Corollary

Aftermath + 1

I needed to move. Thinking about Nan in this place wasn’t going to help me.

There’s no point messing about with ‘what ifs’ once you step into the garden. What if you fall, what if you step on the wrong flagstone, is there a wrong flagstone? 
You were supposed to keep moving, one step in front of the other. Armari called it a ‘questing’ which would make sense if the path took you to a place, you asked for.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
The garden was freaky enough. Like when the path led you to places that you couldn’t see from the patio, places that didn’t make sense as being part of the garden. Or even when it brought you right back to the house without giving you any information. Wasn’t that the point of a quest, to get somewhere, something? Right, I was getting distracted. Almost like the bloody garden didn’t want me here. Funny that.

I stopped and reminded myself of what Armari had taught us at the start.

 ‘The way through is to clear your mind. That is, unless you are actively questing for an answer from the garden. Then you focus on nothing but the question.’

He said that the first bit was letting the garden search you. That once you chose your path, you had to stick to it, not let yourself get distracted by any ‘hey, turn to your left for a greater treasure’.

What he didn’t say was that the garden was tricky. Like when the distraction looked like your question, inviting you to step off. I’d never fallen for the temptation to step off the allotted path since quite frankly the garden creeped me out. I asked Armari back when I was still a newbie, if the garden was alive. He denied it. ‘It’s sentient not sapient, at best it manages itself’.  Yeah, like that made the garden any less frightening.

Back then he had been complaining that more of the folk, the ones who were questers, were returning empty-handed and sulky tits. Almost all of them had been from a group of people called the Crowd. He hadn’t like having them around when he was teaching us, or maybe he just didn’t like them.

Damn! I needed a good conk to my head. This was so not the time to be wool-gathering about the ye old days. Honestly, if he hadn’t said that the garden was part of the reason I was back here in the first place, I’d be safely sipping my tea, staring at it through the windows.

‘Shut your eyes and follow the path, open your eyes and there you are,’ I sang to myself like some demented nursery school child who had escaped its confines to play with her imaginary friends. Still, it did the job, and I shut my eyes and stepped forward. Dallying by the door was bad enough. Dallying in the garden, well that was asking for trouble. The kind of trouble where a three-headed golem was just an entrée.