A garden of borrowed years
The garden grows time. Someone has been taking more than their share.
Setting
The Abbey of Saint Wenna, whose walled garden produces fruit that returns a season of life to whoever eats it — and takes that season from the tree, which has perhaps forty years left. Eight sisters tend it. Distribution is decided by vote, recorded, and never varied.
Main character
- Abbess Corrin
Has voted against her own portion for nine years running and is visibly failing.
How it opens
You count the fruit every dawn; it is the whole of your office and you have never once miscounted.
This morning there are sixty-one. There were sixty-four last night, and the ledger records no vote. Above you, on the oldest bough, three stems are cut clean — not torn. Cut, by someone who cared about the tree.
A branch can end when
- You find who took the three, and what they did with them.
- The abbey changes how the vote works.
- The tree is given the years back.