Beyond the outskirts of abandoned factories, where smokestacks leaned like weary giants against the horizon and assembly lines lay gutted, their steel intestines scattered across broken floors, there stretched a garden unlike any other, a wilderness not of soil, water, and sunlight, but of rust, corrosion, and silence so heavy it seemed to pulse like a heartbeat beneath the earth. The ground, once fertile with seeds and rain, had hardened into vast sheets of corroded iron, brittle enough to crack beneath each step with the shrill fracture of shattering glass, echoing through the emptiness like a warning not to proceed further. From this wounded terrain sprouted grotesque imitations of trees: trunks formed of tangled pipes fused together by decay, branches extended as crooked beams, and leaves replaced by serrated fragments of gears, their jagged edges dripping with streaks of oxidized orange that gleamed like blood in the dying light of the setting sun. Flowers too, if one dared call them flowers, unfurled with metallic defiance, their petals hammered from warped copper sheets that curved into knife-like blossoms, glistening with the faint green patina of corrosion, while their stems bent under the weight of decay, snapping with the faintest touch. And yet, despite their fragility, they swayed with uncanny elegance in winds that whistled through hollow pipes, releasing not fragrance but clouds of reddish dust, shimmering sparks that drifted like embers before vanishing into the haze of dusk. Among them lived birds wrought from fragments of broken machinery, wings of sheet metal, feathers made of shredded tin, beaks chipped from iron rods, and when they sang, it was not song but shrill metallic shrieks, a chorus of grinding hinges and clattering chains that pierced the silence and set the air trembling. Travelers who stumbled upon this garden spoke of a paradoxical beauty that defied sense: ruin transformed into artistry, death blooming into something alive yet artificial, collapse molded into a vision of strange grace. Some wept, overwhelmed by its magnificence; others trembled, disturbed by its unnatural vitality. They whispered that the rust itself was alive, creeping across every surface not with random indifference but with a hunger that resembled thought, consuming not merely metal but wood, stone, and eventually even the intangible, names, memories, histories. Paths once taken crumbled into dust, faces once loved dissolved from recollection, and time itself seemed to corrode, its steady march breaking into fragments like shattered cogs of a forgotten clock. Those who lingered too long found the rust upon their boots, their hands, their very skin, spreading in patterns that mirrored veins, etching them into creatures half-living, half-decayed, until they could no longer distinguish whether they had entered the garden by accident or whether they had been summoned as part of its endless cycle of consumption. And in the silence, heavy as rusted chains, one truth lingered above all others: nothing escapes corrosion, not steel, not memory, not even the passage of time itself.