Sycta's Garden Prose in Nativis Lunae | World Anvil
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Sycta's Garden

It's the most beautiful garden in the world, vast, floral, and surrounded tightly by trees with a wide pathway between them in an opening. A pool so clear it looks as if it's a hundred feet deep sits patiently in the corner, begging you to enter it's depths. The flowers all seem to gaze at you as if their beauty is unmatched by your own. Animals roam freely and are unafraid of your presence, even requesting pats at times. Birds land on you and butterflies flock towards you.   After a few hours there you begin to feel the garden's loneliness, and determine to come here often so it doesn't feel lonely any more. The sun begins to set but you have no intention of going home yet, you think you'll spend the night sleeping under the stars in this beautiful garden you've found.   The next morning, there are fewer animals there and the sky isn't quite as bright as it was before. But food abounds here, so there's no real reason to leave just yet, it's still so beautiful. The moment you take a bite of an apple from a nearby tree, you feel a shift in the wind. The pathway you used to enter is no longer visible and for the first time you realize just how densely the trees are packed around the garden's edge. You begin to look in a frantic for any sign of life but the foxes, wolves and deer which so dearly desired your attention are nowhere to be found. The little pond catches your eye, again. It's shallowness is clear as it's water, so you feel it may calm you to wade for a moment.   The first step is fine and sturdy, you feel the sand beneath your feet and regain some sense of safeness. You take another step into the shallow waters and learn that the shallowness wasn't true at all- an invisible force pulls you down for what feels like an eternity, until eventually you lose consciousness and presumably die. A few hours later you awake in the garden again, entirely unharmed. Unable to die.   There is no escape. There is no death. There is only the loneliness of a thousand victims before you- none of which you can see, and none of which can see you.   for although they've fallen into the garden's trap long ago, they still live, unable to die, unable to leave. The only way to escape the garden is to think, immediately upon entry, before you succumb to it's charms and decide to eat of it's fruit or sleep in it's beds, "I will never return to this place, I will not stay here long".   So the legend goes, as told by Sycta herself.   “Deep in the darkness of a thousand trees, so much as they block out the sky;
A beautiful garden resides, you’ll see, But lo, if you stay there, you’ll die.
For the day is bright and the creatures roam, and it’s charms are easy to find;
But should you decide to stay from home, you shall soon lose your own mind.
Death is a pleasure we greatly ignore- it’s rest you will long for, assured.
But so as the garden shall lose it’s splendor, so shall your heart be lured.” - Sycta's Codex

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