The sight before him stunned Rowan into silence. He shook his head. Maybe he was imagining things.
It was dark out. The moon was full, but perhaps the silver-white light that bathed the garden was playing tricks on him.
But no…he was used to the colors of his garden in the moonlight. He'd memorized the flowers that he'd painted on the ground with his magic in their nighttime form just as much as he'd memorized them in daylight. He shifted his stance, and a brittle stem cracked under his boots, a stark confirmation that he didn't really need.
His flowers were gone. It was no trick.
Rowan's gaze fell to the few scraps that remained of the wildflowers around the pond, withered husks completely devoid of life, sparsely clumped here and there as a reminder of what used to be. Another stem crackled when the sheer amount of loss almost knocked him off balance.
