1067: Story 1067: Queen of the Rotflowers 1067: Story 1067: Queen of the Rotflowers They say the garden grew overnight.
Where once stood barren ash and splintered bones outside the corpse-pit of Vire Hollow, now bloomed a thicket of crimson and black flora—Rotflowers, they were called.
Their petals pulsed like wounds, their stems twitched with sinew, and their scent was the perfume of decay.
And in the garden’s center stood her.
A skeletal figure wreathed in thorns and mold, flesh wrapped in vine-silk and spores, a crown of dead blossoms blooming from her tangled hair.
She was the Queen of the Rotflowers, and she was waking.
The locals believed she was born from a witch burned wrong, her ashes sown into cursed ground soaked in plagueblood.
They warned never to walk barefoot near the rotfield, never to speak the name Eiria, and never, under any circumstance, to pick the flowers.
But when winter came late and the dead wouldn’t stay buried, a foolish gravedigger named Cal Rowan did exactly that.
Desperate to earn coin, Cal plucked a single bloom to sell to a wandering apothecary.
The moment the stem snapped, the garden screamed.
From the ground, vines erupted—wrapping his limbs, peeling skin, whispering prayers in a tongue only the worms understood.
Cal’s body didn’t die.
It transformed, bent backward, eyes replaced by fungi that bloomed and blinked.
He was the first of her new children.
With every full moon since, the garden grew—stretching across the moors, devouring homes and headstones alike.
The Rotflowers multiplied, each one containing the face of someone lost, eyes fluttering beneath petals.
And from the center, the Queen sang in a voice made of wind through hollow skulls.
“Come to me, my carrion sons.
Let the living remember what they buried…”
Sister Naeve, a once-devout nun turned blasphemous relic-hunter, ventured to Vire Hollow seeking the truth behind the garden.
Armed with a blade soaked in saint’s blood and a heart full of guilt, she followed the trail of blooming rot to its origin.
There, she met the Queen—not a monster, but a martyr.
Eiria spoke of betrayal, burned at the stake by jealous priests for healing the sick with blasphemous herbs.
In her dying breath, she cursed the land, calling forth the seed of Rotmorg, an eldritch gardener-god who fertilized flesh and fed on memory.
Naeve, half-entranced, almost dropped her blade.
Until she saw her sister’s face blooming from one of the flowers—sobbing silently from within.
Then she remembered her purpose.
The clash was short and tragic.
The Queen bled spores, her shriek blooming into a storm of petals.
Naeve plunged the saint’s blade into Eiria’s heart-vine, anchoring it to the earth.
The garden convulsed.
And then went silent.
But still… on nights when the fog rolls thick through Vire Hollow, flowers bloom from fresh graves.
And if you listen close, you can hear them whisper:
“Long live the Queen…”