The black flower bloomed under the protective shroud of dawn, its petals splayed wide like a warning. It didn't sway in the wind like the others. It pulsed—gently, deliberately—like something alive beneath its roots was breathing with it.
Sera stared at it for a long time, unmoving.
Something about the flower felt wrong.
Not in the way weeds were wrong. But deeper—like this bloom was born of something unspoken, festering just beneath the surface. The opposite of memory. The opposite of Celeste.
"This isn't one of hers," she said.
Lina stood beside her, arms crossed tightly. "No. But it knows her."
They didn't touch it. Not yet.
Instead, they watched.
By noon, the petals began to weep.
A sticky, amber substance dripped from its center and sank into the soil, causing the earth around it to darken, crack, and spread in a slow, widening ring.
Nothing grew near it.
Not even the hardiest moss.
Lina knelt beside the ring, sniffing the sap on a nearby rock. "This isn't sap. It smells… like oil. Or blood."
Sera's mouth was dry. "I think it's both."
And then the vines started dying.
Not the Whispering Vine, or the Heartroot's offshoots—but the ordinary ones. The herbs. The seedlings. The marigolds Mira had planted years ago. Their color faded to grey by sundown. Their stems snapped at a touch.
The garden was going quiet again—but this time, it wasn't silence.
It was fear.
That night, Sera dreamed again.
But it wasn't Celeste who came.
It was the other one—the one who fed on rot.
In the dream, she stood in the same stone chamber, except the circle of pendants had shattered, and the vines were dead. One woman remained in the center. She was tall, cloaked in black petals, and her eyes glowed with a dull red fire.
She smiled at Sera with teeth like thorns.
"You woke her," she said.
"You woke me."
Sera tried to speak, but no sound left her lips.
"You want memory?" the woman whispered, stepping closer. "Then take all of it. The pain. The betrayal. The rot. You think Celeste was the first? She was just another girl trying to rewrite the garden."
She bent low, her lips brushing Sera's ear.
"Truth isn't what flowers tell you. It's what they suppress."
When Sera awoke, she was screaming.
They called it the Rotflower.
And it didn't stop spreading.
By morning, another had bloomed—on the edge of town, beside the statue of Mayor Harthmore's great-grandfather. The same man who had written the first ordinance against "unnatural gardens."
By noon, five more bloomed along Main Street.
Each one left a circle of death around it.
Each one seemed to listen when people spoke.
They became watchers.
And then they started whispering.
Not everyone heard it.
But the sensitives did—the children, the artists, the dreamers.
"I heard her," one little girl told her mother, pointing at the flower. "She said to dig up the bones."
Sera returned to the stone chamber that night.
The pendants still floated above the circle, but they were dimmer now. Fading.
She touched her own pendant and whispered, "What's happening?"
A flicker of light answered.
A memory—not Celeste's this time, but Mira's.
It showed the day she closed the greenhouse for good.
She knelt beside the original bloom and wept, not for Celeste, but for the others.
"I tried to stop her," Mira whispered in the memory. "But you can't unroot something that wants to feed."
And there, standing just behind her, cloaked in shadow—was the woman from Sera's dream.
Watching.
Smiling.
Feeding.
Lina slammed the journal shut the next morning.
"This isn't just about memory," she said. "This is about what they buried. What they tried to kill."
Sera nodded. "And what grew back with teeth."
They sat together in the greenhouse as vines curled faintly beneath their feet.
"I think Celeste knew," Sera said. "That waking her memory would wake everything else, too. The rot, the pain, the history they tried to erase."
Lina touched her arm. "Then we don't just tell the town the story. We show them."
Sera frowned. "What do you mean?"
"An exhibition," Lina said, eyes alight. "In the community hall. We tell it all—Celeste, the blooms, the whispering vine. We name the rot."
"But they'll come for us," Sera whispered. "You saw the men in suits. The letters. The threats."
"I'm not afraid anymore," Lina said. "And you shouldn't be either."
Sera swallowed hard.
Then nodded.
The exhibition opened three days later.
They called it: The Garden Beneath Us
Hundreds came.
Curious. Skeptical. Angry.
The walls were lined with photos of the blooms, sketches of the glyphs, and entries from Celeste's journal. In the center, beneath a glass dome, lay the Whispering Vine's first petal—preserved in soft light.
And beside it, a map.
A map of Elowen Ridge with tiny, glowing pins where every black flower had bloomed.
By the end of the week, there were seventeen pins.
And they were spreading.
Fast.
Mayor Harthmore visited the exhibit on the fourth day.
He didn't speak to anyone.
But when he stopped in front of the map, his face went pale.
"I buried it," he said aloud, not realizing he'd spoken. "It should've stayed buried."
Sera turned to him slowly. "What did you bury?"
His hands trembled.
"My grandmother warned me… She said the roots go back centuries. That if they were ever watered again, they'd remember the fire. The screams."
He turned to Sera.
"You don't know what you've done."
"I do," she said. "I've told the truth."
The Mayor left without another word.
That night, Lina found Sera standing in the garden, facing the first Rotflower.
"It's listening," Sera said.
Lina stepped beside her. "What's it saying?"
Sera looked at her. "That the truth isn't enough."
Lina frowned. "What do you mean?"
"We need to act."