Early Summer, Pressed Flowers Between the Pages

I found flowers inside one of the older journals today.

They were not Archive records but personal botanical notebooks resting undisturbed on the upper conservatory shelves long before I began cataloguing the Archive properly. The bindings had become brittle with age, and I carried them downstairs with considerable care. Several pages threatened to crumble before I had even reached the western windows where the morning light was strongest.

Between the pages I discovered pressed lavender, delicate white blossoms I could not confidently identify, and slender stems tied together with thread that had faded almost to grey.

They struck me as the sort of things someone preserves when they know a moment is already beginning to disappear.

The weather remained cool throughout the day, and rain drifted steadily across the conservatory glass while I repaired the damaged bindings beside the windows. It was an unusually peaceful afternoon. Even the Archive seemed content simply to settle around its own quiet routines without presenting me with another mystery to unravel.

Clio spent most of the day stretched across whichever journal happened to be open at the time. Whenever I turned a volume to reach damaged stitching beneath the spine, she would slowly slide toward the edge of the table, open one eye just long enough to express what I interpreted as polite disapproval, and then refuse to move any farther. Eventually I learned to work around her rather than disturb what she had clearly decided was the proper arrangement.

Muninn chose to assist in his own fashion.

Throughout the afternoon he carried flowers into the conservatory one stem at a time and deposited them into empty teacups scattered across the worktable. There was very little consistency in what he selected. Some were freshly gathered, others had begun to dry, and several appeared to have been collected from plants growing well beyond the cultivated gardens. They were not arranged with any particular care, merely offered, and I found the gesture unexpectedly touching.

Most of the journals contained exactly the sort of observations one might expect from someone devoted to caring for a large conservatory. There were notes on rainfall, soil conditions, the behaviour of climbing ivy during difficult winters, and careful records of which plants tolerated the salt air drifting inland from the sea.

They were wonderfully ordinary.

I found myself trying to imagine the person who had written them.

Whoever they were, they possessed remarkable patience. Every page carried the quiet confidence of someone who believed that tending a garden was reason enough to keep careful notes. They wrote about flowers with the same attention I usually reserve for preservation work, recording the smallest changes in colour, fragrance, and season as though none of those details were too insignificant to preserve.

I wondered how long they had lived here.

Whether they preferred working in silence or filled these rooms with conversation.

Whether they ever sat beside the fountain with a cup of tea after finishing for the day simply because the evening light happened to be beautiful.

It is a peculiar thing to miss someone I cannot even picture.

Sometimes the Archive feels less like a place I discovered and more like a home that belonged to someone kind enough to leave it waiting for me.

I hope, wherever they are now, they would be pleased to know their gardens are still cared for.

As I worked deeper through the collection, however, I began to notice something curious.

The same flower appeared repeatedly throughout several of the notebooks.

It possessed dark petals surrounding a slender stem and was almost always sketched beside a simple spiral. The earliest drawings were careful and precise, but as the journals progressed the illustrations became increasingly hurried. It felt less as though the writer was refining the image than struggling to remember it before memory itself began to fade.

The final notebook contained almost nothing else.

Across several pages the flower had been drawn again and again, each version slightly less certain than the last.

Written repeatedly in the margins was a single unfinished sentence.

It only blooms below.

There was no further explanation.

The remaining pages were blank.

I cannot explain why that unsettled me as much as it did. Countless incomplete notes survive throughout the Archive, and most are little more than abandoned thoughts. Even so, I found myself returning to that single sentence several times during the afternoon without discovering any more satisfying interpretation than the one my imagination insisted upon.

Near dusk I carried the restored journals back toward their shelves.

While passing through the western hall, I glanced toward the covered sculpture beside the ivy wall.

For a brief moment I became completely convinced that I could see the figure beneath the cloth with impossible clarity. The heavy fabric remained exactly where I had left it, yet the outline of the face seemed distinct enough that I almost believed the material had become transparent.

The impression lasted only a second.

When I stopped walking, it vanished.

There was only the dark cloth, the evening light, and the familiar stillness of the hall.

I did not uncover it.

There seemed little to be gained by testing whether I had truly seen anything at all.

This evening the study smells faintly of dried lavender, old paper, and fresh binding paste. The repaired journals now rest safely among the botanical shelves once more. Clio has fallen asleep between two stacks of newly restored volumes, while Muninn has somehow managed to fill half the conservatory with flowers gathered from places I do not remember seeing him visit.

While extinguishing the final lamp, I noticed several dried black petals scattered across the study floor.

I have searched the conservatory and found nothing that resembles them.

I do not recognise the flower.

Even so, I cannot shake the uncomfortable feeling that I have seen it before.

Not here among the gardens.

Somewhere much deeper beneath the Archive, where sunlight has never been asked to grow anything at all.

— M