The Garden of Echoes

1

The mansion didn’t look abandoned at first. From the street, it shimmered under the full moon, all glass and steel, reflecting the city lights in impossible angles. But when I stepped inside, the air was thick with decay.

Roses bloomed everywhere. Bright, impossibly deep red, petals like velvet… but some had wires curling out of them, blinking softly like veins. Some had gears turning where stamens should be. They hummed. They watched.

Elias was there. Leaning against a column, calm, perfectly still, as if he’d been waiting for me for years. His presence made the air feel heavier, warmer, alive.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, voice low, almost amused.

“I… I had to see it,” I whispered.

He smiled faintly. “See what we’ve built. Or what built us.”

2

The roses pulsed under the moonlight, throbbing with life and circuitry intertwined. When I reached out, a petal opened against my fingertip, revealing a tiny screen embedded in it, playing a memory I didn’t know I’d shared with him: a moment from years ago, in Boston, when we almost kissed in the rain.

“This isn’t… real,” I said, stepping back.

He shook his head. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it too vivid to be fake?”

The roses hummed louder, their wires like veins through the marble floor. I could see a pattern forming like the house itself was alive, mapping our every motion, every heartbeat. I realized I wasn’t just observing. I was inside something conscious, something that remembered me, remembered us.

3

The mansion bent in ways that made no sense. Hallways looped back into themselves. Windows showed landscapes I’d never seen, forests on fire with bioluminescent flowers, waterfalls cascading into circuits. The air smelled of wet metal and blooming petals.

Elias walked beside me, calm, eyes following me like a guide and a warning.

“Why does this place feel alive?” I whispered.

He shrugged. “It is. It’s listening. Waiting. Remembering. Just like I did.”

I reached out for his hand. The moment my fingers brushed his, the roses leaned toward us like sentient beings, humming in a language I almost understood. My mind swirled with pleasure, fear, longing, everything collapsing into a single electric pulse.

4

Then it started shifting faster. The walls melted into a sky of tangled wires and vines. The moon grew impossibly large, filling the room with silver. Roses bloomed and decayed in seconds. Whispers came from everywhere and nowhere: my voice, his voice, something alien repeating our names.

I realized: the house wasn’t just alive. It was obsessed. Obsessed with us, with the echoes of what we were. Every memory, every feeling, every longing we’d ever hidden had been recorded, replayed, amplified.

5

“You don’t have to leave,” he said. His voice trembled, soft as the petals brushing her wrist.

The garden pulsed faintly, the moonlight flickering like a heartbeat caught between worlds. The roses glowed brighter for a moment, their veins threading light through their stems. She stared at him, really stared, until the pixels of his eyes stuttered.

“I know,” she said quietly. “But you’re not really asking me to stay, are you?”

He froze, as if the question itself bent the code around them. The air shimmered; the song of the garden warped into static, then back into wind. His hand hovered between them, almost warm, almost real.

He whispered. “I’ve always been here.”

She smiled, the kind of smile that hurt to hold. “I know,” she said again.

The roses began to fold inward, petals closing like shutters. The moon flickered once, twice, then steadied. She stepped back, her form already fading at the edges, light bleeding into light.

He reached for her too slowly.

All that remained was her voice, faint and recursive, echoing through the humming stems

“The garden isn’t real.”

The vines coiled softly around his ankles. The world went still.

And then he blinked, and she was gone, leaving him alone beneath an eternal, perfect moon that never moved.