Chapter 615: The Garden That Rembered Before It Happened
A month later, Sophia learned how to forget on purpose.
It was not the gentle kind of forgetting that ca with sleep or distraction.
But the kind that required effort—quiet repetition, deliberate burial, like placing stones over sothing still breathing beneath the ground until even the mory stopped struggling.
She did not think of the people anymore.
Not the screams.
Not the blood.
Not the way her mother’s presence had filled the room afterward. The thoughts didn’t co anymore after one month. It didn’t hurt her anymore, and it was like she never t them.
What remained instead was simpler and safer.
Her mother’s voice.
Her mother’s approval.
Her mother’s correction.
And above all else—the colour of her mother’s hair.
It was black and perfect.
A standard Sophia quietly began to asure herself against.
Her own hair remained a problem that refused to obey.
No matter what the hairdressers tried, no matter how many oils, dyes, or careful hands worked through it, the result never settled.
The black would not hold.
The white refused to disappear.
It was as if her body had decided on its own argunt and would not be convinced otherwise.
After each attempt, Sophia would sit still in front of the mirror while strands fell over her shoulders in uneven contrast—black interrupted by pale streaks that looked almost like light trapped inside her.
The hairdressers would bow their heads, apologize to her mother, and then try again and again and again, and her mother would simply watch them try.
And each ti the hairdressers failed, she would remove them. She would make sure they never visited again.
And then she would tell Sophia she was doing all this because of Sophia, because she loved Sophia, and that Sophia’s hair colour was ugly and didn’t suit her.
It didn’t take long for Sophia to start believing those words as well.
By the ti a year and a half passed, Sophia had grown quieter in ways even she did not notice.
She still spoke when spoken to.
Still answered correctly.
Still smiled when required.
But sothing inside her had learned to pause before wanting anything too strongly.
Even curiosity had begun to feel like sothing she should ask permission for.
Still, it did not disappear entirely.
It only changed shape.
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It began again with a vision.
At first, she thought it was nothing unusual.
She had grown used to fragnts—flashes of faces, half-ford events, impressions that arrived without invitation and left without explanation.
But this one was different.
She saw a boy.
The vision was a sequence.
The boy was a child first. He moved through her mother’s garden with his friends, each in separate directions as they searched desperately for sothing.
He looked to be around two or perhaps three years older than her. He looked up, and Sophia was struck by how beautiful his eyes were.
Beautiful hazel eyes.
Beautiful in a way that felt almost wrong in its clarity—gold flecks caught inside them like sothing deliberately placed there.
Sophia saw as the boy gathered various plants along with his friends, and they sneaked out of the garden.
The vision changed, and she saw the boy again, standing sowhere unfamiliar, surrounded by chaos she could not fully understand. His hands were small, his eyes too wide for what he was seeing.
He was sobbing.
Bodies lay around him in the vision.
She did not understand who they were.
Only that they mattered to him.
The vision fractured again.
And she saw the boy, but he was older now. He was a guard and wore a uniform with an emblem on it.
He stood over the garden with sothing like hatred in his expression. And then he lit the garden on fire as he laughed, tears pouring down his face.
And then he stopped crying as he walked away from the burning garden.
The vision shifted again. This ti the boy was bound, and her mother stood watching him with disgust on her face.
And Sophia understood, without knowing how she understood, that he would die here. And he did. She did not know how, but she saw him in a cell, the life out of his eyes, those eyes filled with life now looking empty.
The vision ended.
But sothing remained behind it. Sophia felt a pull toward the boy. She did not know why, but she wanted to help him. The garden he had burned had a specific plant—one he had taken when he was younger—and she was almost certain that that was what he had been looking for when he was younger. And she was going to help him.
She did not tell her mother the vision. It was sothing she didn’t feel the need to tell her mother about. This vision felt too precise for her to tell her mother about.
Her mother would not approve of her going out alone. But she didn’t care. She wanted to help the boy, and so she snuck out because she knew he was coming with his friends.
The garden was easier to reach than she expected.
Or perhaps she had simply beco better at understanding the patterns of the household.
When people moved.
When doors remained unguarded.
When silence beca an opening instead of a barrier.
The air outside was different.
The garden was beautiful, extrely so.
Rows of carefully maintained plants stretched across the soil, each one marked by order and precision.
And then she saw him.
A boy moving exactly as she had seen in her vision. He had the sa eyes and looked exactly the sa.
He was searching through the garden, unaware of Sophia’s presence.
Sophia stopped.
Her breath did sothing strange in her chest—like it forgot its rhythm for a mont before rembering again.
She should have simply approached him.
Given him the plant and then left, that was what she had planned to do at first, but that wasn’t what happened.
He tripped unexpectedly, and she couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her.
She clapped a hand over her mouth imdiately, as if that could pull the sound back in.
But it was too late.
He had heard her. And so she gave up pretending not to know he was there and extended a hand to help him stand up.
And that was the mont their first official eting began.
She was four years old.
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