As Calla stared at the severed head under the display glass, even from such a distance, she saw one of the raisin-y eyeballs swell. A scream began to bubble up in her throat. And then the most insane thing happened.
The head, which had apparently not been under the glass dome at all, rose up. It was very much attached to a neck just as ghastly as itself, just a corpse-like, which was attached to a body in much the same condition. Moth-eaten fabric, which must have been rather nice at some point based on the intricate patterns that were evident--even in such a state of decay, hung from the corpse. All bones and too thin, too stretched, too decayed skin and tattered clothes.
The corpse seemed to be staring at her, watching her. Calla gripped the pot tighter and tighter against her chest and inadvertently stepped back and stepped back and stepped back. And all at once, the... thing... took a step towards her and she took another step back and something dug into her back and shoulders and arms and legs and the pot in her arms shattered and there was nothing but screaming and running and blood and the rose. Oh, she made sure to hold onto that rose. The pot had cut into her skin and the soil had fallen away and all that was left was the rose and its roots and its leaves but she held it close all the same, its thorns digging into her skin drawing even more blood. And she had never run so fast in her whole dang life.
The Garden seemed to pull at her, vines and thorns and grass and dirt, like it was trying to suck her back into it, like it was trying to pull something from her. Her magic. It wanted her magic. Maybe it didn't want to take it from her but maybe it needed it, maybe it craved it, maybe it had to have it like regular plants need water.
"NO!" she yelled, turning around and holding her ground. "NO!" she yelled again. A semi-conscious command, semi-consciously reinforced by a lash of magic that could not be leeched from--could not be taken and used. She felt the pull of the Garden fade and, just before she turned around, she thought she saw a corpse crumple to the ground as it rounded one of the rose bushes.
Calla looked at the rose in her arms, the one she had taken from this very Garden. She remembered the tainted magic it had once held that she had only been able to purify by what could have only been sheer luck.
She quickly fell to her knees and began digging fervently. She could feel the malice in the soil, the sour magic. She shivered and began to cry. She felt as if she was digging through something very old and very disgusting, something she really didn't want to be touching, let alone digging in. She felt like no matter how much she washed her hands or how much soap she used or how hot the water was it would never be enough. But she kept digging until the hole was deep enough and she stuck the rose in, roots down, and planted it right there at the edge of that disgusting, wretched garden.
"Please, oh please. I'm so sorry but I can't take you back with me. I can't take you back knowing you came from a place so horrible. I can't have you." Tears fell down her cheeks and pattered onto the petals of the rose and rolled off into the dirt below. "I can't take you and I know that's just as horrible for me to be so scared of you when I know--I know--you're not tainted anymore, that you're okay, you're pure, but I can't and I'm so, so sorry for that.
"But as much guilt as I feel I just hope that you don't get overcome by the dreadful magic tainting this place... that, perhaps, you could remain pure.... That you might even help this place, at least a bit? I know it's selfish and I know it's wrong and it's not your fault for having come from here. You didn't get to choose where you've spent all this time. It's not your fault you've become this way.... It's not their fault either," Calla realized. She looked up at the Garden in front of her, filled with a darkness that had been steeping for centuries, and was ashamed to know that there was absolutely nothing she could do. She wasn't powerful enough to purify a whole area. She'd barely been able to purify the rose--it had nearly sucked her in.
"I'll come back," she promised, standing up. She raised her voice, "I'll come back!"
And she ran back home, a coward, becoming aware--for the first time--that neither she nor Grandma and maybe not anyone for centuries really knew anything about the Garden they had been protecting for all their lives. So many generations of witches from her family casting a spell for reasons they didn't even know, perfectly okay living in complete ignorance. Perhaps they should have simply destroyed that place in fire, purifying it, resetting the land both physically and energetically in the simplest way possible.
But Calla knew she couldn't do that. She knew that she could absolutely never burn even a single blade of grass or leaf in that Garden. Not just because it was a garden, not just because it was the Garden she'd spent her entire life enamored with, and not just because she knew Grandma might get super angry with her for doing that. But because she was pretty sure that corpse--whether it was actually a corpse, or simply a ghost of a memory lingering in the Garden--wasn't just any corpse. Because she was pretty sure those clothes weren't just fancy clothes. She was pretty sure those clothes were heavily embroidered fancy clothes. And that, when the corpse had fallen and stopped moving, it had been wearing a heavily embroidered veil, as if it had wanted to hide its face.
And even if he wasn't the nicest person on earth--far from it, in her opinion--he was still alive on some level. He'd been pretty alive when he'd had her kidnapped and brought through the gate and he'd been pretty alive when he'd talked to her in his version of the Garden and he'd been pretty alive when he'd chased her down and pretty alive when he'd awkwardly hurried away, totally forgetting about the rose, the one thing he'd cared about more than himself. And it was clear that his life was connected to the Garden and, in turn, to the very rose she'd stolen from it. Perhaps that was why he hadn't wanted it returned? Perhaps, if she'd returned it, he would have lost his life. Perhaps, when she took the rose in the first place and then revived it, she'd re-awakened the magic and re-awakened him.