Where there is love, there is life

 

Elara traced the edge of a rose petal with her fingertip. It should have been a deep, velvety crimson, the kind of red that felt warm to the touch. Instead, it was the color of faded brick, tinged with a dusty grey that seemed to absorb the light. Like everything else in Aethelgard, it was forgetting what it was supposed to be.

This garden, tucked behind the small cottage she’d inherited from her grandmother, was her last bastion against The Quiet Fade. It was a name the townspeople had given the phenomenon, a creeping lethargy that had stolen more than just the color from their world. It had thinned the laughter in the tavern, silenced the music in the square, and etched permanent lines of resignation onto the faces of her neighbors. Traditions that had been the town’s bedrock for centuries were now little more than dusty habits, performed without joy.

Elara’s pansies were pale lilac instead of royal purple. Her sunflowers, which should have been audacious bursts of gold, strained towards a hazy sun with heads of muted yellow, like butter left out too long. It wasn’t a lack of care. She coaxed and cajoled them, enriching the soil with compost, whispering words of encouragement as her grandmother had taught her. But it was like trying to fill a leaking bucket. For every drop of life she poured in, two seemed to seep away into the thirsty, tired earth.

She stood and brushed the dirt from her patched trousers, her gaze sweeping over the town that sloped down the gentle hill from her cottage. Aethelgard looked like a water-painting left out in the rain. The cheerful blue of the baker’s door was now the color of a winter sky. The vibrant green of the town common was a sickly, olive-grey. Even the people, moving slowly through the cobbled streets, seemed to wear colors that had surrendered to the encroaching grey. Hope, Elara thought, was the most vibrant color of all, and it had been the first to go.

A sharp, rattling cough echoed from the path below. Elara’s shoulders tensed. The Blackwoods.

She saw him then. Kael Blackwood. He was walking alone, his shoulders hunched against a chill that wasn’t in the air. He carried a worn leather satchel, his head down, his dark hair falling over his eyes. The Blackwood family lived on the edge of town, in a perpetually shadowed manor that seemed to lean into itself, as if weary of standing. Theirs was a different kind of fading. It wasn't the slow, gentle Greying of the town; it was a curse, a sickness they called ‘The Shade’ that had haunted their line for generations. It hollowed out their cheeks, stole the light from their eyes, and left them with a persistent, brittle cough that was the curse’s signature.

The townspeople pitied the Blackwoods, but they also feared them. They were a living reminder that things could always be worse than a slow fade; they could be a swift and certain decay.

Kael stopped walking. He looked up, not at the town, but towards the wild woods that bordered her property. For a moment, his gaze caught hers. His eyes were a startling, clear grey, like storm clouds before the rain. There was a depth in them she hadn’t expected—not the emptiness of The Fade, but a sharp, painful awareness. He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, then continued on his way, his form soon swallowed by the path that led to his family’s cursed home.

The brief connection left an odd warmth in Elara’s chest. A flicker of something that wasn’t grey.

Later that evening, as twilight bled the last remnants of color from the sky, Elara sat by her hearth, cleaning her grandmother’s old gardening tools. She ran a whetstone along the edge of a trowel, the rhythmic shing-shing a comforting sound in the quiet house. Her fingers brushed against a false bottom in the wooden toolbox. She’d found it years ago. Inside lay her grandmother’s journal, its leather cover cracked with age.

She opened it to a page she had read a hundred times, the elegant script telling a story she desperately wanted to believe.

The Fade is not new, her grandmother had written. It is a sleep, not a death. The town’s heart has grown quiet. It has forgotten its rhythm. But the old magic remains, dormant in the roots and stones. It waits for a love strong enough to wake it. A love that is not a gentle simmer, but a blazing fire. Find that fire, my little sprout. Ubi est amor, ibi est vita.

Elara closed her eyes, clutching the journal. Where there is love, there is life. It was a beautiful sentiment, a lovely fairy tale to tell a child. But in a town that had forgotten how to love anything with passion—itself, its future, its own history—it felt like an impossible key to a long-lost door.

The next day, she found a reason to go into the woods. A rare patch of moonpetal moss, her grandmother had written, was the only thing that could soothe the rust on old tools. She walked past the borders of her own fading garden and into the ancient forest, where the trees stood like grey sentinels.

She found him by a small, hidden creek. Kael. He wasn’t coughing. He was sitting on a moss-covered rock, a sketchpad open on his lap. He was drawing the creek, his charcoal pencil moving with a fluid grace that seemed at odds with the sickness that was supposed to define him.

He didn't notice her at first, so completely absorbed was he in his work. Elara watched, fascinated. He wasn't sketching a grey, fading world. On his paper, the water danced with light. The moss was a living emerald. The stones were imbued with a strength and texture that the real world had long since lost. He was drawing the world not as it was, but as it. Download here free