The Garden's Watch

Preface

Between loss and remembrance lies a realm of silent echoes–words left unsaid, voices stilled, yet lingering, never fully gone, like roots beneath winter soil, hidden yet alive. In quiet places, in shadows cast by memory, silence becomes speech, absence a kind of presence, a veil, thin as starlight, between worlds. Listen closely: each quiet breath, each pause between heartbeats, speaks clearly the language of those we’ve lost. Their stories–their laughter, grief, and wisdom–echo softly within us, becoming part of our voice. This silence is not emptiness, but fullness, the rich, resonant legacy of those we love, carried forward in every silent echo, like wind through oak leaves, whispering what endures.

The Midnight Trespass

I sat alone in the living room, a self-imposed sanctuary I had built to keep the world at bay. It was a fragile peace, a physical and emotional isolation held together by thin strands of my will. I was a sleeping volcano, a fault buried deep beneath the earth’s crust, and the slightest tremor could make the quake open a cavern to its molten core. The silence I kept was a desperate hope, an armor against the overwhelming pain I carried.

The clock’s chime, a deep, resonant sound in the stillness of the old house, was the only warning. Twelve solid strokes of midnight, each one a tangible weight in the quiet air, each one falling like a hammer on an unseen veil. My intuition, a compass I had learned to trust, felt an immediate disruption in the harmonious flow of our home. A sensation, foreign and new, pricked at the edges of my senses like a needle of cold air. This wasn’t the familiar, heavy sadness of the sorrowful spirit that had lived in these walls for decades, a presence I knew as well as the scent of old paper and dust. This was a different kind of silence, one that held not despair but a vast, cold emptiness. It was a silence that drained the air from my lungs, a feeling so acute it made my skin feel too tight..

I was bewildered. My husband was away, and I felt utterly alone, my empathic senses screaming in his absence. I knew our home was blessed, warded with rituals, and anchored by our family’s spiritual strength. My father, our resident “mythmaker” and gardener, had always said that the land held its own history, its own life. Even the ancient oak outside my window, a silent guardian for generations, felt restless, its branches subtly swaying as if in a troubled dream, each creak a warning uttered in wood.

Then I heard it: a scratching sound. It was a synchronous event, a low, rasping thread pulled through the deep hush of the night. It came from the direction of the office. My skin went cold. The very floorboards beneath my feet seemed to vibrate with a low, unhappy hum, a protest from the sentient nature of the house itself, a shiver rising up through my bones. I felt a wave of dread wash over me. The old habit of fear to make me retreat, but my intuition held firm, telling me this was not a time for hiding. The scratching was a sign, a synchronicity that was pulling me toward a deeper truth. It wasn’t the kind of darkness I had learned to sense and avoid; it was a new kind of silence, and it was scratching not at the door, but at the edges of my reality. The ancient earth beneath the house seemed to sigh in protest, and I could feel its quiet disapproval moving up through the floorboards and into my feet.

I stood in the middle of the living room, a quiet, insistent call from deep in my gut telling me to listen. I walked to the office door, a liminal space that used to be my bedroom and was now a sanctuary for my grief and creativity. Allisa, one of my daughters, had closed it earlier, a simple act that now seemed to hold a new significance. I put my hand on the cool brass of the doorknob. The scratching stopped immediately, and the low hum in the floorboards seemed to recede, like a tide pulling back.

The Messenger

The silence that followed was not empty. It was vast, alive, and attentive, the air thick with unspoken communication–like standing within the held breath of a god. I turned the knob and pushed the door open, a soft click breaking the stillness. The room was dark, but a faint, pulsing glow in the corner, near a stack of my dad’s manuscripts, caught my eye. A thin shaft of pale moonlight from the window cut through the air, illuminating the dancing dust motes. The very scent of the room–old paper, wood, and a hint of the fresh cedar from the garden–felt more alive, heightened.

As I stepped closer, a luminous and indistinct figure, the messenger, hovered over the pages. It communicated not with words, but with a transfer of pure feeling and image, an intense, vibrant hum that resonated through my bones. I felt the sharp ache of its presence, a feeling both ancient and kind, a pressure like a finger pressed gently to my heart, as though the deep roots of the oldest trees had reached up to touch me. It was a divine nudge, a manifestation of a higher power urging me forward on my spiritual path.

I saw the sorrowful spirit not as a haunting presence, but as the man he once was–a soul in a separate dimension, trapped in the repeating loop of his final moments. His profound grief had created a spiritual weakness in the house, a crack in the fabric of this reality. This despair was a source of energy for the evil entity, which I now saw was not a single being but a manifestation of silence, fear, and stagnation. Silence in exile–cut off from the harmony, feeding only on fear. Its goal was to still us, to prevent our life purpose of expressing and sharing truth with the world.

And in that moment, a profound understanding settled over me. I realized that my own unspoken grief was also part of that exile. The evil entity had not broken our safeguards; it had simply found the crack I had carried with me since the day my mother told of the diagnosis. The scratching had not been an attempt to get in, but a psychological attack —a low, rasping sound meant to prey on the helplessness and fear that had led the man to his end, a sound that the very wood of the house registered as a violation. My own grief had settled like a stone under my ribs, heavy and silent, a stone that seemed to pulse faintly with the memory of its own burial. The messenger was not here to warn me of a new evil, but to reveal the old one’s desperate tactics — and the deeper truth of our own interconnectedness. The man’s grief and my father’s wisdom were both part of this realm. This silence was not a void, but a rich, resonant legacy, waiting to be acknowledged. My peace was the key.

The vision faded, the messenger was gone, leaving behind only the cold scent of night air and a heightened awareness of the quiet breathing of the house around me. A single word on my father’s manuscript pulsed with a soft, warm light: TRUTH. I knew what I had to do. I had to write the man’s story to give his grief a voice so that he could finally be free. My pen felt heavier than it ever had before, its cool metal solid in my hand. For the first time, it felt like a tool for a sacred purpose, connected to the pulsing heart of the earth itself. As I began to write, the words came as an act of listening, not creation. Each quiet breath, each pause between heartbeats, speaks clearly the language of those we’ve lost. The words flowed, a river of grief, compassion, and understanding. I was giving a voice to the sorrowful spirit, and in doing so, his story became a part of my own. Their stories–their laughter, grief, and wisdom–echo softly within us, becoming a part of our voice. I knew that this was the most powerful thing I could do, to transform silence into a testament, to make the echoes of the past part of the voice of the present.

The Unspoken Grief

My hand, resting on the paper, paused. A different kind of memory filled me, one that was not of loss, but of the silence that came before it. Between loss and remembrance lies a realm of silent echoes–words left unsaid, voices stilled, yet lingering, never fully gone. I remembered my mother standing in the kitchen, her hands intertwined so tightly her knuckles were pale, telling me about the diagnosis. The air smelled faintly of onions and soap, but her words were ash. “Stage Four,” she’d said, and I had been stunned into silence. I had not been there to catch her breath when the rifles fired a tribute to my father, a retired military man. I wasn’t there to stand beside her at the funeral. His passing was marked by thunder I never heard, a ritual I was absent from, though its silence lived inside me. I was in a hospital bed myself, in a different kind of quiet.

That was the true grief — the things we didn’t say, the things I didn’t know. I was so busy, and my parents, in their love, had tried to protect me. They had already begun their journey of grieving, and I hadn’t even known we were losing him. My family had conspired to exile me, and in the aftermath, I had suffered my own fall–a crash of metal and shattering glass. My body, held together by a network of pins and rods, felt alien, a map of my own grief. That truth had settled like a stone under my ribs, heavy and silent, a stone that seemed to pulse faintly, as though remembering its own burial. It was a grief that, like a parasitic root, had silently taken hold, a crack in my own spiritual armor that the evil entity had found and exploited. I thought of my father, the gardener, who made the alphabet a garden where every sentence “took root like a tree”. I remembered his hands, how they were a sword that never pierced, but only planted. He had given me a love for the world, a love that would, in time, become my shield against the dark. The wind that day had paused to hear him breathe, and now I was tasked with breathing that life back into the world.

A New Beginning

With a new sense of peace and purpose, I returned to my writing. The story flowed, a river of grief, compassion, and understanding, each word a drop of light poured onto the page. The more I wrote, the more the sorrowful spirit’s presence lifted, feeling lighter than a whisper of wind. The house no longer felt like a place of despair, but a place of healing, its ancient timbers breathing freely. I remembered the final time I spoke to my father. His illness had taken his voice, but he had a text-to-speech device. I had stood there, watching him type, and the device had spoken his last words to me: “Promise me… you’ll share our voice.” The memory was a source of light, not grief. It was the moment my purpose became clear.

I finished the manuscript and stood at the threshold of my office, a copy heavy and real in my hands. The peace in the house was profound, a living, breathing silence that held not commands, but possibility. My family, now a united front, felt secure and anchored; their laughter rang clearer and more vibrant. We had not just survived a haunting; we had healed it, nurturing the very spirit of the place.

The Voice That Remains

The evil entity still existed. It was out there, a force of falsehood and fear, a cold current beyond our property line, but it was now powerless against us. We had learned its secrets. We know that our true work was not to fight with weapons, but with truth and creation. My manuscript was the first step. I would publish it, share it, and in doing so, I would give a voice to the voiceless and a home to the truth. The world was alive, listening and ready to receive.

My husband and I sat together, the shared weight of our empathy palpable between us, and I told him what was happening. As an empath, he already knew. We agreed we would not fight this new attack on its own terms. We would not give it the energy of panic. We would hold the vision of our peace and return to the fundamentals that had always protected us.

That night, we gathered our family and stood in a circle outside, our feet bare on the cool, damp earth of the garden. The air was sharp with the scent of frost and late-blooming flowers, a vital breath from the sleeping land. We held hands, a physical and spiritual anchor, and we prayed. We didn’t ask for protection; we gave thanks for the peace the land had given us. I felt the land hum in response, a deep, quiet vibration beneath our feet that spread up through our bodies. The ancient oak rustled its bare branches, a soft, approving murmur–as though the tree itself kept watch, an elder sentinel acknowledging our vow. The sorrowful spirit’s presence, once a weight of sorrow, was now a silent sentinel of calm at the edges of the garden, a quiet strength emanating from the very soil. Our combined reverence was a more powerful safeguard than any ward, a living shield that pulsed with the life of the earth. The evil entity’s attempts to corrupt our children’s dreams failed, each attack hitting a wall of living peace. The spiritual war was not a battle of force, but a battle of will, waged in the quiet heart of a conscious world. It was guardianship–roots against rot, breath against void.

Epilogue: The Fruit of Remembrance

The story ends as it began, but with a profound shift in power. The clock strikes midnight once more, but this time there is no fear, only peace, deep as the earth's root. The air, once drained, is full, thick with the scent of cedar and old paper and a profound sense of rightness. The silence is not a prison, but a threshold, wide as the night sky, and I am ready to walk through it, carrying my life purpose out into the sentient, listening world. I thought of the small sparks I had seen in the village—the whispered confession, the child’s drawings—and I knew they were not lost. The silence had carried them as I had carried the fruit’s light, and they were a part of the greater song. The silence was not empty. It was becoming.

The tree stood in the clearing, a young tree, thin and fragile, its bark pale against the dusk. Yet from its branches hung a single blossom, a Simbelmynë, glowing faintly, as if it held the memory of a star. I did not reach for it. I only listened. I heard the voice I had always known—no longer apart from me, a whisper, but rising from within like breath itself. And I knew the bloom was not just a memory of my father, but a promise of all that was to come. For the Simbelmynë, the Evermind grows where the dead rest and whispers what endures.