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In Sumeru, evenings always fell too quickly.
The sun went out like an oil lamp snuffed with a weary gesture, leaving behind a trail of orange ashes. The sky took on shades of copper and purple, but to Cyno, the scene looked less like a sunset than a vast wound, a bleeding gash torn open in the vault of the heavens. The gardens of the Akademiya, meanwhile, were heavy with scent — Mourning Flowers and Nilotpalotus intertwined like prayers suspended in the air — yet every fragrance seemed to him corrupted by an invisible smell: that of freshly turned earth, the mute odor of graves.
He walked through those paths like a specter among the living, dragging his steps to the rhythm of the dried hibiscus bells already crumbling to dust. The flowers leaned toward him, weighed down by the heaviness of their own bloom, as if they knew they would not last much longer. Some let their petals fall, scattered on the ground like fragments of shed skin. To Cyno, it was not a promise of renewal, but rather a rosary of tiny deaths, lined up in the evening silence.
The world around him was fading, and every color, every breath, seemed to have lost its substance. The purple of the sky dissolved like the ink of a letter mourned for too long. The green of the gardens was nothing but a dulled reflection, a memory of brilliance. Even the rivers seemed to flow only to remind one of time’s eternal flight, that continuous slide into absence.
For Cyno saw nothing but ghosts in this setting. The silhouettes of trees took the shape of raised, pleading arms. The shadows stretching across the walls were frozen whispers, memories refusing to vanish. And every gust of wind through the foliage carried a name he no longer dared to speak.
It seemed to him that all of Sumeru had become a vegetative mausoleum: a funerary garden where flowers, beautiful even in their agony, bowed like spent candles. Their colors, though vivid, reminded him more of silk shrouds than of promises of life. And in this profusion of scents, Cyno felt nothing but absence, as if each corolla were merely a miniature tomb.
In the silence following the fall of day, he realized that evenings in Sumeru were not just quick : they were relentless, like a curtain drawn over a stage where the main actor had already vanished.
For some time now, he had been seeing Tighnari.
It always began the same way: a green glint at the bend of a path, like an emerald spark set down in the heart of twilight. Then came the rustle of his fennec ears, a delicate whisper akin to the shiver of tall grasses when the wind slips through them. Cyno had only to turn his head, and he was there, as if he had never left. As if death itself had been nothing more than a bad dream.
Tighnari smiled.
His smile had the lightness of wildflowers, yet Cyno could clearly see that it was nothing but a rootless bloom, a fragile beauty suspended in an invisible void. He spoke of his plants, of their whims, of how some closed at the slightest touch while others opened in the depths of night, thirsty for starlight. His voice carried that sharp, passionate timbre that made every word incandescent. Cyno listened, captive to the mirage, convinced that his world now rested solely on that illusion of flesh and breath.
— You don’t sleep enough, Cyno. Your dark circles are worse than mine.
Always that teasing tone, half tender, half irritating, like a bitter scent one cannot help but breathe in again.
Cyno did not answer. He merely walked at his side.
They walked along the gardens of Sumeru like twin shadows. At times, Tighnari would crouch before a withered flower and caress it with the tips of his fingers, as if to comfort it in its decline. His hands seemed to give life, yet Cyno knew they were nothing but smoke; when he reached out with his own to grasp them, he met only the icy mist of memories. The petals themselves, beneath the fennec’s touch, seemed to hesitate between lifting themselves up or dissolving away.
At other times, Tighnari would pick a flower — always the most fragile, the most faded — and slip it behind Cyno’s ear. The General remained still, lips pressed tight, unable to protest. He bore the offering the way one bears a scar, knowing it would wither quickly, yet unable to cast it aside. The flower leaned against his temple, as if it too knew it already belonged to the dead.
They spoke little. Most of the time, Cyno simply walked in silence, his eyes fixed on that silhouette he feared might vanish at every turn of the path. And each evening, as night fell over the gardens, Tighnari drifted away, dissolving into the shadows like ink spilled into water. Cyno was left alone, hands open, holding in his palms the absent scent of a ghost.
But there was something strange.
Tighnari always held flowers, as if his hands no longer knew how to rest. Yet they were never vibrant. His bouquets seemed made of silent agonies: pale corollas, petals already crumbling, stems bent like bones too fragile. With every step, fragments slipped from between his fingers, breaking down into golden dust that mingled with the breeze. It was as if he were not carrying flowers, but ashes in disguise.
One evening, as the moon clung to the sky like a funerary lamp, Cyno dared to break the silence:
— Why do you only pick dead flowers?
Tighnari froze, his ears trembling like sails in the wind. Then he lifted his eyes to him. His smile no longer held any of the sharpness Cyno once knew; it was gentle, faded, like a scar one no longer dares to touch.
— Because they’re the only ones still waiting for me, he murmured.
Those words scattered through the air like petals carried away by the river. Cyno felt his heart tighten, painfully. He looked away, unable to face the truth taking shape, too obvious to be denied any longer. Something was wrong; he had known it from the beginning, but he clung to Tighnari’s presence like a buoy lost in the middle of an endless desert.
Without him, there was only silence.
And that silence, Cyno feared more than death itself. So he walked beside this specter, convinced that his steps were taking root in a reality still tangible. But deep down, he knew it: Tighnari already belonged to the world of dead flowers, to that invisible garden where souls lie down like broken lilies.
Each evening, when the wind rose, Cyno watched the flowers in Tighnari’s hands crumble a little more. They lost their petals the way one loses the memory of a loved face: in fragments, in frayed pieces, until only a fragile skeleton of stems and dry threads remained. It should have worried him, but he saw in it nothing more than a metaphor, a strangeness his mind hastened to disguise as poetry.
He should have understood that those bouquets did not come from the gardens of Sumeru, but from a place more distant, more silent. Yet Cyno refused to push his thoughts that far. He preferred to believe that Tighnari chose them by taste, out of that bittersweet irony that had always accompanied him: finding beauty in what is fading, tenderness in what is collapsing.
Each evening, he told himself it was nothing. That it was just a habit. That it was not… more than that.
And each evening, he chose not to understand. To look away when a petal dissolved in the hollow of his palm like a handful of sand. To half-smile when Tighnari slipped an already withered flower behind his ear, as if offering him a fragile vow.
Deep down, Cyno knew. He knew something was slipping away from him, that this walking companion did not carry the same weight as he did, not the same density of flesh and breath. But he clung to his presence like a rope over the void, because a mirage was better than the abyss.
So he held silence close, refusing to listen to the murmurs of the wind, refusing to read in those withered flowers anything other than a tender gesture. He kept walking, kept listening to him, kept convincing himself that as long as he saw that green glint at the bend of a path, he was not alone.
Perhaps that was his only truth: preferring to hold a fragrant shadow close to his heart rather than face naked absence.
Then those nights were the worst.
They opened like a dark wound over the sleeping city and Cyno would sit in the gardens, where no one came anymore. The lanterns had long since gone out, the empty paths bathed in a darkness where only the moon sketched ghosts of light. It was in that silence that he always found him.
Tighnari was waiting, seated in the shadow of an old date palm. His silhouette seemed carved from the gloom, fragile yet unchanging, as if time no longer had any hold over him. His arms were always full of withered flowers: bouquets of silent agonies, crumpled corollas hanging like eyelids grown too heavy. They exuded the scent of humus, damp earth, of eternal autumn.
He spoke. Of his research, of his aborted experiments, of those rare plants he had never been able to make bloom anywhere but in dreams. His voice sharpened with flashes of anger when he spoke of ignorance, the stupidity of those who trampled the world’s beauty. Then it grew lower, more trembling, when he let his doubts slip free —that fear of being nothing more than a breath too quickly dissipated.
He did not look at Cyno; his eyes drifted to the withered flowers between his fingers, as if he did not dare speak aloud what his silences had been screaming for a long time.
— You know, he murmured, I’ve always been afraid of disappearing too quickly… like those flowers that barely open before the wind already tears them away. I’m afraid of being nothing more than a fading scent, a fleeting trace on stone. Ghosts have no future, Cyno… and sometimes I wonder if I’m not already one of them.
He paused, his ears trembling softly in the breeze. Then, almost in a single breath, he let it out:
— But what frightened me the most wasn’t death. It was you. You, who could forget me. You, who could one day stop seeing me.
His hands tightened a little more around the dulled corollas he held against himself, and a rain of petals fell at his feet, like mute tears.
— I loved so deeply, Cyno. Do you understand ? My heart never stopped beating for you, even when everything else was coming to a halt. It was like stubborn ivy, clinging to ruins, climbing even cold stones in search of light. But I was so afraid you would look away, that you would let my presence crumble like those flowers you no longer pick up.
His voice broke barely, but he continued, stubborn, as if he feared silence would swallow him forever:
— I’m afraid of being forgotten. Afraid that my name will dissolve like a shadow in water. Afraid that, even in your heart, I will end up being just another ghost.
At last, he lifted his eyes to him, and in their glow shone a desperate tenderness, that of a bloom destined to fade too soon.
Cyno listened. He, who normally cut conversations short, reducing everything to the essential, found himself drinking in each word as one drinks a water known to be limited. He stayed there, motionless, dreading that the calm might extinguish the illusion, for every phrase from Tighnari resonated within him like a fragile bloom destined to disappear.
Sometimes, unconsciously, he would place a hand on Tighnari’s shoulder. He felt that absence of familiar warmth, like dew laid upon a funerary stone. That coldness that did not belong to the world of the living. And each time, his heart tightened. It was like touching a flower plunged into ice: intact beauty, yet abandoned by life.
He had preferred to believe it was fatigue, the whims of the night, a madness that concerned only him. He had thought that if his fingers sometimes passed through Tighnari’s shoulder like a draft of air, it was because he was dreaming, because he let himself be swallowed by an illusion born of his own grief. So Cyno withdrew his hand, but never fast enough to avoid feeling that void climbing up his arm, all the way to his heart. He pretended not to think of it, feigning that the icy flesh beneath his fingers was nothing more than a nocturnal fancy.
However, he knew.
He knew that Tighnari was both here and elsewhere, in this garden and in another, invisible. That his withered flowers were not aesthetic choices, but silent messengers from a realm he did not dare name. And despite it all, Cyno returned each night. Because between absence and this scented specter of dust and dead flowers, he always preferred the ghost.
He had chosen blindness, because the alternative was too painful. But the truth always finds a way to assert itself.
One night, the lamp he had brought to prolong their time flickered, casting a pale light over the stones of the deserted garden. Cyno sought nothing; he simply wanted to look longer at that face he feared losing with every blink. Yet his gaze was caught by a detail he could not ignore.
There was him, his shadow sharply defined on the ground.
And there was Tighnari, sitting beside him, haloed in light.
But behind him… nothing. Not a trace. Not a reflection.
His breath froze. His heart tightened, beating against his chest like a trapped bird. His lips trembled, searching for words that refused to form.
He reached out instinctively, as he had done so many times before. But this time, it was different. His palm passed through Tighnari’s not as one touches a frozen surface, but as one moves through water: a fluidity without substance, a softness that did not exist. The contact broke before it had even existed.
He stood frozen. Unable to move.
— Why… why are you…
His voice caught in his throat, strangled by the horror he had so long refused to name.
Tighnari lifted his amber-and-green eyes to him, full of resigned gentleness. No anger, no sorrow. Only a desperately calm tenderness, like a flower accepting to wither without a fight.
— You already know, Cyno. You’re just refusing to accept it.
In that moment, Cyno saw the flowers in his arms crumble. They fell apart like parchments too old, reduced to gray dust carried away by the wind. The air around him filled with that light ash, fine as a funerary perfume. And in the silence it left behind, Cyno finally understood.
It wasn’t the flowers that were dying a little more each evening. It was he who was clinging to a spark that no longer existed.
Tighnari had never waited in those gardens. Not in the way he had hoped.
What he saw was only an echo, a stubborn memory his heart refused to bury. A shadow born of his denial, of his loneliness.
Tighnari was dead. For a long time already.
And Cyno remained there, alone in the middle of the gardens, the flickering lamp at his side, his hands open and empty, like a man still clutching an invisible bouquet.
The gardens filled with a terrible silence, a silence that was no longer peaceful. It was not the gentle one of sleepy nights, but a heavy, suffocating absence, a leaden shroud fallen over the world. Even the crickets, even the rustle of the palms, seemed to have fallen silent to make way for this void that screamed without a voice.
Cyno fell to his knees.
His legs gave way all at once, as if the ground had sucked out all his strength. His body trembled, unable to contain what he had held in for far too long. His throat tightened, and for the first time in years, tears finally sprang forth. They rolled down his cheeks, burning, before crashing against the cold stones like a belated rain, a rain that always comes too late after a drought.
Each drop seemed to toll like a discreet knell, like a useless offering to the invisible roots beneath his knees. He felt as if he were crying not only for Tighnari, but for all the flowers he had failed to protect, for all the presences he had let die without ever finding the words.
He remained like that for a long time, collapsed, until the wind’s breath dried his tears a little on his skin. And when, at last, with difficulty, he lifted his head, the vision he had dreaded was confirmed.
Tighnari had vanished.
There was no longer that emerald halo at the bend of the path, no longer that silhouette seated in the shadow of the date palm, no longer that bittersweet voice filling his nights. The garden, vast and deserted, stretched before him like an open tomb.
Nothing remained.
Nothing but a carpet of withered flowers, scattered by the wind. They covered the ground like a clumsy offering, a funerary adornment. Their pale petals drifted away, carried by the currents of air, until they blended with the dust of the stones. Cyno reached out with a trembling hand, wanting to hold at least one of them, but they disintegrated at the slightest touch, as if even their memory refused to belong to him.
Then he understood that this mourning would never be spoken.
That he would never have a grave on which to lay his prayers, never a ritual to seal the absence. He had only this void, and this silence.
And Cyno remained alone. Alone with his grief, alone with the ghost he had loved to madness, alone with these dead flowers that, each night, would remind him of the shadow of a smile.
The wind swept through the gardens, carrying the dried corollas in a graceless dance, like a rain of ashes. Cyno watched them drift away, powerless, until he noticed that one remained, just one, lying before him.
It wasn't crumbling.
Fragile, faded, its twisted stem bending under its own weight, but its petals—silver-washed blue—still held. A Nilotpalotus. Flower of the deep waters, which blooms only under the moon, in the heart of the silent forests. A flower Tighnari loved so much, which he described as “the sky’s radiance fallen into the lakes.”
Cyno took it in his trembling hands. It was icy, yet it did not break. He held it to his chest as if it were a fragment of eternity, the last tangible remnant of what he had just lost.
And in that gesture, he found himself believing that Tighnari had left it there for him. Not a dead flower among others, but a trace, a proof. A memory he would not have to invent, not have to dream.
So Cyno stood up, the Nilotpalotus pressed to his heart. It would be his burden and his refuge, his only talisman in a world now too empty. He would never know why this flower had endured when all the others had turned to dust. But he chose to believe it was his. That it was Tighnari.
And each night, when he returned to these gardens, he would hold it between his fingers, convinced he could hear in its subtle fragrance a breath, a voice, a presence that refused to vanish entirely.