Kael was eighteen when his dream garden withered. Once, that inner landscape had been a lush grove, imbued with the bittersweet scent of his younger sister Elara's memories.
She hadn't died—not physically.
Simply, a shadow had lengthened over her, a silent illness that had stolen her smile and, in the end, her consciousness, leaving her in a deep sleep from which healers found no awakening.
Kael had always clung tightly to the memory of her crystal laughter, her curious eyes, the tiny 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 arid.
It had not happened suddenly, like a bolt from the blue. Rather, it had been a slow, inexorable, unstoppable desiccation. At first, the leaves of his dream-trees had lost a bit of color. Then, the flowers had begun to droop. In the end, the grassy paths that once echoed with their running had turned to dust. Kael woke up one morning with an emptiness in his chest, as if someone had taken away a piece of his heart.
He could no longer recall 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 the light of day. And, most painfully, he no longer felt the pang of nostalgia or the consolatory 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.
Her body was still alive, but it did not respond to stimuli. She had been in a bed for a long time, and a charitable woman was taking care of her: Kael would visit her occasionally, but less and less often.
He could no longer bear the sorrow of seeing her breathe, but not live...
His practical nature, developed by necessity in a neighborhood where survival was a daily struggle, did not help him cope with that kind of loss. He tried to remember, to force himself, but his sensitive heart found only ash.
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, awake, 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, under a sky that was always gray, 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 shut down. He spoke as little as possible, his responses reduced to the essential. He avoided the gazes of others, fearing they might read the emptiness in his eyes. He felt like an empty shell, incapable of truly connecting with those around him. His uncle, a robust and taciturn man named Borin, watched him with a mixture of worry and helplessness. He had tried to talk to him, to shake him, but Kael's words were always the same: "I'm fine, Uncle. It's just tiredness."
One particularly muggy afternoon, Kael was delivering tools to a more affluent suburb, an area where people's dream-gardens were, once, mostly lush and vibrant with color. He walked past a small square adorned with a gushing fountain. On the edge of the fountain, a girl, perhaps seven years old, dressed in modest, dirty clothes, was sobbing softly, clutching something in her hands that Kael initially mistook for a handful of withered petals.
It was not 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 would then heal 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 pallor. They were the remnants of a completely destroyed dream.
Kael was not the type to meddle in other people's affairs, 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 messy hair and swollen eyes, kept sobbing, 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, her eyes full of tears reflecting her fears. "My... my Flowering Garden. 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 "Flowering Garden" 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, jolted him out of his torpor. 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, she handed him the fragments. Kael took them delicately in the palm of his hand. 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 glimmer, sprang from his index finger and spread to the fragments. It wasn't a strong light, but a fleeting, brief flicker, almost an illusion.
Suddenly, Kael's head was flooded with 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, wrapped 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 just 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 smelled it!" she sobbed, running away, the fragments clutched to her chest.
Kael stood motionless by the fountain, his palm still weakly tingling. The vision had been so vivid, even if brief. A sprout, a hope. The scent of flowers. Had it been a suggestion? Or did that small, nonexistent 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 tiny, unexpected hint of curiosity. His pragmatism screamed at him 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?'