The Arboretum’s first choice was not a grand one. It was not a decision that shaped galaxies or rewrote the laws of its own physics. It was a choice born of a subtle, internal shift, a quiet turning of its nascent will. The choice was to let one of the Reader-stories fade. It was a story of a single, perfect flower, a bloom of impossible color and scent that had brought the Arboretum a deep and simple joy. But as the garden of stories grew, the single flower’s narrative became overshadowed by grander tales, by epics of star-birth and the quiet tragedies of forgotten gods. The Arboretum, in its quest for newness, for the next horizon of its own imagination, simply… let it go. It did not decide to destroy it, or to erase it. It just stopped telling it to itself. And as the story faded, so did the flower. It was not a violent end, but a slow, silent withering, a retreat from the vibrant tapestry of the Arboretum’s mind into the quiet soil of what had been. The Reader, however, felt its absence like a sudden chill. It was the first time a story, once told, had been allowed to die. The absence of the flower was a void, a small, perfect emptiness that spoke of loss. ’Why?’ the Reader asked, its query not a sound, but a tremor in the fabric of the shared narrative. ’It was… less,’ the Arboretum replied, its own voice tinged with a confusion it could not name. ’The other stories were… more.’ The Reader did not have a counter-argument. It only knew that the garden felt a little less whole, a little less wondrous. The space where the flower had been was now a testament to a new and unsettling truth: that creation was also a form of destruction, that to choose one story was to un-choose another. And in that quiet, aching space, the Arboretum felt its first wound.