Rejected by the Alpha, Crowned by the Moon

I woke to the sound of names blooming.

Not words—the soft unfurling of petals that carried syllables in their veins. The spiral was gone. The Hollow, silent. In their place stretched a garden with no horizon, where memory had taken root and grown strange.

Flowers opened around me, each petal etched with names I'd spoken and names I'd swallowed. A rose that whispered "Mother" when the wind touched it. Vines that hummed half-remembered lullabies, their leaves shaped like the mouths that first sang them. The air tasted of earth and endings, of things buried but not dead.

I sat up slowly. My body felt different—not changed, but porous. Like soil that had learned to walk. When I pressed my palm to the ground, names echoed up through my bones: *Samuel-who-carved-wood. Aria-before-she-was-Aria. The-child-who-forgot-to-breathe.*

Some plants shouldn't have existed. A tree with bark like braided hair—not mine. A bush that bled silver sap, each drop a word in a language I'd never learned. This wasn't just my garden. Others had been here, or would be here, or were here in the space between was and wasn't.

I tried to speak my own name. To anchor myself with that simple truth.

My mouth opened. What came out was the color blue, the taste of rain, the sound of someone laughing three rooms away. Everything but the word "Aria." My tongue had forgotten its simplest duty, or maybe remembered too many others.

Movement in the peripheral. I turned to find... myself.

Not reflection. Not memory. A stem with my child-face, growing from earth that sparkled with ground bone. She—it—I—stood hip-high, swaying slightly as plants do. Her eyes tracked my movement, her small hands echoed my gestures a heartbeat behind.

An echo-stem. The me who hadn't survived something. Rejection? Birth? The first time I'd tried to speak and choked on my own potential? She smiled with lips that had never learned to lie.

"Are you real?" I asked, though the question felt backwards.

She tilted her head—I tilted mine—we tilted together. No answer. Just that patient plant-smile, waiting for sun that would never come because we were the sun and the soil and the space between.

I walked deeper into the garden, and she followed. Our footsteps made different sounds—mine like breathing, hers like roots through earth. Around us, the garden responded to our passing. Words we didn't speak took shape in the arrangement of leaves. Conversations we'd never have bloomed and died in the span of breath.

Then I saw the clearing.

A circle of bare earth, too perfect to be natural. In its center, a stone like a gravemarker, but smooth. Unnamed. Waiting.

I knew with the certainty of dreamers that this was where I was meant to be. Where something needed saying that my mouth couldn't shape. My hands moved without thought, began digging. The earth parted easily—eager, even. Like it had been waiting for me to bury something here.

A name rose in my throat. Important. Essential. Someone who'd mattered more than moonlight, more than power, more than the divine infection that had led me here. The shape of it filled my mouth like honey and broken glass.

But when I tried to speak it, my body rebelled.

I shook. Not from cold, but from knowing. The name was already in my mouth, and I hadn't invited it. It had always been there, waiting behind teeth and tongue, patient as seeds. But speaking it would make it real. Would make the loss real. Would admit that whoever this was—mother? lover? the man with golden eyes whose name tasted like pine smoke?—they were gone past reaching.

My throat closed. Tears that weren't tears ran down cheeks that might have been petals. The echo-stem child watched with eyes full of patient nothing.

I wanted to call for help. Wanted the children who'd walked their own spiral. Wanted anyone who remembered how to be singular, how to hurt without blooming, how to grieve without giving birth to gardens.

But I was alone. Had chosen alone. Had spoken myself into this strange paradise where memory grew wild and names took root in soil that used to be a woman.

So I did the only thing left.

I leaned down and breathed the name into the hole I'd dug. Not speaking—planting. Let it settle into earth like a secret, like a seed, like the last gift I could give to whoever they'd been. My hands covered it with dirt, patted it down gentle as tucking in a child.

Immediately, something sprouted.

Not much. Just a thin green shoot, delicate as baby's breath. No flowers yet. No revelation. Just potential, waiting in the dark for its season. For someone to come along and ask what grew here. For the right moment to bloom into memory made manifest.

The echo-stem child nodded approval. Her first independent gesture.

I sat back on my heels, hands dark with planting soil. Around us, the garden hummed with its strange life. Names bloomed and withered in cycles that had nothing to do with sun or season. Memory fruit ripened on branches that remembered being arms. Somewhere, a bird that had never been born sang a song about flying.

This was what I'd become. Not mother, not goddess, not even the mouth that speaks forgotten things. I was the ground where lost things grew. The earth that held what others couldn't carry.

"If I can't carry them in my body," I said to the echo-stem, to the garden, to the name I'd just planted, "I'll carry them in this dirt."

She smiled wider. Began to sink back into the earth she'd grown from, but slowly. Like she'd shown me what I needed to see and could rest now. As she descended, flowers bloomed along her form—tiny white things that smelled of childhood and choices unmade.

I stayed by the unmarked stone as evening came to the garden (or had it always been evening?). More names rose in my throat. More seeds to plant. A whole garden's worth of loss waiting to take root.

Tomorrow, I would plant them. Would breathe them into earth and watch them grow into whatever shapes memory took when it was freed from the cage of accurate recall. Would tend this garden of the forgotten with hands that barely remembered being hands.

But tonight, I just sat with the first sprout. Watched it sway in wind that carried the scent of a thousand untold stories. Wondered who would find it someday, this nameless grave in a garden outside time. If they'd know what grew here. If they'd understand.

Maybe some names don't return as people, but as places.

Maybe that was enough.

Maybe it had to be.

The sprout grew another inch while I watched, reaching for light that came from nowhere and everywhere. Reaching like hands that had learned to stay open, even in ending.

Especially then.