Dawn-dark. Eve feeds basket after basket to flame.
Her hands shake—not from cold but from the fever-dream that seized her three nights past. In it, Eden grew inward like a closing fist. Every reed she'd ever woven sprouted eyes. Every fruit she'd gathered turned to stone in her mouth. She woke choking on perfection.
Now she burns. One basket. Another. The pile diminishes as ash mounts.
Across the water, Adam's chisel rings once—a question mark carved in sound. He works by torchlight, etching commandments into granite. The same words, always the same words. Be fruitful. The phrase hangs between them like smoke.
Eve lifts another basket. This one held figs yesterday. The weave still smells sweet. Into the fire it goes, sparks spiraling upward like inverse rain. She counts: seventeen burned since the dream. Three remain.
The fever has broken but its lesson persists—one basket must burn for every basket born. Balance, or suffocation. She learned this not through revelation but through the body's own revolt, the way her lungs refused air until she lit that first tinder.
Fire reflects in the creek's surface. Two flames now: one above, one below. She stares at the doubling until her eyes water. In the shimmer she sees her own face, smudged with ash, and behind it something else—a flicker of scales? A curved absence where light should be?
She blinks. Only her reflection remains.
The eighteenth basket crackles into nothing. Adam's chisel stops. In the new silence, she hears her own pulse, rapid as a trapped bird's. Two baskets left. Then one. Then—
"Eve?"
Adam's voice cuts across the water. She doesn't turn. Can't turn. The last basket waits in her lap, its weave so fine she can see dawn breaking through the gaps.
"Eve, enough."
But enough of what? She doesn't know. Only that the emptiness inside her has a shape now, and that shape demands filling. Not with fruit or children or even love. With something harder. Something that costs.
She lights the final basket as true dawn breaks. The smoke rises, mingles with morning mist. Somewhere in the Garden, a bird calls—three notes descending. She recognizes it as the one that nested in this very basket two days ago. Its song sounds like goodbye.
When the last ember dies, she sits in the cooling ash. Her fever-vigil is complete. Yet the emptiness remains, patient as stone.
Morning. Creek-water laps her ankles, cold enough to wake the skin.
Eve sits on the familiar stone, its surface sun-warmed already. Her fingers find the reeds without thought. Muscle memory: over, under, through. The pattern emerges like breathing—inevitable, necessary.
Ash still grays her fingernails from the dawn burning. She doesn't wash it off. Let it mix with the oils of new reed, create its own binding. Death into life. The old formula.
Adam works across the water. She knows without looking—the rhythm of his chisel speaks volumes. Steady strikes, then a pause. He's cutting the curved belly of the B in "Be fruitful." Always that commandment. As if repetition might make it true.
Her basket takes shape: a wide mouth narrowing to a firm base. Good for gathering. Good for carrying. Good for burning when its time comes. She's already set aside yesterday's basket for tonight's fire. The rule holds even after the fever-vigil. Especially after.
Balance, she thinks, though the word feels too simple. It's more than that. It's—
A blue heron lands at the creek's edge. It watches her work with one golden eye. She's woven its nest twice this season. Both times it abandoned the basket after laying, as if sensing their impermanence. Smart bird.
She dips the half-formed basket in the creek. Water darkens the reeds, makes them pliable. Across the way, Adam's chisel slips. The sound—metal against stone gone wrong—raises her head.
He's cut himself. Not badly, but blood beads on his thumb. He stares at it as if he's never seen blood before. Perhaps he hasn't. Not his own.
Eve returns to her weaving. Over, under, through. The heron spears a fish, swallows it whole. Life into life. No fire needed there. No balance to maintain. Lucky heron.
By noon, the basket is complete. She sets it in the sun to dry, next to the one marked for burning. They look like siblings—same hands made both, same materials, same design. Yet one will live another day and one will die tonight. She doesn't choose based on quality or beauty. The choice makes itself, the way water finds its level.
Adam has moved to a fresh stone. She glimpses the abandoned one, its half-carved commandment now christened with a drop of blood. The stain will darken, she knows. Become part of the stone itself. His first signature.
Wind stirs the reeds at water's edge. Time to gather more materials. Tomorrow demands another basket, which means tonight demands another fire. The equation never varies.
She stands, joints stiff from sitting. The heron lifts off, wings beating their slow rhythm. For a moment, its shadow falls across both baskets—the living and the condemned. Then it's gone, and only sun remains.
Adam grips the chisel. His thumb throbs where the stone bit back.
Blood makes the tool slippery. He winds a reed around the cut—one of Eve's reeds, stolen from her pile while she was gone. The bleeding stops but the memory persists: that moment when control slipped, when stone proved harder than intention.
He's been carving the same commandment for... how long? Days blur in Eden. "Be fruitful and multiply." The words should feel holy. Instead, they feel like weight.
Across the water, Eve returns with an armload of reeds. She moves with the same grace as always, but something has shifted since her fever-burning. The ash under her nails. The way she looks through things instead of at them. The careful distance she maintains from the Tree.
He positions the chisel for the next stroke. His reflection wavers in the polished stone—a face he barely recognizes. When did his jaw set so hard? When did those lines appear between his brows?
The commandment stares back at him, patient as gravity. Five words that should be simple. Yet he and Eve circle them like wary animals. The marriage bed remains cool. Their conversations drift toward weather, toward the naming of plants, toward anything but the central absence.
He strikes. The chisel bites clean this time. Another letter emerges. F for fruitful. F for fear.
Eve has started her evening ritual. He doesn't need to look—the sound of her gathering tinder is unmistakable. Soon, smoke will rise. Another basket will become memory. He envies her clarity, the simple arithmetic of creation and destruction. His own work accumulates. Stone after stone, tablet after tablet, all saying the same thing. Building toward what?
She strikes flint. The first spark catches.
He remembers the first time she burned a basket. How he'd rushed to stop her, certain she was destroying something precious. She'd looked at him with those dark eyes and said, "It's necessary." No explanation. No justification. Just that flat certainty.
Now he understands, or thinks he does. Eden provides everything except purpose. So she creates her own: the daily choice of what lives and what burns. At least it's hers.
The fire across the water grows. Smoke drifts his way, carrying the scent of burned reed. It makes his eyes water. Or maybe that's something else. This thumb still throbs. The reed bandage darkens with seepage.
He sets down the chisel. The tablet reads "Be fruit—" and stops. Incomplete, like everything else here. Tomorrow he'll finish it. Tomorrow he'll start another. The pile will grow until... what? Until the world is full of reminders? Until the words somehow become flesh?
Eve's silhouette moves against the flame. She's added the basket now—he can tell by how the fire leaps. Her evening offering to whatever god demands balance.
A thought strikes him, sharp as the chisel's edge: What if the real commandment isn't written in stone at all? What if it's written in the space between them, in the children they don't conceive, in the distance that grows with each perfect, endless day?
He touches the cut on his thumb. Still tender. Still real.
The stone waits. The words wait. Everything in Eden waits except Eve's fire, which consumes and moves on.
He picks up the chisel. Sets it down. Picks it up again.
Across the water, the basket collapses into ash.
Twilight. The last basket smolders as Eve banks the coals.
A sound from the underbrush—not quite wind, not quite whisper. She knows this presence, has felt it circling her rituals for weeks. Tonight it emerges.
The serpent flows into firelight like water finding its course. Scales catch the ember-glow, each one a small mirror. Eve doesn't startle. Part of her has been expecting this.
"You're early," she says. Usually it waits until full dark.
The serpent coils, a living spiral. Its tongue flicks once, tasting smoke. "Your fires grow more frequent."
True. What began as weekly has become nightly. The fever-vigil broke something open, and now the need won't quiet. She pulls her knees to her chest, makes herself smaller. Or harder. "The Garden provides. I simply... rearrange."
"Mmm." The sound could mean anything. The serpent circles the dying fire, and ash swirls in its wake. No footprints. No trace. Just movement and consequence.
Eve watches the patterns form and dissolve. There's a language here she almost grasps. "Why do you come?"
"Why do you burn?"
She considers lying. It would be easy—speak of tidiness, of making room, of simple preference. Instead: "Because if I don't, the Garden swallows me whole."
The serpent stops. For the first time, it looks directly at her. Eyes like deep wells, reflecting nothing. "The Garden swallows nothing. It simply is."
"That's the problem."
Silence stretches between them. The fire pops, sends up a spray of sparks. One lands on the serpent's scales, dies without marking.
"Your husband carves stone." Not a question.
"The same words. Over and over."
"And you weave baskets. Over and over."
"I also burn them."
"Ah." The serpent resumes its circling. "There's the difference."
Eve shifts, uncomfortable. The stone beneath her has grown cold. Or she's grown too aware of its hardness. "Adam seeks permanence."
"And you?"
The question hangs like smoke. She doesn't answer because she doesn't know. Not permanence. Not impermanence. Something between. Something that moves.
The serpent's path tightens, drawing closer to the fire's heart. Ash rises in small cyclones. "What do you know of the Tree?"
Every muscle in Eve's body goes rigid. "We don't speak of it."
"Yet you think of it."
Heat floods her face. How does it know? But of course it knows. Everything in Eden knows everything else. Privacy is the first fruit they're denied.
"God forbade it," she says.
"God forbade eating. Not thinking. Not wondering. Not approaching."
"Semantic games."
The serpent laughs—a sound like wind through dry grass. "Everything here is semantic. Word made flesh made word again. Your husband knows this. Why else carve commands in stone?"
Eve stands abruptly. The conversation has tilted into dangerous territory. "I should go."
"Should." The serpent tastes the word. "Such a careful chain."
She turns to leave, but its voice follows: "Your fires burn hotter each night. Soon you'll run out of baskets. What then?"
She doesn't answer. Can't answer. But as she walks away, the question burrows deep.
Behind her, the serpent tends the dying fire alone. Or maybe not alone. Maybe nothing in Eden is ever truly alone.
The last ember winks out.
Night floods the Garden. Eve lies wakeful, counting cricket-songs.
Across the shelter, Adam's breathing has gone deep and even. His bandaged thumb rests on his chest, rising and falling. The cut looked worse by firelight. Everything does.
The serpent's question coils in her mind: What then?
She knows the answer, has known it since the fever-dream. When the baskets run out, she'll weave faster. When the reeds run out, she'll find new materials. And when those run out?
She'll burn something else.
The thought should frighten her. Instead, it brings a strange peace. Finally, a progression. Finally, an ending—even if self-made.
Outside, a nightbird calls. Three notes descending, like her dawn visitor. But this song is different. Urgent. Almost a warning.
She rises, bare feet silent on packed earth. Adam doesn't stir. These days, he sleeps like stone.
The night air cools her skin. No moon, but Eden generates its own light—a soft luminescence that turns leaves silver, water black. She follows the creek upstream, away from their usual paths.
The Tree stands where it always has. Where it always will.
She's avoided it since the fever-dream. Not from obedience but from something sharper. Fear? Respect? The sense that looking too long might change things irrevocably.
Now she looks.
The fruit hangs heavy, each one catching light like a small sun. Not golden. Not silver. A color that has no name because naming would diminish it. She counts: seven fruit on the lowest branch. A complete set. A finished week.
Her hand rises without permission. Stops just short of touching.
"You were forbidden to taste its knowledge." The serpent's words, or her memory of them. Hard to tell the difference anymore. "Yet how can you understand goodness or evil if you never peer beyond what you are told?"
Behind her, a twig snaps.
She spins, expects Adam. Finds only darkness arranged in familiar coils.
"You," she breathes.
"Always me. Or always you. The pronouns tangle here." The serpent's eyes hold steady. No judgment. No pressure. Just witness.
Eve turns back to the Tree. Her raised hand trembles. "If I take this—"
"If?"
"When." The word tastes like ash. "When I take this, everything changes."
"Everything changes regardless. Your baskets burn. Your husband bleeds. The Garden remains perfect while you grow stranger to it."
True. All true. Yet—
"I'm not ready."
The serpent says nothing. Waits with the patience of stone. Or longer—the patience of what outlasts stone.
Eve's hand drops. Not today. But soon. The certainty settles in her bones like fever.
She thinks of Adam's bloodstained tablet. His first signature, she'd thought. But maybe signatures require more than accident. Maybe they require choice.
"Show me something," she says suddenly. "Anything. Prove you're more than my own doubt talking."
The serpent moves. Not toward her but toward the Tree. It climbs the trunk in one fluid motion, disappears into shadow branches.
A moment later, a single fruit drops.
It lands at her feet, splits on impact. Light spills out—not blinding but warm. Inside, she glimpses something impossible: Adam at his stone, but the chisel moves by itself, carving words she can't read. Herself at the creek, but the baskets weave themselves, an endless chain of creation without hands.
Then the vision fades. The fruit seals. Unmarked, as if nothing happened.
The serpent descends. "That's one future. There are others."
Eve picks up the fruit. It weighs nothing. Everything. "Why show me this?"
"Because you asked."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer that matters."
She sets the fruit back among its siblings. Let it ripen or rot as it will. Not today. But the seeing has already begun its work. The cracks spread like fever, like fire, like blood on stone.
Behind them, a distant hammer rings once and stops.
Adam, awake. Searching.
She holds the fruit. Its weight surprises—dense as stone, warm as flesh.
The serpent watches from a low branch. Dawn creeps across the Garden, painting everything in shades of decision.
"Crack it," the serpent says. Simple. Like breaking eggs. Like splitting stone.
Eve strikes the fruit against the Tree's own root. The sound rings like metal on metal. A seam appears, precise as intention. She works her fingers into the split.
Inside: segments neat as vertebrae. Light pools in the hollow spaces—not the sun's light but something older. She thinks of her fever-dream, of baskets sprouting eyes. This is different. This sees her.
"Your name," she says suddenly. The courtesy matters. If she's going to swallow knowledge, she should know its messenger.
The serpent's tongue flicks. For the first time, it seems surprised. "Names have power here."
"Everything has power here. That's the problem."
A pause. Then: "In the time before time, I was called Light-Bearer."
"Was called. Not am called."
"Precision matters." The serpent descends, coil by careful coil. "Now I'm simply what you see."
Eve lifts a segment to her lips. Hesitates. Twenty years of habit scream warning. Twenty years of perfection insist enough.
But enough was never enough. Hence the baskets. Hence the burning. Hence this.
She bites.
The taste—
Not sweet. Not bitter. Sharp like winter (though she's never known winter). Complex like age (though nothing here ages). It tastes like the first time she saw her reflection and thought stranger.
Knowledge floods. Not facts but understanding. The difference between is and must be. The space between commandment and desire. Why Adam's stone will never hold what he carves there. Why her baskets burn with such eager flame.
She sees herself as if from outside: naked, juice on her chin, irreversibly changed. The Garden hasn't moved but she has. The center no longer holds.
Another bite. Another revelation.
The fertility commandment twists into focus. Not just "multiply" but why: to fill the emptiness that perfection creates. To make noise in the silence. To break the terrible completeness with blessed incompletion.
She understands her fear now. And Adam's. Children would be the first true creation—not named but made. Not perfect but possible.
"More?" the serpent asks.
She takes a third segment. This one shows her Adam at his stone, but clearly now. He carves not from devotion but from terror. Each letter an anchor against drift. Each tablet a grave marker for the life they haven't lived.
The fruit is half gone. She could stop. Should stop. The word should tastes like nothing now.
Instead, she gathers the remaining segments. Saves them. For Adam. For the conversation that must come. For the choice that's no choice at all.
"Thank you," she tells the serpent. Or Light-Bearer. Or whatever it truly is.
"Thanks are premature. You haven't seen the cost."
"I'm paying it already." She touches her throat where the knowledge sits, sharp as bones. "We both are."
The serpent nods once and disappears into the undergrowth. Its work is done. Or begun. The grammar of consequence defies easy tense.
Eve stands. The Garden looks exactly the same. The light falls at familiar angles. The creek runs its ancient course.
But she carries revolution in her closed fist. In the segments that pulse like a second heart. In the juice that stains her lifeline deeper than any ash.
Time to find Adam. Time to offer what can't be taken back.
The Tree watches her go. If it grieves the loss of its fruit, it keeps that secret.
Like everything else here, until now.
She finds Adam where stone meets water. His back bends over another tablet.
The chisel trembles in his grip. She sees it before he does—the blood seeping through reed bandages. The wound has opened. Or never closed.
"Adam."
He doesn't turn. Can't turn. The commandment holds him like a chain. She counts the letters carved: BE FRUITFUL AND MUL—. Always stopping there. Always starting over.
She kneels beside him. The fruit segments pulse in her palm. Now that she's here, words feel impossible. How do you offer revolution to someone who builds chains?
"Your hand," she says instead.
"It's nothing."
But it's not nothing. Blood drops onto stone—one, two, three. Each drop darker than the last. She thinks of her burned baskets, of necessary sacrifices. His body has started its own ritual.
She sets down the fruit. Unwraps his bandage with careful fingers. The cut is deeper than before. Or maybe she sees deeper now. Either way, it needs tending.
"Let me," she says.
He releases the chisel. It clatters on stone, breaks the word MULTIPLY into MUL—TIP—LY. Fragments. Like everything now.
She tears a strip from her own covering. Binds his thumb properly. The blood soaks through immediately, but at least it's contained. Shared.
"Eve." Her name sounds different in his mouth. Heavier. "What have you done?"
So he knows. Of course he knows. Knowledge has its own scent—sharp as copper, sweet as ash.
She picks up the fruit segments. Holds them where he can see. In daylight, they look almost ordinary. Almost safe.
"I chose," she says.
"Chose what?"
"To know why we're afraid."
His face cycles through expressions: denial, anger, grief. Settles on something worse. Recognition.
"Show me," he says.
She places a segment against his lips. Waits. His eyes close. Opens. The garden reflects there, but fractured now. Multiplied.
He bites.
The change is immediate. His spine straightens. His hands flex. For the first time in memory, he looks at her. Not past. Not through. At.
"Oh," he breathes. One syllable holding twenty years of understanding.
She feeds him another segment. This time he takes it from her fingers. Their skin touches—electric, unfamiliar. When did they stop touching? When did distance become their only covenant?
"The commandment," he says. "I carved it to stop thinking. But the thinking came first."
"Yes."
"We were already fallen. The fruit just—"
"Names it."
Thunder rolls across the Garden. Not weather—Eden has no weather. This is older. Deeper. The sound of paradise recognizing its own breach.
Adam looks at his tablet. At the blood mixing with stone dust. At the words that never quite finished themselves.
He picks up the chisel. She tenses—will he return to carving? Complete the broken commandment?
Instead, he draws a single line through the words. Cancellation. Completion. The same gesture.
"What now?" he asks.
She takes his hand. Careful of the wound. Threads her fingers through his. The touch burns like knowledge.
"Now we stop pretending."
Lightning flashes. No rain follows. Just light exposing what was always there: two people sharing fruit in a garden too small for questions.
He eats the last segment without prompting. Chews slowly. Swallows hard.
When he kisses her, it tastes like copper and consequence.
When they break apart, the Garden has already begun its change. Not dying. Not disappearing. Just... releasing.
Time to meet what comes next.
"Adam? Eve?"
The voice flows like water through reeds. Not angry. Worse—disappointed.
They crouch in the thicket, skin prickling with new awareness. Naked. The word has meaning now. Before, they simply were. Now they are seen.
Adam's hand finds hers. Sticky with blood and juice. She squeezes back. Together they step into the clearing.
God's presence doesn't manifest. It simply is. The air thickens with attention.
"We heard You," Adam says. His voice cracks on the second word. "But we were afraid."
"Afraid." The word hangs, examined from all angles. "Of Me?"
"Of being seen," Eve says. "Of being known."
Silence. The kind that pressures ears. Then:
"You have always been known."
"Not like this." She can't explain the difference. How knowledge changes the known. How seeing changes the seen.
Around them, the Garden holds its breath. Every leaf still. Every bird mute. Even the creek pauses its endless conversation.
"The fruit," God says. Not a question.
"We chose," Eve says. Adam's hand tightens in hers.
"Yes. You chose."
The simplicity devastates. No thunder. No flood. Just acknowledgment of what is.
"Are You angry?" Adam asks.
A pause. When God speaks again, something has shifted. "Anger requires surprise. I am... adjusting."
"To what?"
"To your timeline. You were meant to choose. But not yet. Not for ages still."
Eve thinks of her baskets. Her careful ritual of creation and destruction. "We couldn't wait for meant-to. The Garden is—"
"Perfect. Yes. And perfection, it seems, has its own season."
Wind stirs. The first wind Eve has ever felt that carries temperature. Cool. Almost cold.
"So we leave," Adam says. Not a question.
"You leave. The Garden remains, but not for you. Not anymore."
"Where?" Eve asks.
"Forward. Out. Into what you've chosen." God's presence shifts, and for a moment Eve glimpses something impossible: sorrow. "The world beyond is vast. Difficult. It will demand everything."
"And give?"
"What you make. What you earn. What you discover between the making and the earning."
Adam's thumb bleeds through the bandage. Eve's mouth still tastes of light. They are already changing.
"One question," Eve says. "Were we wrong?"
The silence stretches. Then, soft as ash:
"You were human."
The presence withdraws. Not gone—never gone—but distant now. Watching from the place where perfect things wait.
Eve and Adam stand in the Garden that is no longer theirs. Already it looks different. Smaller. Like returning to a childhood room.
"Now?" Adam asks.
"Now," she agrees.
They walk toward the edge they've never seen but somehow know is there. Behind them, tablets lie scattered. Baskets wait for burning that will never come.
The first step outside is onto rough ground. It hurts. It's real.
They don't look back.
The ground cuts. Each step teaches pain's vocabulary.
Eve clutches the last basket—the one that should have burned tonight. Instead, it holds seeds. Stolen? Saved? The distinction blurs like everything else.
Adam walks beside her, reed-cloth wrapped around his waist. She wears something similar. Amazing how quickly shame learns its costume.
Behind them, Eden glows. Not with light but with something else. Completeness. A finished thought they can no longer read.
"Here," Adam says.
Here is nowhere. A patch of dirt between two stones. But his voice carries decision, so she stops.
He kneels. She watches him work—not with chisel but with hands. Pulling stones from the earth. Clearing space. Building different foundations.
She tips the basket. Seeds scatter. Most will die. Some will grow. The mathematics of possibility.
"Eve."
She looks up. He's holding two smooth stones. In the fading light, she sees what he's carved there. Not commandments. Their names. Adam. Eve. First signature. Last testament.
"For marking," he says. "What we plant. What we build."
She takes her stone. It's still warm from his hand. Or maybe stones carry their own heat now. Everything outside Eden operates by different rules.
Thunder rolls. Real thunder this time, promising rain. They have no shelter. No certainty. No plan beyond the next breath.
She smiles.
"What?" Adam asks.
"We're going to die," she says. Not despair. Recognition.
"Yes."
"And before that?"
He looks at the scattered seeds. At the darkening sky. At her face, which carries its own light now.
"Before that, we live."
The first rain falls. Cold. Clean. Nothing like Eden's mist. It stings their skin, pools in the turned earth, awakens seeds that have only known perfection.
They don't seek shelter. Not yet. Let the water teach them its lessons. Let the cold name their boundaries. Let the darkness show them what light means.
Eve plants her name-stone at the field's edge. Here begins what we choose.
Adam plants his beside it. Here ends what was chosen for us.
Together they wait for dawn. It will come different tomorrow. Earned. Dangerous. Theirs.
In the last basket, one seed splits. Green shoots reaching for light it's never seen.
The first thing born outside paradise. The first of many.
Wind carries ash-scent from somewhere. Memory or promise—impossible to say.
They build no fire tonight. Tomorrow they'll learn that art. Tonight, they have each other's warmth. It's almost enough.
Stars appear. More than they ever saw in Eden. The darkness, it seems, has its gifts.
Eve reaches for Adam's hand. Finds it already reaching.
The seeds take root or don't. The storms come as promised. Two humans learn the weight of days.
Sometimes, in the difficult years, they dream of perfect gardens. Wake grieving. Wake grateful.
The choice stands. Untradeable. Their own.
