A light breeze pushed Queen Horatia’s hair away from her face as she entered the cave and as t

A light breeze pushed Queen Horatia’s hair away from her face as she entered the cave and as their eyes started to adjust to the light, it revealed a phantasmagorical technicolour garden, as though a prism had refracted every shard of light within the cave. Overgrown with bluebells so lush and plump, they bowed their heads, as though in genuflection for the arrival of their two new guests. On the top of a hill, lit by rays of light and resplendently surrounded by butterflies, stood the Isochronus Stag, regaled in a short auburn coat and crowned with two magnificent vine-like antlers on the top of his handsome head.

Leaving Horatia by the entrance, Quinn slowly approached the Stag and stopped a short distance in front of him. Looking towards the ground, Quinn solemnly bowed his head. As she tried to see what was happening, Queen Horatia’s realised her eyesight was slowly returning - the instigator of all her hardships throughout the past year was now standing in front of her.

Inching carefully closer towards the Stag, Queen Horatia squinted her eyes and inspected him carefully. Standing almost three times as tall as Quinn, the Stag’s short but dense coat glistened like a mirror. As the butterflies flapped around her, Horatia took a deep breath, and following Quinn’s lead, she dipped her head, which the Stag returned. Slowly but surely, she stretched out her arm to touch the Stag’s neck and as her hand made contact, the Stag imparted a vision:

After the cataclysmic natural disaster, the paradise gardens from the legend had become entombed underground. Whilst many of the plants from the garden couldn’t survive in such conditions, undisturbed by humanity, the gardens started to develop its own ecosystem. Of the species that developed during this time, the Isochronus deer thrived in such an environment, keeping the gardens maintained through their constant grazing. But nature can be cruel and the success of this species led to overpopulation and fairly soon, the gardens couldn’t sustain the deer anymore. It was around this time that Queen Horatia’s ancestors founded Isochronus and through their desire to irrigate the soil to bring life back to the wasteland, a tunnel was accidentally created for the deer to escape.

The Isochrons and the deer lived happily together for many years but as Isochronus advanced, more and more of the deer’s habitat became overtaken. Finally one day, they all but vanished.

A quiet epiphany washed over Queen Horatia. Throughout the course of the year and the tribulations that she had faced, she had learnt that life isn’t about grand gestures or overblown displays of altruism or an unrelenting need for control. This was her final lesson: humility. The balance between nature and mankind is, and will always be, tenuous and uneasy. Both can be as unimaginably destructive and cruel as the other, yet both have the ability to create an inordinate amount of beauty and good, particularly when they work in synergy. In this moment, she realised, whilst mankind may have contributed to the destruction of nature, it is also the only force born of nature capable of resisting its entropy for the benefit of all living things.

Standing among the swaying bluebell, Queen Horatia’s full vision returned.

#TheLostGardensOfIsochronus