The shears' rhythmic snip-snip grew louder with each passing hour, though no gardener appeared. Eleanor stood vigil at the bone chapel's entrance, her thorned fingers curled around the chalice of memories. The liquid inside had darkened to near-black, its surface rippling with each approaching footstep that never came.
Mira slept fitfully nearby, her small body curled around a cluster of teeth she'd collected from the bonfire ashes. The child's forehead gleamed with sweat, the root-mark pulsing an angry red as she whimpered in her sleep. Eleanor knelt beside her, brushing back sweat-dampened hair—then froze.
The girl's pupils had vanished.
Her eyes were now pure black from edge to edge, reflecting the chapel's bone walls in warped miniature. When Eleanor touched Mira's cheek, the child's eyelids snapped open.
"He's pruning the edges," Mira whispered in a voice not her own. "Cutting away the rot."
A scream shattered the night.
Eleanor burst from the chapel to find the tailor's widow convulsing on the ground, her body arched at an impossible angle. The rosebuds that had bloomed from her tear ducts now sprouted thorns that pierced her own cheeks, sending rivulets of blood down her neck. Around her, the other transformed villagers clutched at their own mutations—the field hand's thorn-nails digging into his palms, the midwife's hair braiding itself so tightly it tore at her scalp.
The crow circled overhead, its cries sharp as broken glass. "Too fast! They're remembering too fast!"
Eleanor grabbed the chalice, sloshing black liquid across her wrist. The drops burned like acid as they seeped into her bark-like skin. She understood now—the gardener wasn't coming.
He was already here.
The transformations weren't gifts.
They were pruning.
And the village was the rot being cut away.