The death of a story, though mourned, was not a final end. The Gardeners, in their grief, found a new form of creation. They began to build memorials to the stories that had been lost. These were not statues or monuments, but new stories, woven from the fragments of the old. A character from a dead narrative would be given a new life in a new context, a plot that had unraveled would be rewoven into a new tapestry.
The first memorial was a simple story, a tale of a single character from the first story that had withered and died. The character, now adrift in a new narrative, carried with them the memory of their lost world, a quiet sorrow that gave their new story a depth and a resonance it would not have otherwise possessed. The memorial was not a replacement for what had been lost, but it was a testament to its enduring power. The Gardeners learned that even in death, a story could still give life to another. The graveyard, they discovered, was also a seedbed.