Steven Universe: The Diamond Legacy

The Stone Garden

A/N: Thanks Fox__Crow for helping me write this chapter and coming up with some of the important ideas. This one's for you!

I enjoyed my quiet days, sitting on the beach with a blanket beneath my belly and a book in my hands. I'd finished my summer reading and essay that went along with it, relieved that was done and I could relax for the rest of the summer (in that aspect). I brought the Gem Atlas onto the beach with me, turning the pages at taking in every artifact sight with great detail when I saw something familiar.

"Wait a minuet. Can that be?" I tapped my finger on a symbol from the gates of Tower of Nippon. A human handprint on Rose Quartz's emblem. I read the caption explaining the tower was built in my Grandmother's honor and could only be accessed by one of her lineage. Dad found a cache of old Rebellion weapons inside years ago and ended up donating it to the Museum of Gemkind. The description at the bottom said the symbol didn't appear anywhere else.

They're wrong. My memory flashed to a cherished place from my childhood, a secret place only I knew, where I could be anything. The Garden. I wonder. I whistled to Bear, who was standing on top of the water roaring down and catching the flopping fish in his jaws. Bear loped over to me, swallowing the fish and cocking his ears at me.

I took out a flat slab rock with Gem glyphs on it. I took a piece of the stones before I moved away, so I always had a piece of that wonderful place with me no matter how far I went. Bear took a quick sniff and grunted, lowering his back. "Thanks bud." I got up onto his back and held on. Bear roared a portal open and charged through. I dismounted, my feet touching Jersey soil for the first time in over two months. "Home sweet home." Bear  reared up smelling the strange air. I closed my eyes letting myself adjust to the environment. When I opened them, it felt I stepped back in time and became a little kid again

I stood in the midst of a secluded woods. Twelve rings of megaliths surround an artificial hill in the center. The Stone Garden, a name I'd given it when I was seven years old, and especially fitting. The entire garden was set up like a ripple of water in mind; each ring grew larger than the last the further it spread from the epicenter.

You wouldn't find this place in the Gem Atlas, or in any history book. Heck, you wouldn't even find a passing mention of it in a Weird Jersey magazine. The garden was too small, too insignificant compared to the grand and otherworldly sights scattered across the Earth. "Were they always this small?" I brushed away the moss on one of the stones, it stood at my height. "Or did I grow bigger?"

I turned my head at Bear rustling through the garden, curiously smelling the stones and the ground, before coming back to me, nudging my back concerned. "I'm okay Buddy." I patted his neck, gazing at the stones and the surrounding trees. Listening to the birdsong and the bubbling of the the nearby creek where I'd splash my feet on hot summer days or pretended it was the border of a magical land.

The Stone Garden had been my sanctuary when I was a little girl, long before I found the Mountain Fortress, when I didn't understand why I was so different. I stumbled upon it while exploring the woods behind my old house in Northtown Jersey  with Lion. I remembered the amazement of the discovery to this day. The great moss covered stones rising from the earth, the wild trees, green and thick. I knew this would become a special place, a place to explore and enjoy.

From then on it had been my personal playground. My imagination always came in full force whenever I was here, with nobody to judge me or say that I was weird. Many hours I'd spent here, creeping among the stones, pretending I was an explorer who stumbled into a magical world hoping to catch a glimpse of the fairies, dryads, and unicorns who hid in the surrounding woods.