Corollary

Aftermath + 1

‘The garden holds an item for you. I implore you to attend as this is quite the rare event.’

I hovered over the step off the path. Whatever it was, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Armari had written that the garden didn’t offer gifts without a quest. How did he know? Not the rare bit, but the fact that it was for me. Adulting was such a con. The clear thing to do was to run very far away from a garden giving gifts. But I had already come this far, even though I had said that I wasn’t coming back to this place. At least I hadn’t vowed that I would never return. Vows were twisty turning things that bound you in ways you didn’t ask for. Add a scrap of intent to the vows and things like doors and pathways became choked with thorns when you needed them to be clear and open and not find yourself looking for a window to jump out through. Vows and magic were a seriously bad combo. I hadn’t needed Armari to tell me that.
I hovered still. Just one more step… I wanted to believe that I could control what happened next and not be tossed around like a sidekick to the main character.  If I stepped away now, the what-if would haunt me, probably drive me crazy like my nan.

Even now, I could feel it. The hum beneath my skin, from the minute I stepped into the house. It was like whatever stamp had been on me to help me live without magic was now dissolving into little bits.  I reached down to the balled-up letter in my pocket. How had he found me? I hadn’t consciously planned to cut him out of my life. I just hadn’t wanted to be back without the boy that started all of this, standing beneath this tree that had no business being here.

I stepped forward, under the leafy branches till I was utterly dwarfed by the green. The closer I got to the blingy, the more it faded till I was crouching over the memory of it as it faded into a little space of nothingness. I dropped down lower, keeping my eyes on the space that was now telling me there was nothing there, just more damned leaves and grass.

The garden was throwing out one of its old tricks, one of those counter-intuitive things. If you followed the bling and started searching for it, well… it’s what you got. Something blingy and according to Armari, something utterly short-lived in the long run. He used to say that the bling drew you over till your eyes passed over the real deal that is unless you stared at the space where the nothingness was. I’d never understood what he meant until now. But standing over the space, it felt like there was a vacuum there, not the ground and leaves my eyes were showing me. Basically, this was some high-level bs. This bloody garden needed to make its mind up. Did it want me to have it or not? What was this whole deal about having to work for it?