New to the Garden? Start at the beginning → The Beauties in Bloom
It begins again with stillness — but not silence.
The Garden of the Beauties in Bloom has a pulse now, faint and filthy, hidden in the soft rot beneath its tangled roots. Meadow hears it. Feels it. It hums in her cracked bones and whispers through the vines twisting through what remains of her skull.
Hibiscus is gone.
Not slumped. Not broken.
Gone.
The earth where she once rested is freshly torn, a wet hollow of churned mud and blood-smeared petals. The silver bowl beside it is overturned. Empty.
That’s never happened before.
Meadow knows better than to speak. Even the dead can be punished.
So she watches.
The others remain motionless in their places, heads tilted, features twisted and hollow.
They’re aware, but sluggish. Most don’t move at all.
They grow their flowers and exist in a world of blurred dreams and hunger.
Some twitch when the wind moves.
Others moan so softly the sound gets caught in the air like mist.
None of them can ask what she already knows.
Something is changing.
The Botanist hasn’t come in… a while. But time here bends strangely, so that sometimes it doesn’t exist at all.
It’s been long enough that Meadow can feel it and that alone is unusual.
She’s remembering time again. She’s remembering hunger.
Usually, the heavy boots would crunch the gravel path.
The shears would go snip, snip, snip in time with muttered measurements.
Pruning. Rearranging.
A hand brushing a bloom like it was a doll’s wig.
But now… nothing.
And Meadow, for the first time in many cycles, shifts.
Her head creaks toward the path.
Something urges her forward.
A memory?
A warning?
She recalls a day. Long ago.
Before the flowers.
A room with lights far too bright, burning through closed eyelids.
A name written on parchment.
A smell sharp, burning… but behind it, something intoxicating.
Crushed blossoms. Antiseptic.
And beneath that: decay.
A compost of rot and vegetation and human flesh.
A scent only the deranged could love.
And a voice.
Not the Botanist.
Him.
A man in a green coat.
Cold hands. Warm breath.
“You’ll be perfect,” he had whispered.
“We’ll make something beautiful out of you.”
She had been the first.
Not by chance.
By design.
And now, someone else has begun to undo that design.
She doesn’t smile. Her mouth doesn’t remember how.
But inside, something stirs. A slow shiver runs down the vines that anchor her to the pedestal.
“Hibiscus has run,” she thinks.
“And I am still rooted. But maybe not for long.”
The Garden is changing.
So is she.
And she’s just… so hungry.
🕯️ To be continued….. Zombie Emporium Presents: Sunny
