Sabine began walking.
The first few paces felt ordinary. Cold air. Steady ground. Controlled breath. She focused on rhythm, on keeping her shoulders level, on moving forward without hesitation.
Then the air changed.
Thicker. Heavier. The incense intensifying until each breath carried weight. The hedges seemed to lean inward without actually moving. The gravel beneath her feet felt less solid, as if the ground were remembering something older than the formal paths laid over it.
The first vision arrived without warning.
The music room at Corvyr.
Not imagined.Real.Sabine stood in the doorway and saw it exactly as it had been the last time she walked through, pianoforte under its dust cover, sheet music stacked on the stand, one chair pulled close to the cold grate and never moved back. The velvet curtains tied away to preserve them. The room naked and beautiful and utterly empty of the life it had been designed to hold.
Her throat constricted.
She forced herself to keep walking.
The vision dissolved. The hedge path returned. But the garden had tasted her reaction and wanted more.
The next image came sharper.
The nursery. Shuttered. Cold. The carved rocking horse with one ear missing. The white coverlet on the narrow bed. The chest of wooden blocks and the blue wool rabbit gathering dust because no second child had ever come to justify keeping the room ready.
Sabine’s breathing quickened.
She caught it. Regulated it. Kept moving.
The path offered a turn to the left. She took it.
Immediately the garden showed her the east wing corridor behind its folding screen. Doors shut. Plaster water-damaged and scraped back. The passage where House Corvyr had begun its retreat from itself, room by room, season by season, until the house became a performance of occupation staged in shrinking quarters.
Her chest ached.
Not now,she thought.Not here.
She turned right at the next junction and found herself facing the entrance hall at Corvyr during the grain auction after the second failed harvest. Tables set up. Tenant families waiting. Her father standing at the front with ledgers open and his hands shaking faintly as he read numbers that would never add correctly no matter how many times he recalculated them.
Sabine stopped.
The vision held.
She saw Mirelle standing near the window in the background, spine straight, face composed, smiling at a neighbor as if the room were not being measured for dismemberment. Saw Cassian pretending not to notice which servants had disappeared since the prior season, which silverpieces had been quietly sold, which repairs had been deferred past any reasonable hope of completion.
The path offered an opening to the left. Soft. Inviting. Promising relief if she would only step toward it.
Sabine understood immediately.
Surrender disguised as exit.
She turned away from the false opening and continued forward.
The garden resisted. The air thickened further. Her lungs worked harder. The incense made her head feel light and strange. But she kept her breathing even, kept her pace steady, and refused to let memory convert into misstep.
The visions came faster after that. Fragments. Flashes. The study where she had closed the ledgers and finally admitted the house was dying. The chapel where her father had promised recovery until promises became indistinguishable from lies. The forecourt on the morning she left, Cassian standing bareheaded in the cold, looking young and frightened and trying to hide both.
She walked through all of it.
Then the path turned one final time, and the garden showed her something else entirely.
