She wandered where the path grew soft with moss, past the crooked stones that leaned as if tired from centuries of prayer. The churchyard was nearly forgotten, its steeple collapsed long ago, leaving only a ringing of bells that no one alive remembered hearing.

The willows hung low, their green veils brushing against her hair as she moved. She came here often, drawn not by faith but by a hunger she could not name. Beneath her boots, the earth was weighted with stories, the kind buried without names.

She carried a small trowel, the handle wrapped in linen. Every so often she knelt and brushed her fingers through the soil, feeling for what time had left behind: a fragment of pottery, a bead, the dull glint of something once adored. She believed the ground remembered beauty, even when people forgot.

When the light began to dim, she found it, a small heart-shaped pendant, tarnished and bleeding rust, caught in the roots of a willow. She lifted it carefully, as though it might still belong to someone. The air shifted; the trees sighed.

Holding it against her palm, she felt the weight of devotion, the ache of what had been loved and lost. The charm was nothing precious by the world’s measure, yet in her hands it became sacred.

As she slipped it into her pocket, she thought of how beauty and ruin often shared the same soil. The ghosts here did not frighten her. They were witnesses. They had seen the same thing she was beginning to understand, that even in decay, there is always something worth keeping.