ViVi's Rose Garden

Vivi had always been different. Born beneath the shade of twilight skies and raised on lullabies sung by the wind, she found beauty in the darkness where others saw fear. Dressed in her usual lace gown, skin pale as moonlight, and raven hair cascading down her back, she walked like a shadow through the town. But Vivi wasn't interested in the living. She had long since abandoned that world.

The cemetery, cold and overgrown, was her sanctuary. Its ancient stone mausoleums and ivy-choked statues stood like sentinels, protecting her from the outside world. At the edge of the cemetery, she had nurtured her rose garden—black and crimson petals blooming with a life that seemed unnatural in such a place of death. No one knew how she did it. The roses were too dark, too beautiful to belong in a place like this. And yet, there they grew, flourishing under her care. She tended to them daily, her thin, pale hands brushing the velvety petals, her voice whispering to the flowers as though they could hear her secrets.

But the roses had a secret of their own.