---
Chapter 10: A Garden Where Sorrow Sleeps
Years passed.
The world beyond the valley had changed—villages rebuilt, roads cleared, and laughter returned to places once silenced by war and sorrow. Yet in a quiet corner, far from kings and temples, a simple garden bloomed on the edge of a hill.
And there, beneath a willow tree, sat Elian.
His robes were lighter now, his hands calloused not by battle, but by planting seeds and weaving baskets. The people who visited him did not know his story. To them, he was just the Gardener with the distant eyes—the one who listened more than he spoke, whose smile carried something old and weighty, like a memory pressed between pages.
He kept no relics of the past.
Only a single feather, framed in wood, hanging near the door. And a notebook filled with pages—not of pain, but of lessons, of dreams, of things he wished someone had told him when he was broken.
Sometimes, at dusk, he would sit by the willow tree and speak to the wind:
> "I remember you.
Not in fire.
Not in loss.
But in light."
And sometimes, when the wind was just right, it answered back:
> "And I remember you…
not in grief—
but in love."
The pain of his heart had not vanished.
It had simply found a place to rest.
Not as a wound.
But as a root.
And from that root, a garden had grown.
---
✧ The End?