Chapter 9: The Gardeners of Silence

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

No one knew who first planted the memory seeds beneath the ruins of the Forest Glen Mall.

But by the time Root Union scouts arrived, the place was no longer abandoned. Moss carpeted the escalators. Trees grew up through the atrium. And down in the old food court, thirteen people sat in total silence, surrounded by glowing vines and hand-drawn glyphs painted on plastic tables.

They didn’t speak.

They didn’t blink.

They waited.

The Root Union called them the Gardeners of Silence.

People who had once heard too much, news cycles, violence, loss, and chosen instead to listen inward. One of them, a woman named Amari, hadn’t spoken in seven years. But her hands told stories in glyphs, drawn with charcoal on the back of old receipts.

“The soil remembers more than the city,” she wrote.

“We are just returning to what was never gone.”

In a hidden corridor near the old electronics store, Tayari (from Chapter 4) found a wall etched with the same glyph that had grown in her lab. Next to it, a phrase written in rust-colored ink:

“Station of the Unspoken. 3 of 7 now awakened.”

She ran her fingers over the wall. The metal vibrated slightly.

“This place is alive,” she whispered.

Then, the sound came. Not from speakers. Not from birds.

From below.

A low vibration. A humming made of memory. The silent Gardeners stood. One by one, they turned to face Tayari.

In unison, they raised their palms.

And every one of them bore the same mark: The Bound One’s glyph, etched like a birthmark into their skin.

“You were not meant to find us,” Amari said suddenly, breaking her seven-year silence.

“But the blade called. And now the roots remember your name.”

Somewhere far above, the mall roof cracked, and a shaft of violet light filtered through.

The seeds below stirred.

And the fourth station began to bloom.