Morning settled gently over the Intervale, though the abandoned garden from the previous evening remained fresh in everyone's minds, its dead vines and cracked fountains sitting uneasily behind their thoughts even as the new day's light softened the memory of it.
Sarya could not stop thinking about the figures at the tree line — the way they had watched without approaching, the way the gardener's smile had faded into something careful when he named them.
She found him tending a bed of herbs near the crossroads and asked the question she had been carrying since the previous night.
"Why didn't they come closer?"
He continued watering for a moment before answering, unhurried, the way he seemed to approach most things.
"They were deciding whether we still belonged to the same world," he said.
Sarya waited for more. None came immediately, and she understood, by now, that his answers arrived at their own pace and rarely all at once.
