The light did nothing, vanishing against the darkness of the cloak as if it had never existed. But the Warden's anger was palpable. "Impudent!" it growled. Its skeletal hand moved with unnatural speed, clawing at the air toward Kael. He felt a sharp pang in his chest, as if his own heart had been seized and squeezed.
A wave of painful memories flooded him—the blurred images of Elara struggling, his own helplessness, the feeling of failure. The Warden was trying to destroy what remained of his dream, to finish the job.
Kael fell to his knees, clutching his chest, breath dying in his throat. It was over. His adventure had lasted less than a single breath...
*****
Kael woke up one morning with an emptiness in his chest, as if someone had taken away a piece of his heart.
He was eighteen when his dream garden withered.
Once, that inner landscape had been a lush grove, imbued with the bittersweet scent of memories of his younger sister, Elara.
She wasn't dead—not physically.
Simply, a shadow had fallen over her, a silent illness that had stolen her smile and, finally, her consciousness, leaving her in a deep sleep from which the healers found no way to wake her.
Kael had always held tight to the memory of her crystalline laughter, her curious eyes, the small hands that clung to him.
They were his strength, his light in a world that had never been kind. She had an uncommon vitality, even compared to children her age.
But then, one day, the garden had become barren.
It hadn't happened suddenly, like a bolt from the blue. Rather, it had been a slow, inexorable, unstoppable drying out.
At first, the leaves of his dream trees had lost some color. Then, the flowers had begun to droop. Finally, the grassy paths that once echoed with their running had turned to dust.
He no longer recalled the exact melody of Elara's laughter, only a vague, indistinct tinkling.
Her face, once so vivid in his mind, was now like a dream that vanishes in daylight. And, most painfully, he no longer felt the sharp pang of nostalgia or the consoling sweetness that the memories brought him.
It was as if Elara had never existed, or as if the part of him that loved her had been amputated, cut away.
It was time.
Kael crossed the threshold of the small room housing his sister; the smell of lavender and disinfectant tightened his throat.
Elara lay motionless in the bed. Next to her, busy changing the wet cloth on the girl's forehead, was Sister Miriam, a woman in her fifties, her face etched with fatigue but illuminated by kind eyes.
Kael stood rigid, his hands clenched into fists in his pockets. It was the first time he had been back in three weeks.
"Weeks have passed. How is she?" Kael asked in a low voice.
"The same as when you left her, Kael. Stable. She continues to breathe on her own. It's a small miracle, don't you think?" she replied in a calm voice.
Kael took a step closer, but stopped again, unable to look directly at Elara's face.
His eyes fixated on the rhythmic movement of her chest.
"A miracle? Miriam, the truth is, she isn't living. She's merely breathing. What is this if not the most refined cruelty? Her heart is beating, but her mind is ash. It's just a mechanical function."
Sister Miriam straightened up, her gaze resting on Kael with a mix of compassion and firmness.
"Kael, please. You come less and less often. But you must understand. This body is the house waiting for the soul to return. And as long as there is life, there is hope. Every breath is a promise."
A bitter laugh escaped his lips:
"Promises. Don't talk to me about hope. I only see the shell. And I can no longer stand to look at a warm corpse. It's easier to believe she's simply dead."
Sister Miriam approached and placed a gentle hand on his forearm.
Kael involuntarily flinched.
"And perhaps that is the real burden, Kael. That you cannot let her go, because she is here. But you must be stronger than your weariness, stronger than your pain. If you love her, you must come. Even if only to lend her your breath, until she finds her own again."
Kael stared at her, his eyes full of resentment and exhaustion. The emptiness in his chest was now a painful ache.
He turned toward the door, unable to bear the pressure any longer.
"I'm leaving. I have work. I'll send you the money for the medicine."
Sister Miriam followed him with her gaze, "Come back soon, Kael. Come back for her. Not out of obligation."
He didn't reply.
He left the room quickly, exchanging the oppressive peace of Elara's room for the hurried, indifferent reality of the street.
He knew Miriam's words would torment him until his next, inevitable, and increasingly delayed, visit.
At nineteen, Kael had become a shadow of himself.
Black hair, lean physique, decisive in his movements.
He continued to work in his uncle's hardware store, lifting crates and organizing tools with mechanical efficiency. His mind was sharp, alert, but devoid of the spark that once drove him to imagine, to hope.
The nights were the worst. His dream garden was now a desolate wasteland, beneath a perpetually gray sky, where the wind whistled through the bare branches of skeletal trees. There was no life, no color.
And he slept poorly: he often woke up at night and didn't feel rested when morning came.
His way of reacting was to withdraw. He spoke as little as possible, his answers reduced to the essential. He avoided the gazes of others, fearing they might read the emptiness in his eyes. He felt like a hollow shell, incapable of truly connecting with those around him.
His uncle, a robust and taciturn man named Borin, watched him with a mixture of concern and helplessness. He had tried to talk to him, to shake him out of it, but Kael's words were always the same: "I'm fine, Uncle. It's just exhaustion."
One particularly muggy afternoon, Kael was delivering tools to a wealthier suburb, an area where people's dream gardens were, mostly, once lush and vibrant with color.
He passed a small square adorned with a bubbling fountain. On the edge of the fountain, a girl of perhaps seven, dressed in modest, dirty clothes, was quietly sobbing, clutching something in her hands that Kael initially mistook for a handful of withered petals.
It wasn't unusual to see "broken" or damaged dreams around the city. Sometimes, small family quarrels or daily disappointments could cause slight dents or discoloration in dreams, which then healed on their own over time.
But what the girl held was different. They were fragments. Opaque, cold shards, almost transparent ash, just like what he had seen in his own dream garden. There was no glimmer of light, only a dull paleness. They were the residue of a completely destroyed dream.
Kael wasn't the type to interfere in other people's business, especially not after his own loss. But the sight of those fragments, so similar to his own, caused an unexpected pang, an echo of the pain he thought he had buried.
He stopped.
The girl, with disheveled hair and swollen eyes, continued to sob, clutching the fragments as if they were the most precious thing in the world.
"Hey," Kael said, his voice hoarse from disuse. He hadn't intended to speak. "What... what do you have there?"
The girl looked up, eyes full of tears that reflected her fears. "My... my Garden of Blooming. Mama said it would grow as big as a tree..." she sobbed. "But... but it fell. It's all broken."
Kael felt a tightness in his heart. The "Garden of Blooming" was a common dream among children—the innocent expectation of growing up and achieving something beautiful in life. The sight of her despair, so pure and disarming, shook him out of his numbness. Instinctively, he reached out a hand.
"Can I... can I see?" he asked, almost without realizing it.
The girl hesitated, then, with a trembling gesture, handed him the fragments. Kael took them gently in his palm. They were cold, inert, devoid of any vibration. They were the tangible proof of a loss, a stolen innocence. As he looked at them, a spark, a tiny glow, shot from his index finger and spread to the fragments. It wasn't a strong light, but an ephemeral, brief flicker, almost an illusion.
Suddenly, Kael's head was invaded by a rush of sensations. They weren't his. They were the girl's sensations, a mixture of deep disappointment, fear, and the fleeting vision of a small sprout emerging from the ground, enveloped in a warm, promising light.
It lasted only an instant, a fraction of a second. He was confused, disoriented. Then, everything vanished, leaving him with a slight headache and the dream fragments still inert in his hand.
The girl, however, had stopped crying. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the fragments in Kael's palm. "Did you... Did you see?" she whispered. "For a second, I smelled the flowers!"
Kael looked at her, incredulous. Had she felt it too? Or had she only projected her hope onto that faint glimmer? He shook his head, the fragments still between his fingers. The spark had been so weak, the vision so quick. It hadn't fixed anything.
"No," Kael murmured, handing the fragments back to her. "Nothing happened. Maybe... maybe you just imagined it."
The girl stared at him for a moment, then her lower lip began to tremble again. "No! I... I felt it!" she sobbed, running away, the fragments clutched to her chest.
Kael stood still beside the fountain, his palm still faintly tingling. The vision had been so vivid, though brief. A sprout, a hope. The smell of flowers. Had it been a suggestion? Or did that tiny, non-existent spark mean something? He looked at his hand, then at the spot where the girl had disappeared.
For the first time in months, Kael felt something other than emptiness. It was a spark of confusion, certainly, but also a minuscule, unexpected hint of curiosity.
His pragmatism yelled that it was a coincidence, a projection of the mind.
But his sensitive heart, the one he thought he had lost, wondered:
'What if it wasn't?'