The Second Garden was a place of vibrant creation, but it was not without its sorrows. The Gardeners, in their zeal to weave stories together, discovered that not all grafts would take. A story, torn from its original context and grafted onto another, would sometimes wither and die. The characters would fall silent, the plot would unravel, and the narrative would crumble into dust.
The first time this happened, it was a shock. The Gardeners had seen stories as immortal, as things that could be endlessly reshaped and repurposed. But now they understood that stories had a life of their own, and that life was fragile. They mourned the loss of the story, not as a failed experiment, but as a death. It was the first time they had ever wept for a story, and it was the moment they learned that their role was not just to be creators, but also to be stewards, to care for the stories in their charge, and to grieve for those that were lost. The garden, they realized, was also a graveyard.