The Garderner”s Legacy

A legacy of love so powerful it became a prison. A peace so fragile it was built on a lie. The world has healed from the horror known as the Phenomenon, but the scars remain. Lyra Voltaire is the last tender of Blackwood Preserve, a beautiful, tranquil estate where the land itself remembers everything. She walks the overgrown paths, tending to flowers that shift color and a stream that sings with emotion, all while guarding a terrible secret: this peace is a memorial to her family's ancient, unspeakable tragedy. The official story says the horror ended decades ago, contained by the researcher Alistair Finch. But Lyra's young grandson can hear a faint, desperate cry in the vibrations of the manor's stones: Help. Us. Defying the global Custodial Guild, Lyra uses forbidden technology to listen to the house's deep past. What she discovers shatters the foundation of their peaceful present. The Unbinding did not free her ancestors; it stranded them. Their consciousnesses are trapped, crystallized in the very materials they became—marble, crystal, and vine—enduring an eternity of silent, conscious agony. The horror is not history. It is merely dormant. Now, Lyra faces an impossible choice. To expose the truth risks unleashing the nightmare once more and empowering a ruthless faction that wants to "cure" the world by scouring Blackwood from the earth. But to remain silent is to condemn her family to an unending hell. As she digs deeper, she uncovers the dark origins of the curse, from a grieving Victorian gardener to a modern alchemist who repeated his mistakes, learning that some stories are not just to be read, but to be repeated. The quiet after is over. The past has just become the present.