5 The Garden of Unborn Worlds

Liora stepped through a veil of mist and entered a garden unlike any she had seen. Its expanse was vast, luminous, and impossible to measure. Flowers glowed with colours that had no names, trees arched impossibly high, and streams of silver light wound through the soil like living threads.

Yet she noticed something strange: not every flower bloomed. Some remained as buds, suspended in anticipation. Others had shrivelled, their forms unresolved. And some could not exist at all — not because they were neglected, but because the soil, the sunlight, and the air were not yet arranged to allow them.

She walked carefully among the paths, touching a petal here, tracing a branch there. Each interaction shifted the garden subtly. New blossoms opened where her hands had lingered; new streams formed, reflecting stars that had never shone before. And yet, some buds remained stubbornly closed. Possibility was alive, but not all possibilities were simultaneously available.

Liora realised with quiet awe: some worlds are structurally impossible until the conditions of their emergence have been created. The present is never neutral; it is fragile, contingent, and world-making. Possibility does not wait in a void; it arises only when constraints align in the patterns that make action and form intelligible.

She saw entire patches of the garden that had emerged only because other areas had been shaped first. A tree’s roots had reorganised the soil to allow a hidden stream to flow; a single flower had coaxed neighbouring buds into existence through its orientation in sunlight. Worlds unfolded only because prior articulations had made them intelligible. Nothing simply appeared. Everything was conditioned, patterned, and emergent.

As she lingered, the garden shimmered, revealing a secret she had felt but never named: the past was not “less advanced.” It was differently constrained. The future was not open. And the present was a fragile, structured, and world-making field of possibility, where every action mattered because it reorganised the space in which the next action could occur.

Liora knelt by a bud that had yet to bloom. She touched it lightly, and it opened, revealing a form she had never imagined. She understood then that she was not simply observing a garden; she was participating in it. Every step, every touch, every act of attention was an intervention in the topology of the world.

The garden did not promise completeness, nor did it threaten failure. It only revealed what could exist, now made possible through structure, articulation, and inhabitation. Liora rose, leaving paths glowing behind her, carrying the quiet knowledge that some worlds could not have happened before — and that the present, fragile as it was, was alive in their unfolding.