Elias said, “Yes, but what garden?”

Aven’s smile softened. He reached and lightly pushed Elias’s wrist down, not in challenge, simply easing the gesture away. “Here.”

Over the next hour, Elias learned that most answers took that shape.

They took him along the paths because movement pleased them and because he kept asking to see more. The gardens spread wider than he had guessed from the crash site: layered walks under fruiting trees, warm stone courts around pools, long lawns that rolled toward low white buildings almost hidden by vines. The air carried leaf-smell, wet stone, and the sweet edge of something baked. Nothing looked neglected. Nothing looked defended. Yet doors slid open before anyone touched them, water appeared in channels without pumps in sight, and meals waited in broad halls on shallow heated tables as if the place fed itself.

Elias took it in with the hard focus of a man hiding a limp.

The eating hall stood open on three sides to the garden. Sunlight poured across long tables set with bowls of cut fruit, pale grains, green leaves, breads that steamed when broken open. No one served. No one cleaned while he watched. People drifted in, took what they wanted, sat where they pleased, then wandered away half-finished. Others arrived laughing and slid into the abandoned places without a glance.

Elias stood at one end of a table and asked, “Who brings this?”

A woman with cropped fair hair bit into a yellow slice and looked at him as though he had asked who made the weather. “It comes.”

Elias asked, “From where?”