“Fixing one small problem has a way of uncovering three older ones.“

The pond had started to emit a weird stench—very similar to when Lara peeled boiled eggs. Not strong. Just enough to make her notice. Lara knelt at the edge of her SPACE garden and pushed aside a mat of floating leaves with the end of a stick. The fountain still trickled into the basin, steady as ever, but the silt along the bottom had crept upward, softening the stones, swallowing the edges.

“If you’re going to take up space,” she muttered, “you might as well earn it.”

She fetched a bucket, a bent sieve, and a plank she’d been meaning to turn into a shelf. The plank became a bridge across the pond’s edge; the sieve went in, slow and careful. Mud slid up, dark and heavy. She let the water rinse through before tipping it aside.

Sprout shifted near her ankle, roots pulling free of the soil and replanting themselves a handspan closer to the pond. It had been doing that lately—moving when she wasn’t looking, settling where the ground felt… better. Ink left a thin trail across the plank and stopped at the shed door.

She dipped the sieve again. This time, it hit something solid. She frowned, reached in with both hands, and tugged. The mud let go with a wet slurp. A jar came up in her grip. For a second she just stared at it, water streaming down the glass. Then she laughed, short and surprised.

“I thought I lost you.”

The compost jar—sealed tight, smeared with pond scum, heavier than it should have been. She’d knocked it in weeks ago and written it off as a mistake. One of many. She set it carefully on the plank and went back to dredging, smiling now. The pond could wait. The jar mattered. The sieve scraped again. This time, what surfaced wasn’t glass but ceramic—a broken fragment of pottery, curved, pale, no bigger than her palm. She rinsed it and frowned.

It was… normal. Just pottery. Too thin for a roof tile, too thick for a cup. She turned it over. No mark. No glaze worth mentioning. Ink circled it without touching. Sprout uprooted itself again and edged closer, leaves angled toward the fragment of pottery as if listening.

“That’s weird,” Lara said, but not in an excited way. More like she’d found a sock that didn’t belong to any pair she owned. She set the fragment of pottery aside with a shrug. The garden had a way of coughing up junk. She’d deal with it later. The jar came first. She opened it at the edge of the beds, bracing herself for the smell. It never came.

Instead, the compost inside was dark and crumbly, rich the way soil only got after patience. She pinched a bit between her fingers. It held together, then fell apart, warm enough that she paused. Lara pressed her palm over the soil where she layered it in. Warm. Not hot. Not steaming. Just… alive. She pulled her hand back slowly, heart ticking up a notch. That shouldn’t have finished yet. Not in the time she’d been gone. Not without turning. Not—She exhaled and forced herself to slow down.

“Small test,” she told the garden. “We’re not being dramatic.”

She scooped a pinch into a forgotten pot at the edge of the bed. Another pinch into a corner she didn’t use for anything important. She covered it, watered lightly with fountain water, and stepped back. Ink retreated to the shed threshold. Sprout stayed. She wiped her hands on her trousers and went inside the shed for seed packets.

[ Official source: http://www.betwix.co — © JL Chee ]

The door closed behind her with the same dull sound it always made. No echo. No weight. Just… shut. Inside, the shed stretched longer than it should have. Not wide—never wide. Narrow enough that if Lara spread her arms, her fingertips brushed both walls at once. Shelves rose from floor to ceiling on either side, packed tight with books, manuals, ledgers, and things that only pretended to be books. The air smelled faintly of old paper and iron filings. Familiar. Comforting.

She walked slowly, boots scuffing the wooden floor. The boards didn’t creak. Most of the books were dull and practical. Crop rotations. Tool maintenance. Old diagrams her father would have loved. She’d learned early not to question where they came from. The shed provided what it thought she needed. Or what she already knew how to use. Lara reached out, trailing her fingers along the spines as she passed. They were cool. Solid. Halfway down the aisle, she stopped. Something was… off.

Not wrong. Just misaligned. A book sat half a finger-width out from the shelf, its cover faded to a color she didn’t recognize. The title wasn’t in any script she knew—thin lines intersecting at angles that made her eyes slide away if she looked too long. She frowned and pushed it back into place. The shelf shuddered—barely. Like a breath caught and released.

Lara froze.Nothing else happened. No sound. No light. The shed remained its stubborn, narrow self. She waited for another heartbeat, then shook her head.

“Draft,” she muttered, though there were no vents. Further in, the aisle bent. Not sharply. Just enough that the far wall disappeared from view. She followed it, curious despite herself, and noticed something else then: the light. It didn’t come from anywhere she could point to. No lantern. No window. Just a steady, ambient glow that softened shadows without casting them. As she moved, the brightness shifted—not following her, exactly, but adjusting, like the shed was deciding how much she needed to see.

Ink slipped past her feet and paused ahead, body low. Its surface darkened, absorbing the light instead of reflecting it. Sprout followed more cautiously, roots clicking faintly against the boards. At the bend in the aisle, Lara felt it. A pull. Not forward—sideways. She turned her head, squinting at the shelves. For a split second, the space between two bookcases looked deeper than it should have been. Not wider. Deeper. Like the gap went on longer than the shed allowed. She blinked. The gap was normal again. Dusty. Tight.

Her heart thudded once, hard. She laughed it off under her breath. “I need sleep.”

Sprout brushed her ankle, leaves tilted toward the shelf she’d been staring at. Ink traced a slow, looping path on the floor, stopping just short of the gap. Lara hesitated, then stepped past it. At the back of the shed, the tool rack waited. Ordinary. Flat. Hammers. Trowels. Rope. Nothing that glimmered or bent the air. She exhaled, tension draining out of her shoulders.

“That’s more like it.”

She reached up for a seed packet—and paused. The Lumen seeds rested on the highest shelf, wrapped in cloth, exactly where she’d left them. Dry. Shriveled. As if they’d been waiting. She took them down carefully, holding them in both hands. The shed felt… quieter here. Watching, but not intruding. Koen’s voice surfaced in her memory, calm and unadorned.

❝They don’t take for most people.❞

“Most people,” Lara echoed, barely audible.

She turned back toward the door, passing the bend in the aisle without looking too closely this time. Ink followed close. Sprout lingered for half a beat longer, roots brushing the base of the shelf that had felt wrong. The boards did not move. But somewhere deeper—somewhere Lara could not see—a seam of light flickered, twisted into itself and disappeared.

She didn’t bring the Lumen seeds out into the open beds. She didn’t even bring them near the new compost test. Instead, she knelt near the pond, where the soil stayed cool and damp, marked a shallow line, heaped the soil up in a little mound and pressed the seeds in one by one. Sprout shifted closer, roots brushing the tops, shifting soil to cover the seeds. Ink crossed the soil once, then twice, stopping her hand when she reached for a different spot. Lara paused, then nodded.

“Here, then.” She watered the seeds once, and stood. That was it. No ceremony. No waiting around.

From a place Lara could not see, something watched the soil where she had knelt.

[ Official source: http://www.betwix.co — © JL Chee ]

The Guardian shifted, the motion stirring dust that had not been dust a moment before. Awareness still came in waves—slow, heavy, like joints remembering how to bend. It had been a long sleep. Long enough that the first thing it noticed was not the girl, but what followed her. Roots crept where they shouldn’t have. Ink-dark tracks appeared, vanished, reappeared closer. Two small shapes slid into the edge of its vision.

“…Seems like I woke up late,” the Guardian murmured, voice barely more than pressure in the air. Sprout paused, roots curling inward. Ink went still, as if pretending to be nothing more than a spill. The Guardian’s attention softened. Not approval—recognition.

“You two,” it said quietly. “Still rearranging things.” Ink’s tail flicked once. Sprout shifted half a handspan to the left, then back again. A faint sound followed—almost a laugh, almost a sigh.
“Come,” the Guardian said, already turning away. “We have much to catch up on. And a great deal to plan.”

The Guardian lingered a moment longer, its gaze sweeping the raised beds and towering planters. It frowned. “So much yet unknown…” It wondered if its Master this time will live up her potential or squander it like the last one. As the door of the shed closed behind the trio, a rack of tools shimmered into existence. If one were to peek inside Lara’s space, in place of the shed one would have seen a pale weather beaten tool rack instead.

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Plans

Over dinner, Lara mentioned her plans for the pond.

“I’m thinking of using it,” she said, passing the rice. “For a pond plant with valuable bulbs. Mrs. Awlyna said buyers pay well for the crunchy bulb of the glassroot corms.”

Her mother hummed. “It does sell well in the market but Lara glassroot corms are finicky. It only grows in streams of slow flowing clean water with low silt.”

“Hm. I’ll give it try.”

Her father glanced up. “You lose anything else down there?”

“I found what I dropped,” Lara said. Which was true. They talked about orders and weather and whether Aunt Rina had tried to sell “miracle seedlings” again this week. Her mom offered to buy Lara some glassroot corms tomorrow. Lara listened, nodded, and didn’t mention jars or warmth or seeds that should not have been worth planting.

Later, when the house had gone quiet. The tool rack glowed faintly around its edges. The shadows shivered. The fragment of pottery lay where she’d left it. For a moment—only a moment—glyphs flickered across its surface, then went dark. Beneath the soil, the Lumen seeds drew in moisture. Slowly. Patiently. They swelled and tiny silvery filaments grew outwards. In the quiet, roots spread, light folded inward, and old things decided not to stay forgotten.

==end of chapter 7==

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