There came a time when even the names of the gods were forgotten.
The languages of mortals changed, rivers shifted their paths, mountains wore down into valleys — but the blossoms still bloomed.
No one remembered why they fell early each spring, or why the petals sometimes glowed faintly at dusk.
It was simply what the world did.
And perhaps that was enough.
---
On a morning of soft rain, a child wandered alone through the grove. She was no scholar or seer — just a curious soul chasing a butterfly between the trees.
The petals drifted all around her, catching in her hair, clinging to her small hands. She laughed and spun until the forest itself seemed to turn with her.
Then, as the wind paused, she saw it — one single blossom still clinging to a branch while all others had fallen.
It swayed, trembling, as if waiting for her.
She stepped closer and reached out. The petal loosened, gliding gently down into her palm.
It was lighter than air, and yet it pulsed faintly — as though it had a heartbeat.
> "You're warm," she whispered, smiling.
---
Far beneath her feet, the roots stirred.
They no longer glowed or sang; their work was long done. But once each age, when the world turned toward its gentlest light, the Heartroot sent a single breath upward — not to awaken, but to remember.
The breeze lifted through the soil, rising toward the grove, brushing past the trees like a sigh.
The child felt it.
The petal in her hand shimmered once, and she heard — or perhaps only imagined — a voice.
> "Dream softly, little one. The world remembers through you."
She blinked. "Who are you?"
The voice did not answer, only laughed — a sound like wind through blossoms.
The girl laughed too, though she didn't know why. She tucked the glowing petal into her pocket and ran home through the rain.
---
That night, she dreamt.
She stood in a field of stars that swayed like flowers, their light falling in slow waves across an endless sky.
Two figures waited there — one robed in soft pink and white, the other cloaked in crimson shadow.
They were not frightening, nor strange.
They were familiar, like faces seen in stories she'd never been told.
> "You found our last song," said the woman of blossoms.
> "Was it yours?" the child asked.
The darker figure smiled faintly. "It was everyone's. You just happened to listen."
The girl looked around her. "Is this heaven?"
> "No," Sakura said, kneeling so their eyes met. "It's the place between breaths — where the world dreams of itself."
> "Will it wake?"
> "Always."
The petals began to swirl again, and as they rose, the child saw her own reflection in their shimmer — not divine, not ancient, but simply alive.
---
When she awoke, the petal in her pocket had turned to dust.
But the dust glowed faintly for a moment before fading into the air.
Outside, the rain had stopped. The grove shone under a pale morning sun, each blossom heavy with dew that sparkled like memory.
The child ran to the window, breathing in the scent of the petals on the wind.
Somewhere in her heart, the hum of the roots echoed once — quiet, steady, eternal.
She smiled, not knowing why, and whispered a word that felt older than time:
> "Thank you."
---
In that breath, somewhere unseen — beneath mountains, rivers, and sleeping roots — the world exhaled in kind.
The cycle turned once more.
Not as a circle of sorrow or divine decree, but as the simple rhythm of life:
growth, rest, remembrance, and renewal.
Petals fell.
New buds formed.
And in the soft silence between heartbeats, the song of the first spring still lingered — faint, endless, kind.
It was no longer the song of gods, or even of spirits.
It was the song of everything that endures when love is remembered.
The breeze carried it across the waking world — a single note, as light as a sigh, as eternal as dawn.
And when the last petal fell, the world bloomed again. 🌸