The old woman, Elara, sat on her porch, the twilight painting the sky in hues of bruised purple and soft orange. Her gnarled fingers cradled a small, obsidian seed. It wasn't a seed from any known plant; it was smooth, cold, and pulsed with a faint, inner warmth.
Decades ago, a traveler, his face etched with the weariness of forgotten roads, had given it to her. "Plant it," he'd said, his voice a rasping whisper. "When the time is right, it will bloom. But be warned, it blooms with memories, not flowers."
Elara had tucked it away, a strange curiosity, forgotten until now. The traveler's words, once a cryptic puzzle, now resonated with a chilling clarity. Her mind, once sharp, was fading, memories slipping like sand through her fingers. She felt a desperate need to hold onto them, to anchor herself to the past.
She walked to the small garden, her steps slow and deliberate. The soil was dark, rich, and ready. She pressed the obsidian seed into the earth, a silent plea for remembrance.
That night, she dreamed. Not of her childhood, or her marriage, or her children, but of fragments, shards of moments that weren't hers. A bustling marketplace filled with strange, melodic chatter. A towering city of shimmering crystal, reflecting a double sun. A battle fought on a field of black sand, under a sky of swirling, crimson clouds.
She woke with a gasp, her heart pounding, her mind reeling. The seed had bloomed, not into a plant, but into a cascade of alien memories, vivid and overwhelming. She felt the weight of centuries, the echoes of lives lived and lost.
The next day, a strange, crystalline flower had sprung from the earth, its petals shimmering with iridescent light. Each petal held a different scene, a captured moment from the memories she'd dreamt. She touched a petal, and a wave of emotion washed over her, not her own, but a deep, sorrowful longing.
Elara understood. The seed hadn't just bloomed with memories; it had bloomed with the collective memory of a lost civilization, a people whose history had been scattered and forgotten. The traveler had given her not a plant, but a legacy.
She sat by the flower, her gaze fixed on the shimmering petals, and began to write. She wrote of the crystal city, the black sand battlefield, the melodic chatter of the marketplace. She wrote until her fingers ached, until the twilight painted the sky in hues of bruised purple and soft orange. She wrote to preserve the memories, to give voice to the voiceless, to ensure that their story wouldn't be lost again. She became the keeper of their past, the gardener of their memory.
