The Midnight Garden

The greenhouse was forbidden. Had been for twenty years.

Elena descended the spiral stairs into the depths beneath the botanical institute, her lantern casting dancing shadows on walls covered in ivy that hadn't seen sunlight in decades. The air grew warmer, humid, alive with the whisper of growing things.

Her grandmother's notes had been cryptic: "The answer blooms where we fear to look."

At the bottom of the stairs, Elena pushed through a curtain of hanging moss and stopped, her breath catching. Before her stretched a garden unlike anything in the world above—flowers that glowed with their own inner light, vines that pulsed with bioluminescence, and at the center, a single flower unlike any she'd ever seen.