Chapter 1: The Garden of the Forgotten Blade

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

The earth did not give up its secrets easily.

Not here, where wild nettle crept across the stone ruins of a long-forgotten greenhouse, where roots tangled like memory beneath the soil. The land just outside Springfield, Ohio, was supposed to be abandoned; just another overgrown patch of rural stillness. But the land had been whispering.

Dr. Anaya Toussaint heard it in her bones before she heard it in the wind.

It started when her team received an anonymous lead. No name, just GPS coordinates and a single line typed in violet text:

“What was buried there remembers you.”

She arrived alone.

The garden was still half-swallowed by the earth, its glass roof shattered long ago. Vines had overtaken the metal framework like a living shroud. But beneath it, beneath a bed of moss and ash, Anaya uncovered something strange: a hilt. Cold to the touch. Embedded in stone, but humming like a living thing.

She crouched over it, searching with her eyes. A shimmer moved across the blade’s edge, even before it had been fully revealed. It wasn’t rust. It wasn’t metal.

It felt like breath.

She exhaled sharply, dizzy. Just then, the wind shifted, and a voice, not her own, fluttered inside her skull like a forgotten lullaby:

“Cerulia is waking. The Weavers of Void are stirring.”

Anaya staggered back. For a moment, the blade pulsed. Beneath the moss, she saw it, etchings too smooth for erosion, too symmetrical for randomness.

Symbols. Glyphs.

She tried to take a picture, but the image refused to render. Her cellphone failed.

“Not tech,” she muttered aloud. “Not magic. Something else.”

Her gloved hands brushed away more dirt, revealing the full blade. It was curved slightly, organic, almost coral-like in design, but laced with an iridescent material that shimmered in violet and blue under the clouds. She pressed her palm against the hilt.

It pulsed again.

MEMORY GLITCH:

A flash of children dancing beneath firelit skies. A great tree made of glass and bone. A voice chanting: “The Bound One watches from beneath the roots…”

Anaya gasped, pulling her hand back. Her pulse thundered in her ears. The blade rested quietly again, inert. Silent.

But in her mind, the words kept echoing:

“The Garden of the Forgotten Blade must bloom again.”

She looked around, heart pounding.

This was no ordinary archaeological site. It was a station of the unspoken. A threshold. The air was thick with ancestral memory, looping like smoke in her lungs.

The blade had been waiting.

She didn’t yet know that disturbing it would awaken more than just old echoes. That it would ripple across timelines. That it would start the awakening of the Dreamcode… and the return of the Weavers.

But something ancient had opened its eyes that day.

And it remembered her name.