Sera had never considered herself a guardian.
She was an artist, a dreamer, someone who saw beauty in the cracks—but now, everyone looked at her as something more. The town's whispers had changed.
Not just "the girl from the greenhouse."
Now they called her The Bloomkeeper.
She didn't know how to feel about that.
It began with visits.
Strangers came daily, word having spread beyond Elowen Ridge. They brought their stories like offerings—whispers of heartbreak, shame, abandonment. Women who had fled homes that didn't love them. Queer couples looking for a place to feel seen. Survivors who needed silence that didn't sting.
Sera listened.
She never had the perfect thing to say. But the garden often spoke for her.
One woman stood weeping near the Petal Circle for over an hour before saying, "I've never felt safe before."
Another whispered to the Rotflowers, "Thank you for being angry for me."
A girl left a necklace of thorns and wrote only one word in the garden's notebook: Survived.
Celeste did not return in form again.
But her presence lingered.
The golden sprouts swayed even without wind. Light shimmered on glass panels that should've been dull. The vines in the greenhouse grew in patterns—spirals, stars, hearts.
And sometimes, if Sera stood quietly in the center, she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Warm.
Steady.
Like a promise kept.
Lina took to carving new wooden plaques. Each bore a single name and date—some ancient, some new. They were hung on a circular wall near the greenhouse under a carved arch that read:
The Ones Who Were Not Forgotten.
Mira began organizing night readings in the garden. Poetry, journals, songs. The first time she sang, it was the lullaby Celeste had written in her final weeks.
There wasn't a dry eye in the crowd.
Despite the peace, Sera couldn't shake the feeling that something unfinished remained.
Not a threat.
A mystery.
The hole—the dark circle behind the greenhouse—remained open. It never widened. Never narrowed. Sometimes it shimmered faintly, like starlight over a still pond.
She began calling it The Rootwell.
And it called to her more with each passing night.
One evening, after everyone had gone and the frost made her breath silver, Sera stood at its edge.
She whispered, "What do you want me to see?"
And the wind answered by falling utterly silent.
Then—
A breeze rose.
Only downward.
She felt herself pulled, not in body, but in memory.
Her feet didn't move, but her mind fell.
Down.
Down through layers of soil and time and pain and bloom.
She saw Celeste again—only younger.
She was seventeen, painting vines on her bedroom wall while her father screamed at the door.
She was twenty, bleeding from a protest wound, hiding a letter in a jar beneath the greenhouse.
She was twenty-three, watching Mira walk away, tears in her eyes, pride on her lips.
And then she was twenty-eight, breathing her last breath in the snow, whispering to the Rotflowers:
Remember me.
And they did.
Sera snapped awake, kneeling beside the Rootwell, heart hammering.
A single bloom had grown near her hand—black and gold, shimmering.
New.
She plucked it carefully and tucked it into her coat.
She would press it in her journal later, label it Celeste's Truth.
The town began changing.
Not by law.
But by love.
The old council building was repurposed as a healing center. Former members—those who had chosen silence out of fear—returned to offer help. One even donated Celeste's lost paintings, discovered in a locked storeroom.
Mira held an exhibit titled The Ones Who Stayed Silent.
No blame.
Just truth.
And it broke something open in everyone.
Sera finally finished her mural.
It stretched across the entire east greenhouse wall.
A woman made of petals and scars. Her spine was a vine. Her heart was blooming. Her face was all of them—Celeste, Mira, Lina, every woman who had planted something and dared it to grow.
Above her head were the words:
We bloomed anyway.
The title Bloomkeeper stayed.
Not as a burden.
But as a vow.
To protect what others tried to destroy.
To listen to the petals and thorns.
To speak when others couldn't.
To remember.