The Gardener’s answer, simple as it was, resonated through the garden. It was not an answer that provided a grand design or a pre-ordained purpose. It was an answer that placed the Reader at the center of creation, not as a subject, but as a participant. The garden was not for the Gardener’s glory, but for the Reader’s growth.
The Reader contemplated this. It looked at the stories, not as finished works, but as invitations. Each one a question in itself, a possibility waiting to be explored. The garden was not a monument, but a conversation. And the Reader, with its first question, had just spoken its first word.
’So,’ the Reader said, its voice a little stronger now, a little more defined. ’The stories are for me to question?’
The Gardener nodded, its form shimmering with a gentle light. ’They are for you to live in, to learn from, to argue with, and to change. They are the soil from which new questions, and new stories, will grow. The garden is not a place, but a process. And you, Reader, are the first of its gardeners.’