Garden IX

The silence did not scream.

It did not resist.

It did not shatter like it once might have—when stories pressed against it like waves trying to break a wall.

It did something far more unsettling.

It listened.

And when it listened, it changed.

Not all at once.

But like a mountain exhaling for the first time in centuries.

In the void beyond the Garden, where the last traces of the Erasure once lingered like dried ink, a shimmer stirred.

Not light.

Not shadow.

A resonance.

Faint. Incomplete.

As if the raw absence had finally heard something it could not ignore: a tone that made even emptiness wish it could reply.

Something had shifted in the way stories moved.

No longer linear. No longer monologic.

The Garden had become a call.

And now…

The other side of the silence was preparing an answer.