The train wound like a silver serpent through the fog-veiled countryside, cutting across valleys of grey and green, its low hum the only sign of life between one nowhere and the next. Aurelia Wren sat by the window, her reflection hovering ghostlike in the glass. She hadn't spoken in hours. Perhaps days.
Outside, the trees bent like mourners in prayer, cloaked in early autumn's damp breath. She traced a circle in the condensation on the windowpane, then another beneath it. Hourglasses. Always two.
The town sign passed in a blur: Whitchurst Hollow. No one left the train. No one got on. As it pulled away, Aurelia stepped into silence thick enough to drown in.
Her boots crunched against gravel as she walked the narrow lane that once led to Wrenmere House. No one had been here in years—not since the fire that had taken it all. The townspeople said the land was cursed. That grief had settled in the soil like ash. That whatever grew there wasn't meant to.
They weren't wrong.
The estate rose from the mist like a skeleton—walls split by ivy, windows blind and hollow, the blackened roof slouching inward. Nature had crept in like a quiet thief. Weeds blossomed through cracks in the flagstones. A sparrow burst from the chimney and disappeared into the overcast sky.
She stood at the iron gate. Rust bloomed along the bars like dried blood.
Aurelia hesitated.
She should not have come back.
But the letter had been written in her brother's hand.
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Inside, the air smelled of time and forgetting. She ran her fingers over a scorched banister, the charcoaled wood breaking off like petals. Footprints lay thick in the dust—hers, old and faint, leading away from the house. She followed them in reverse, out the back, past the fractured greenhouse, through a thicket of thorns that hadn't been there before.
She remembered this path.
But not the garden.
It appeared like a secret the earth had tried to bury—nestled in a hollow beneath a hill, where the mist refused to settle. A crumbling stone arch stood guard, half-swallowed by moss, with no sign or plaque, only a single engraved word:
Tempus.
Time.
Beyond the arch, the world shifted. The air grew warmer. Quieter. Unnatural.
Aurelia stepped into the Hourglass Garden.
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At first glance, it was like stepping into someone else's memory. The grass shimmered with dew that glowed faintly blue. Trees hung heavy with pale flowers that opened and closed like breathing lungs. At the center stood a massive, gnarled tree—its trunk twisted into the shape of an hourglass. Its roots writhed outward, disappearing beneath a shallow pond that mirrored the sky with perfect clarity.
She walked toward it, drawn like a tide to the moon.
Everything about this place felt...wrong. Not sinister, but displaced. Untethered. The birds sang in unfamiliar melodies. The wind didn't touch her skin. The sun cast no shadows.
And then she saw the bench.
Wooden. Weather-worn.
Empty—
No.
Not empty.
A single white rose lay across it, freshly cut, still dripping.
And beside it, a note.
"You've come back too late, Aurelia.
He's already gone.
But the garden still remembers.
—T."
Her breath caught. Her fingers trembled.
T.
Thorne.
She had buried him beneath a sycamore tree three years ago.
No one else had seen him fall. No one else had heard the scream.
It had taken her everything to forget the sound.
Now here he was—his name blooming like rot in a garden that shouldn't exist.
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The Gardener watched from a distance, quiet as shadow.
They wore no name, no face—only a veil of ivy and a robe of midnight green. Their presence felt like the hush before a storm. They leaned on a curved staff of bone and bark, and when they finally spoke, their voice was neither male nor female, but something ancient.
"You shouldn't be here," the Gardener murmured. "Not yet."
Aurelia turned. "Who are you?"
"One who tends. One who waits. One who remembers."
"What is this place?"
The Gardener stepped closer, roots shifting beneath their feet like sleeping snakes. "This is where time weeps for what was lost. This is the Hourglass Garden. Everything left behind finds its way here—eventually."
Aurelia's voice cracked. "Is he here?"
"That depends. Are you?"
She blinked. "What does that mean?"
But the Gardener was already walking away, robes trailing over the grass like smoke. "You'll understand, if you listen. But beware, Aurelia Wren. Not every second chance is a gift. Some are a debt."
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That night, she dreamed of the garden—but it was brighter, blooming with red flowers and laughter. Thorne stood beneath the hourglass tree, smiling like she remembered, holding out his hand.
When she woke, the rose from the bench lay on her pillow, and her hands smelled faintly of earth and memory.