In the mist-choked valley of Hollow’s End, there was a garden where nothing living grew.
Its caretaker, a gaunt woman known only as The Keeper, tended to rows of glass flowers—delicate, lifelike blooms frozen in perpetual wilt. Each one contained a name. Not just any name, but those that had been erased from the world: the forgotten dead, the disgraced nobles, the lovers struck from history in a fit of rage.
People came to her in secret, carrying whispers on slips of parchment. A widow might pay to bury her husband’s name among the thorns, ensuring no one would speak it again. A guilty man might plead for his victim’s name to be planted deep, where even the wind couldn’t carry it.
The Keeper never spoke. She simply pressed the names into the soil, and by morning, a new glass flower would rise—beautiful, brittle, and utterly silent.
But names are not so easily killed.
One autumn, a scholar named Elric Vayne arrived, clutching a fragment of a royal decree—one that had ordered an entire bloodline scrubbed from existence. He begged The Keeper to find the lost name of the erased prince, hidden somewhere in the garden.
She refused.
So Elric waited until midnight and stole into the rows alone. He brushed his fingers over the petals, listening. And to his horror, he heard them—not with his ears, but in his bones. A chorus of muffled screams, of pleading, of voices fighting to be remembered.
The glass flowers were not tombs.
They were cages.
The Keeper found him at dawn, his hands bloody from clutching a shattered bloom. The name inside was gone, but the garden knew. The earth trembled. The flowers turned toward him, their petals vibrating with something like hunger.
Elric ran.
He shouldn’t have.
Now, travelers say Hollow’s End has no garden—just a field of broken glass that sings when the moon is high. And if you’re foolish enough to step inside, you might hear a voice you recognize.
Maybe even your own.
"Stay," it will whisper.
"Stay, and let the world forget you too."