced sections that descended from the central structures like the ribs of a vast, living organism, each terrace devoted to a different category of shadow-plant.
Malakor walked her through them without commentary, a silence that she recognized, from long experience with Aldric, as a deliberate pedagogical choice.
He was letting her observe before he explained, letting her form her own questions before he supplied answers, and the respect implicit in that approach, the assumption that she was capable of understanding what she saw without being told what to think about it, softened something in her chest that she had not realized was hard.
The first terrace was devoted to what Sera could only describe as sensory plants: species that produced light, sound, scent, or some combination of the three in response to the emotional resonance of their surroundings.
She stopped beside a low shrub whose leaves were the color of dark wine and whose edges emitted a faint, melodic hum that changed pitch depending on how close she stood.
When she reached out to touch a leaf, the hum deepened into something rich and resonant, and the leaf's surface warmed beneath her fingertip, and for a moment she felt a wash of contentment so pure and so unexpected that she pulled her hand back as though she had been burned.
"They respond to emotional resonance," Malakor said quietly.
He had stopped a few paces away, watching her with that assessing gaze she was beginning to recognize as his default mode of observation.
"Every being in this realm generates an emotional frequency that the plants can perceive.
They are not sentient in the way you understand sentience, but they are aware, in their own fashion, of the feelings of those around them.
" "That is impossible," Sera said automatically, and then stopped, because she was standing in a garden that grew from shadow in a realm where the sky was a canopy of bioluminescent fronds and the ground breathed like a sleeping animal, and the word impossible had lost whatever currency it had once held.