Withered Garden
You step into the short, narrow hallway, having to turn your body ever so slightly to fit through it. It did not look that small from afar but now that you are in it, it is much smaller than you initially thought. You cannot help but ask yourself just who were the people that once lived here and how skinny they must have been to have a passageway this cramped. You stand in front of the windowless door and admire the details engraved onto the door. Thorny vines wrap around the ends of the door, forming a frame, and the small blooming flower in the center is the main attraction with a symphony of other flowers creating a ring around it as if they were protecting the little flower.
There is no handle or knob on the door. You give the door a nudge and it opens with ease. You open the weightless door the rest of the way. A sweet yet sad scent of withered plants fills the air. The room is still dark, as dark as the room you entered from. You step through the door, and hold your lantern out to see what lies before you. Rows and rows of boxes divided into columns come into the light. In each of the boxes is dirt and sprouting out of the dirt are blackish plants, hunched over like old men. You approach the closest box and gently pinch the leaf of one of the plants with your thumb and index finger. You feel a crunch. You immediately let go of the leaf to see it crumble away like ashes into the dry soil.
The garden has not been tended to in a long while. Too long of a time to even guess. You also find it rather strange that there is no sunlight here. You hold the lantern up over your head and to the ceiling to find some sort of spiky texture looming over your head and throughout the entire place. You climb a box to get closer to the ceiling and you can now see just what it is that covers the ceiling. Dark green vines lined the ceiling. You spin around and see that the vines are also on the walls. They have enveloped the whole garden, greedily taking all the sunlight for themselves, not letting even the tiniest ray slip through a crack. You jump off the box, walk over to one of the walls, and give it a good kick. You stagger backward. A delayed pain in your foot has you hunching over like the dead plants around you. These vines are as tough as stone. There is no way of getting through them. You sit down for a moment to wait the pain out and once the sore has faded away, you get back on your feet.
Near the far end, opposite the door to this room is a cylindrical structure, sticking out like a store thumb as opposed to the rest of the things in the room. You make your way to it, finding the path to be taken over by vines just like the rest of the room. As you get closer to the end, the more infested the floor is with vines. The thorns tear your shoes and pants, making it impossible to take another step. You are now but an arm’s reach away. It is a cobblestone well with a pulley and rope slightly buried under the vines. There is no bucket in sight and it is probably somewhere in the vines. There are vines going down the well to soak up the water below. While the rest of the garden has dried up, the vines managed to avoid that fate by soaking up all the water for themselves. Judging from how the vines are still alive, there is a good chance that there is still water in the well.
You place the lantern on the well, its side hovering dangerously over the side of the water. A little breeze would be more than enough to knock the lantern over, so you will have to be very careful. You plant your hands on the cold bumpy cobblestone and carefully step over the vines until you are right on top of the well. You pick up the lantern hastily, afraid that it might tip over at any second, and dangle the lantern over. The well is not very deep and there is water at the bottom, but something else too. A glint of light reflects off a small object floating atop the water. It is a key. You reach down, stretching your arm as far as you can but it is far from your reach. A bucket is needed to fetch the key.
You slowly back out of the vines and away from the well until you are safely away from their thorns. You look down and find that your pants are a little torn and some cuts on your legs that go unnoticed. Fortunately, the cuts are minor, and luckily, the vines do not appear to be poisonous either since you do not feel ill. But it is a good idea to be a bit cautious in the future, so you make a mental note to yourself to pay more attention as you go forward. You go by the rows of boxes one by one to see if there is anything in them. There is nothing but the withered corpses of flowers and other foliage in them. There are also a handful of shiny stones and gems in the dirt that would no doubt sell for a small fortune but they are of little worth right now.
As you approach the last box in the room, you have a sudden and unexplainable feeling that there is something different about this one, and your gut feeling is correct. A lone flower rests in the box and has somehow survived while everything else in the room had perished long ago. The bulb is squeezed tightly together, preserving what is inside of it and the stem is so thin that it should have snapped from the weight that it is holding. You have no idea how the flower managed to persevere all the while with no water, sunlight, or nutrients in the soil. Some water will desperately help this flower.