Raizen couldn't stop looking at them.
The drawers were still open. Row after row of black lotuses - each one nested in its own fabric-lined slot, each one coated in the same thin shell of resin that his two were. They caught the shop's warm light and held it in their dark petals, gold centers barely visible, like embers buried in ash.
They were all the same flower. The same species - if that was even the right word for something that shouldn't exist. The same layered structure, the same impossible symmetry, the same un-dying perfection the vendor couldn't explain.
But they weren't identical. The more Raizen looked, the more the differences emerged. Small, microscopic ones. The distance between petals - wider on some, tighter on others. The dim light in the center - brighter in a few, almost invisible in most.
Each one was the same idea expressed differently.
