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It always started the same. The dilapidated shrine walls began to shimmer as if by a warmthless heat-haze, and suddenly Kamukura was standing at the wooded edge of a garden instead: mossy statues at the gate, clay tiles dappled with smoky-hued petals, trees whose branches seemed to start and stop wherever they pleased, alien constellations in a black sky peering through the gaps the branches left. Outside it was midwinter, but the breeze here smelled of springtime and decay. Each time Kamukura came here they tried to focus their Analysis on some particular smell or sound, trace it back to some too-young origin and expose the irrational illusion of it all. But the threads never frayed as expected; they stretched back in perfect contiguous causality. It was as if the garden had always been here.
A limbic prickle, at that. Still interesting. (And something weary whispered, For now.)
Up ahead, in the heart of the garden, was a lone sunflower. Taller than last time. Not yet in bloom. But now the wind was teasing its leaves, and with it came a voice, if you could call it that, airy and lively and seeping in from all around.
". . .And he did get away with it at first, and I was so proud to hear he'd managed to make anything of my counsel. He was so afraid, you know. Especially of me! But you do know fear is so often an impetus for hope. . ." They approached slowly, seemingly unnoticed on light feet, as the voice moved to the fountain and the fountain babbled on. "And yet right on the way home the car exploded, and he died on the highway. Unbelievable, don't you think so? I never did get to find out what happened to his poor old mother."
It was a story they had heard before. Pored over, cross-referenced. The entity liked to tell them stories when they came, stories of mortals from long ago—in a stirring of leaves here, a rush of water there, now the creeping of an ant's legs. In binaries and balances. It liked to make others view the world as it did, as an interconnected machine, every motion an omen of future chaos to shape, or sway with, or become. It was a desperately apophenic lens, the kind born of loneliness dripping down countless human lifetimes and growing more bleak and pungent with each. Kamukura generally felt they had made contact with something too pathetic to call a deity.
"His soul's actually planted right here, next to yours," the being said with a spider creeping up the sunflower's stalk, in lilting lonely reminiscence. "Ah, when he was alive and in full bloom, you should've seen him! A tall canola flower from the fields of Nyuta, it must've been, earthy and vibrant, just as golden as you'll be. . ."
The spider may have approximated a dry laugh. Only the barest hint of the canola could still be seen, a withered stem, the flaky gold-dust of dead petals.
(The way the presence spoke of legend and struggle never enticed Kamukura, but the fact every mortal it met was doomed never bothered them, either.)
Sensing a trailing-off, Kamukura finally chose to step forward into the clearing and say, by way of greeting, "You talk to the flowers."
And with that, an immensely singular focus turned onto Kamukura—like the water and wind stilled to welcome them, like the absence in the air caressed their skin. A disturbance of Kelvin-Helmholtz swirls drawn in negative space.
They recognized each other.
". . .Ah, hello!" it said in a voice just a little more located, a little more aware.
"I'm sorry I didn't see you right away, how uncouth of me! I often don't know I'm doing it, to be honest. But you know the thing about flowers, they don't actually understand a word you say. . .and it was all reruns, don't worry. You're not missing any crucial points of data. . .and besides, no matter the story I tell, you know how it'll end by now, right?"
"Hello," Kamukura said. "I was not worried."
The anxious breeze relaxed back as it deposited dandelion seeds in their hair. It made them linger for a moment, in the warm wind and the starlight and the distortion they would eventually chart and understand but still did not.
Then, reopening their eyes, they said, "Go on."
Stars like eyes blinked and rippled. A blue morpho flapped its wings in momentary confusion.
Perhaps that came off too terse, vague. They lay down on the cool clay tiles, looked heavenward, and clarified: "You can go on, if you would like. You may continue the story."
The vacuum was slow to respond, but then it sprawled and happily continued on, for when you welcomed it to speak it seldom stopped—the terrible fates of its past charges, the observations of millennia. And Kamukura closed their eyes, felt the stones' embrace, the petals beneath. As they listened their own human form began to melt a little too, shift into something more comfortable.
"It's lucky my sunflower sprung up when it did," the falling petals said at one point as Kamukura was curling up and becoming something fluid and feline and many-limbed. "Sunflowers are hardy and beautiful, but their long roots mean they need a lot of room or they won't turn out quite right. . .is that right? Did I hear that once?"
It was hardly a voice anymore. ". . .I do hope all this empty, fertile soil I've got means it'll stay alive for a while."
But then the words soon softened and melted out of perception completely, and instead became a voiceless buzzing in the bones, spiriting away all the mirage-matter around them into bending light. When Kamukura was there, it seemed just as happy to be with them in silence.