The Garden That Remembers Itself
Among my kind, the Dhukura, memory does not live in books. It lives in soil. When I press my hand to the roots of a breathing oak, I can feel the whisper of centuries pulse through the grain — lessons carried not by words but by sap. Our gardens are not monuments; they are recollections that choose to keep growing. To tend them is to recall the world as Moab first made it: alive, listening, never still.
We name this sacred act of remembrance Olan-Mo — “the return to breathing.” It is not worship, not entirely. Worship presumes distance between devotee and divine. The Garden erases that distance, for we were shaped in Moab’s likeness — not of light, but of living patience. Each seed we plant is a syllable of Moab’s original language, and each flowering, an answer to the question the world keeps asking: “Do you remember?”
On the First Garden
In the days following the Great Mourning, when the forests blackened and the rivers fled their beds, we Dhukura were few — no more than a thousand wandering keepers of forgotten green. The Alfra call those years “the Hollow Century.” To us, they were a season of listening. We heard the ground cry beneath our feet, and from that sorrow arose the first Garden of Renewal in the valley of Bralhen. There we buried nothing but silence, and from silence grew the Tree of Ten Thousand Leaves.
Each leaf bore a different pattern of veins, no two alike. Our elders taught that these were the memories of the world reborn — fragments of thought from beings long turned to dust. The leaves did not fall in autumn; they fell when remembered, vanishing in light. Thus, the tree thinned slowly, as if releasing burdens one by one. When at last it stood bare, a single seed remained, glimmering green white. That seed became the mother of all later gardens, and in its Moab’s breath rested once again within reach of touch.
The Three Songs of Growth
Every Dhukura novice must learn the Three Songs of Growth, though few understand them fully before their hundredth year. These are not melodies to be sung aloud, but vibrations carried through the marrow when one works the soil.
- Song of Germination — the acknowledgment of potential, when breath enters stillness.
- Song of Blooming — the expansion of will into beauty, when self becomes multitude.
- Song of Return — the closing of the circle, when form yields back to formlessness.
These songs are not ours to compose; they are ancient harmonies whispered by the Current itself. In the presence of true harmony, even stone may remember how to live. I have seen basalt soften like clay beneath the breath of the second song, roots threading through its surface as if Moab himself were mending an old wound.
Tovan Ki and the Living Vein
The scholars of Luvarel have written that Tovan Ki moves like air through the world. They are correct — for them. But among the Dhukura, the Current does not travel as air; it flows as sap. We call it the Living Vein. Its rhythm is slower, its strength more enduring. To wield the Living Vein is to breathe through root and branch, to know that the leaf and the lung share one design.
When I awaken the Ki within a garden, I do not command. I ask. The roots answer according to memory, not obedience. If my heart beats in discord with the pulse of the soil, the Current retreats. Only when I remember the pattern of Moab’s first breath — inward, outward, patient — does the Vein open and life renew itself.
This is why the Dhukura reject steel when wood will suffice and silence their voices in public paths. Every sound risk rippling through the Vein and disturbing its quiet work. We are often accused of secrecy, yet secrecy is simply respect measured in decibels.
The Reflection of Decay
In the Second Age, many Ida scholars argue that death is an end. We of the Great Gardeners see it differently. Decay is reflection, the necessary counterpart of growth. When Baom’s light scorched too fiercely, Moab gave shade. When life grew arrogant, Moab gave rot — not as punishment, but as equilibrium.
In every sacred grove there is a pit called the Hollow of Remembering. There we bury not bodies but broken promises, unfulfilled oaths, and objects of pride. As they decay, mushrooms bloom upon their surface, drawing nourishment from what was once hubris. The Alfra of Kaelvoris once mocked us for this rite, until they witnessed a blighted field reborn overnight after a single burial. “The garden remembers even what we wish it would forget,” their queen said. She was correct — for remembrance, like soil, is neutral. It receives both poison and prayer with equal hunger.
Encounters with the Mopru
Our oldest records speak of the Mopru — those who twisted Moab’s design to draw sustenance not from growth but from the act of unmaking. The Mopru desecrate gardens to silence memory. Where we cultivate reflection, they cultivate absence. When their armies swept through the Northwestern Marches, we retreated beneath the roots of the oldest trees, shaping hollows that breathed air and light through the Current’s veins. The Mopru axes struck, but their iron dulled, for the Living Vein remembers its enemies.
We still find traces of their corruption: blackened soil that refuses seed, sap that runs like tar. Yet even there, redemption is possible. When a Dhukura completes the Rite of Returning — giving her body back to the earth unburned — her essence is said to travel through the Vein, purifying any place where decay has forgotten its purpose. Death, then, is not defeat but transference: the gardener becoming garden, the breath entering its next circle.
Ethics of Cultivation
Every Dhukura child learns three inviolable laws before they are allowed to touch the sacred soil:
- Take only what breathes willingly. Force is the language of those who have forgotten patience.
- Shape nothing that cannot outlive you. Beauty must inherit itself, not depend upon its maker.
- When you forget, let the earth remind you. Pride dies where humility takes root.
Through these precepts, we remember that cultivation is not creation. It is conversation. The garden does not exist to feed us; it exists so that we might recall what feeding truly means — the exchange between what lives and what listens.
Closing Reflections
I write these words beneath the canopy of the First Grove, where the wind moves like an old friend and the moss glows faintly with its own awareness. I am nearing the end of my tending. When my hands weaken, I will lie among the roots and add my breath to the Living Vein. The soil will remember the shape of my care, and one day, perhaps, a new leaf will rise that whispers my name without speaking it.
This is the way of the Dhukura: not to rule the land, nor to escape it, but to become its language. In the stillness between the seasons, when the wind pauses and the rivers hesitate, I hear Moab’s first breath again — and the garden that remembers itself begins to dream.