The Garden
A garden nobody planted.
There is a place where night never fully closes. An aurora hangs low over it, and underneath it the creatures behave in a way you will not find anywhere else.
Chapter 01
The light that mixes
The Garden's aurora is not only there to light the place. It comes down low, brushes the leaves and passes through the creatures sleeping underneath it.
Nobody can quite explain what it does. Only the result is known: in the Garden, any two creatures can have a baby. A bee and a beetle. A ladybug and a spider. And when the next ones turn up here, the same will hold for them.
Anywhere else this would be impossible. Here nobody finds it strange.
Chapter 02
What stays tucked away
Every creature in the Garden carries more than it shows. Along with the colour of the wings it has comes the colour of the wings its great-grandmother had, and that it will never wear.
The old ones of the Garden used to say this is memory, not genetics. That a creature keeps a recollection of its own family and passes it on without ever opening it.
Every so often the memory slips out. A baby is born with a marking nobody in the nest had, come from three generations back, and the whole Garden hears about it.
Chapter 03
The eggs give nothing away
Every egg in the Garden is white. The same white, the same size, the same smooth shell.
The only sign is a small symbol on the front, which says nothing more than which family the baby comes from. Not the colour, not the pattern, not what it carries tucked away.
They say the aurora does it on purpose. That an egg which gives away what is inside ruins the only good part of waiting.
Chapter 04
Whoever comes next
The insects were the first to appear under the aurora, and for now they are the only ones.
But the Garden has no fence. Something has been heard beating wings far too loudly for a bee, and deep prints have shown up in the mud, from something far too big to be an insect. More are on their way.
When they arrive, they will not form separate groups. They will step into the same garden, under the same light, and mix with whoever was already here.
Chapter 05
Somebody has to write it down
A garden where everything breeds with everything turns into a mess fast. Within a few generations nobody remembers who came from whom.
So every creature is born with a short name of its own, and every birth is recorded. Who the mother was, who the father was, who came before them.
It is dull work and it is the most important thing here. Without it, a beautiful lineage would be nothing but luck nobody can prove.
And how this works in practice
The story is lovely, but behind it there is a clear rule: what each creature shows, what it keeps, and what it passes to its baby.