Page 17 of Pumpkin Spiced Orc

IVY

F og clings to the orchard this morning, thick enough that even the brightest blossoms seem muted in the gray light, as though they’re waking from some long, fevered dream.

I’m halfway down the porch steps before I realize I’m not carrying a plan—just a sense of dread rolling through me like unsettled wind.

The air is cold, damp in the way that seeps inside bones, and each inhalation tastes of earth and dust and secrets I don’t want to uncover, but feel compelled to anyway.

I haven’t slept in days, not since Brody’s confrontation. Not since I realized the anger I harbored wasn’t just at Garruk—it was at my father too, the man who built me an orchard and spelled out devotion in root and sap, and never told me what rooted him to that land first.

My feet guide me toward the attic. Cobwebbed and dusty, cluttered with boxes labeled Dad’s Tools , Mom’s Dresses , Christmas Decorations , and Vanished Things .

I pull back a tarp on an old chest in the corner, the wood warped but sturdy, and inside—among letters, a tarnished lantern, a faded photograph of a younger father smiling in the orchard—there’s a thick leather envelope sealed with wax. My name on it, in his handwriting.

I breathe. The sound echoes. I lift it, close, run fingers over the raised letters.

Then I tear the seal.

I read.

It unfolds slow, confession dripping from each line. He knew. He knew the orchard was magic. He knew that I wasn’t just his daughter—part gardener’s child, part land’s heir—but something more: blood-tied to roots older than the ridge, claimed before I could ever understand what claim meant.

He wrote that he watched me laugh in the orchard as a child—those summers I spent climbing the pome trees, tasting apples before they ripened, still sap-smudged and wild-haired—and saw how the land responded to me like it was greeting a long-lost song.

Roots pulsed beneath the bark. Buds bloomed off-season.

Whispering wind followed my path, urgent as prayers.

He knew. And for years, he worked to keep that from me. Not to hide—but to protect.

“I thought ignorance was safety,” he writes.

“I told myself if you never knew, you could leave. You could pretend I gave you the world as mine, not hers. I pushed you away to give you choice. So you wouldn’t feel bound if you chose to go.”

But the words come with ache: regret in the pen strokes, apology in the faded ink.

“…one day he came. Garruk. Not teacher. Not hired help—but sentinel. Chosen. The land named him long before you did. I begged him to stay after you went away. To guard the orchard. To guard you.”

My vision blurs. I see the orchard golden, a toddler me, and my father standing in silence beside a quiet sentinel whose presence breathes power into the soil.

I sink to the floor of the attic, the letter clutching tight to my chest. Betrayal isn’t small. It blooms vast—bigger than hurt. Bigger than connection.

It all falls together.

The journal mom left in the root cellar. The breathstones pulsing. The bond forming. Garruk not just caretaker, but chosen—chosen by more than love, chosen by bloodline and root.

I feel trapped.

Trapped by history I never chose. Trapped by promises made before I could speak my name. I run.

I emerge in the orchard, hands shaking so bad I can't hold the letter steady. The orchard around me is blooming again—petals pale and thick as snowfall, branches heavy, shading deeper than ever. Fog coils between trunks. The world beyond seems absent. I’m alone except for the orchard and the memory of a man who sacrificed honesty for distance, and another who stood sentinel without consent.

My footsteps crumple blossom petals as I weave between trees toward the heart oak, the one carved with glyphs I half-understand now, the one that watches.

I sink down beside the roots, shaky breaths catching in my throat as the fog creeps over soil and stem.

The letter becomes redundant in my lap, more pulp than parchment at this point.

I let myself cry for how wrong I feel—for the betrayal, for the loss of choice, for the weight of being orchestrated like a fate I didn’t ask for.

The wind picks up. Leaves rustle overhead soft, comforting, like the orchard is leaning in, offering me solace—not judgement, just recognition. The blades of blossom around me brush my calves, tender as apology.

I press my forehead to the bark. Cold. Alive. Persistent.

He finds me when the fog begins to clear hours later, the orchard fading into quiet stillness. Garruk’s boots brush leaves before he speaks. His voice is rough, unsoft, carrying proximity without warmth.

“Ivy.”

I don’t lift my head.

“I read the letter,” I say. Voice brittle. “Everything.”

Silence.

He kneels beside me, hand brushing the roots. “I had no part in that choice,” he says. “Your father didn’t ask me. He told me he hoped I would stay. He chose silence.”

“That doesn’t make it okay,” I whisper. “It makes me wonder what else was decided for me when I wasn’t looking.”

He closes his eyes.

“He wanted to give you freedom. But he never saw that claiming you could hurt more than binding you.” His voice breaks on the word claiming . “I stayed because he asked. But then I stayed because I couldn’t walk away.”

Tears blur my vision. I blink against them.

“You didn’t protect me,” I say. “You took part in my story like it was yours.”

He opens his eyes. Blue-gray and tense under shadow. “But I didn’t betray you. I was honest from the moment you came back.”

I look at him, heart thumping. “That doesn’t undo everything.”

He stands, silhouette framed by fog and blossom. “No,” he says. “But I can stop letting fear of this bond keep me silent about what matters now.”

I swallow back trembling.

“You’re the one grown in these roots now too,” he says. “Not by blood, but by choice. Because I should have told you sooner. Shown you sooner. Trusted you with the truth when you deserved it.”

“I’m not sure what to do with the truth,” I say quietly. “When nothing I believed was mine alone.”

He kneels again, placing his palm over my hand in the roots. “Then let me help you carry it. I don’t expect forgiveness. But I expect you to keep telling me what matters—every time the orchard wakes and when it trembles for you.”

I feel the pulsing in his palm. It matches mine.

The wind rises, swirling petals around us in a soft spiral, as if the orchard approves of what doesn’t break—forged in betrayal but tempered in reckoning.

We sit for hours in that root-scented hush, wind hugging old bark, waiting for the orchard to decide whether to mourn, to wake, or to let us be.

We stand together finally, roots between us like silent promise.

No illusions about our past. No false normal.

Just truth. And the weight we choose to carry.