Paths no longer led anywhere.
They followed.
They trailed behind feet like memory, like shadow, like story unspoken but felt. You did not choose a road and chase its end—now, the road chose you and listened as you walked.
And in the Garden Without a Center, this was no magic.
It was truth.
Every step left behind a resonance.
And enough resonances—enough presence, enough witnessing—became a path.
Not of direction.
Of relationship.
A trail made of attention.
The first to understand this was a child named Ulan.
They had no past—not in the way others meant it. No timeline reclaimed, no fragments of erased myth, no world born before. Ulan had always been here, had never known silence as loss or story as something to reclaim.
And yet, as they wandered the Garden, they noticed something no one else had:
The grass bent gently after they stepped.
The wind curved as if learning them.
The birds paused mid-flight, then resumed, adjusting their rhythm ever so slightly.
