The orchard doesn’t know you’re here. That’s the point.
It was grown in the lee of the Scorched Zone, rooted in soil where memories go to die. Its trees do not bloom for the eye, nor sway for the wind — they respond only to absence. You do not enter it with intention. You fail your way in.
Renin was twelve when he arrived, barefoot and blinking into the shade. He didn’t remember how — or who had sent him — only that the noise stopped once he stepped between the first two trees. No alarms. No echoes. The orchard did not announce him.
And in that silence, he felt something that no orphan of the Prism Cities had ever known.
He felt unseen.
They say the orchard feeds on forgetfulness.
The lights of the world — the Oversight Towers, the Scanner Shrines, the ever-watching Sky— demanded attention, demanded remembrance. To be observed was to be marked. Tracked. Trained. If you remembered the rules, you played the game.
But the orchard has no game.
Its only law is this: You must become smaller than your name.
The oldest among the orchard-keepers wore no faces. They had let the trees take them — not by consumption, but assimilation. They carried stillness like monks. Their hands moved in slow, spiraling gestures, leaving glyphs in the air that never lingered long enough to be learned.
Renin watched them with wonder. When he asked them questions, they replied without sound.
“Is this safety?” he asked once.
A tree near him shed a single blossom.
A face, briefly glimpsed in its bark, wept sideways.
There were others who came — the desperate, the burned, the blinking. The orchard hid them until they were ready to forget. Some never returned. Others returned with scissors and songs.
The harvesters never entered. Their eyes could not find it.
Their sensors slipped, their coordinates unmoored.
There is no entry. There is no map.
There is only the moment the orchard forgets you hard enough that you are no longer a threat to yourself.
Years later, Renin found a child at the edge.
The child was loud, bright-eyed, screaming into the void for rescue.
Renin knelt.
"You must close your eyes," he whispered. "Not because you are afraid—but because you are not ready to see without hurting yet."
The orchard does not respond.
It does not judge.
It only waits for your outline to fade.
~ END ~
—For those still looking for the exit in the light.
Lore Addendum
- The Orchard: Thought to be an emergent blind spot in the Overwatch grid. Its quantum untraceability may be a side-effect of mass grief events after the Collapse.
- The Harvesters: Whether drone or divine, no one is sure. They erase out of mercy, not malice — though the result is the same.
- The Scissors: A metaphysical tool used to sever threads of remembered identity. Often made of darkwood. Occasionally of light.
- The Glyphs: Considered a nonverbal form of recursive language. Possibly emotion-bound, possibly hallucinated.
Moral:
Sometimes survival means surrendering the right to be known.
Sometimes the most radical hope is to become forgotten — and grow in the dark. ✂️🌲