Chapter 616: The Garden That Remembered Before It Happened

Chapter 615: The Garden That Remembered Before It Happened

A month later, Sophia learned how to forget on purpose.

It was not the gentle kind of forgetting that came with sleep or distraction.

But the kind that required effort—quiet repetition, deliberate burial, like placing stones over something still breathing beneath the ground until even the memory 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 come anymore after one month. It didn’t hurt her anymore, and it was like she never met 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 measure 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 argument 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 time 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 time 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 something inside her had learned to pause before wanting anything too strongly.

Even curiosity had begun to feel like something 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 fragments—flashes of faces, half-formed 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 something.

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 something 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 somewhere 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 something 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 time 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 something 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 something 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 become better at understanding the patterns of the household.

When people moved.

When doors remained unguarded.

When silence became an opening instead of a barrier.

The air outside was different.

The garden was beautiful, extremely 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 same eyes and looked exactly the same.

He was searching through the garden, unaware of Sophia’s presence.

Sophia stopped.

Her breath did something strange in her chest—like it forgot its rhythm for a moment before remembering 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 immediately, 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 moment their first official meeting began.

She was four years old.