Flower of the Abyss

Plot adapted from the game Inmost

Only the legendary Flower of Hope can cleave through the endless night, but anyone who tends it must repay the debt with their soul.

A sixty-year-old Wanderer has been trapped in the Abyss for twenty years. One day, he encounters his childhood self, a boy playing hide-and-seek on a ranch; his younger brother, who died in childhood and now writhes as a half-bodied monster in the backyard; and even his late wife, a ghost transformed into a white fox that guides the way. Then he discovers that the “knight” hunted by the guards is his son, whom he has never met, while the golden-haired orphan girl in the attic is bound by her past to the bloody secret behind a fire that destroyed a building ten years ago...

The suffering of three generations knots into a dead end in the Abyss: a suicide note written in response to school bullying, a baby’s cries in a burning building, the black blood on a knight’s sword. All have become nourishment for shards of pain. When the Wanderer is pinned to a crumbling wall by the guards, he glimpses a flower left behind by his son as he lies dying. At last, the yellow blossom that sprang from rotting blood makes him understand: the Abyss is a reflection of the pain of reality, and all his life he has been handing a knife to his own reflection.

Years later, the grown golden-haired girl sits quietly with him before three graves in a cemetery. Beside a withered flowerpot at their old home, a flower in the neighboring pot is blooming with the Abyss’s most brilliant beauty. It turns out that when the withered flower died, it had already buried the seed of being reborn in the rotting soil.