Story 1067: Queen of the Rotflowers

They say the garden grew overnight.

Where once stood barren ash and splintered bones outside the corpse-pit of Vire Hollow, now bloomed a thicket of crimson and black flora—Rotflowers, they were called. Their petals pulsed like wounds, their stems twitched with sinew, and their scent was the perfume of decay.

And in the garden’s center stood her.

A skeletal figure wreathed in thorns and mold, flesh wrapped in vine-silk and spores, a crown of dead blossoms blooming from her tangled hair.

She was the Queen of the Rotflowers, and she was waking.

The locals believed she was born from a witch burned wrong, her ashes sown into cursed ground soaked in plagueblood. They warned never to walk barefoot near the rotfield, never to speak the name Eiria, and never, under any circumstance, to pick the flowers.

But when winter came late and the dead wouldn’t stay buried, a foolish gravedigger named Cal Rowan did exactly that.