Rosé's POV
Igdaliah placed a plant in front of me. Its stem was brown and wrinkled. It also had no leaves.
"Now," he told me.
I reached out my hand and touched the fragile plant and concentrated. The first time I had done this was more than a decade ago when my rose bush had been trampled on and killed by Nadia. I recalled how much I had cried that day because it had taken a lot of work and months to get them to bloom so perfectly. They had not been red or white roses either. They were roses with colour that resembled that of my hair.
On that day I had sat on the dark soil which they had been planted on and wept for them. Nadia was not punished for her deeds which only made me feel more miserable. I held the mangled stems in my arms despite the thorns that dug painfully into my skin. At that age I did not know how it felt like to lose a child but that day my grief could have mirrored that of a mother who had lost her baby.
