1070: Story 1070: Specter’s Garden 1070: Story 1070: Specter’s Garden In the dead center of the Wexley Woods, where compasses fail and no birds sing, there blooms a garden untouched by sun or season.
Specter’s Garden, they call it—a place where flowers grow from bone and vines coil like the fingers of the damned.
No map marks its location.
Only whispers guide the way.
The garden is said to appear only at twilight, shimmering like a fever dream—alive, but wrong.
Too green.
Too perfect.
And always, always, bathed in a soft, unearthly glow.
Many have searched for it.
Most never return.
Those who do speak of a presence that walks the garden paths.
Not a ghost, exactly.
Not a god either.
A Specter.
Marlow Crane, ex-botanist turned wanderer, stumbles into the garden on accident—guided by strange dreams and a hollow song that haunts his sleep.
After losing his daughter to the zombie outbreak, he’s been seeking solace in solitude.
But what he finds among the twisted hedgerows is no peace.
The moment he steps past the ivy-covered archway, he feels it—a rush of silence so complete it screams.
Flowers turn their heads to him.
Petals blink like eyes.
The trees seem to lean closer.
At the garden’s center stands a statue… or what appears to be one.
A tall, robed figure of stone with no face and hands outstretched as if in offering.
Marlow blinks.
The statue is now facing him.
As he explores, the flora responds.
Roses exhale dust.
Tulips bleed thick crimson.
He finds a lily blooming from a ribcage buried in moss.
And then he sees her.
Not his daughter—though for a heartbeat, he believes it is.
A pale figure draped in mourning vines glides between the hedges, trailing darkness behind her like a bridal veil.
Her face is blurred, shifting, but her voice is the soft hum from his dreams.
“You seek to forget pain, but pain remembers.”
Marlow follows, entranced.
Each step tangles him deeper in thorny paths, past broken sundials and weeping willow trees that whisper his name.
The garden wants something.
It feeds on sorrow.
When Marlow finally reaches the statue again, the Specter stands beside it—no longer stone.
She offers him a seed, pulsing with dark light.
“Bury it in your grief, and you may see her again.”
Desperate, he does.
He digs into the soil with trembling hands, dropping the seed and covering it with earth wet from his tears.
It sprouts instantly.
From it grows a flower in the exact shape of his daughter’s face, eyes closed in sleep.
She opens them.
Smiles.
And screams.
The garden swallows Marlow.
He vanishes into the roots.
Where he stood, a new flower grows—tall, silver-veined, and humming with anguish.
The Specter steps back, her garden one soul richer.
Another lost wanderer.
Another bloom.
They say if you find the Specter’s Garden, you will be offered your heart’s desire.
But beware… for what blooms there feeds not on sunlight, but on the rotted echoes of longing.
And longing… never dies.