Emily's white veil rolls up a 1943 grape leaf specimen as the wind blows past the emerald monument. In Louis's military breast pocket, the acorn finally cracked open, revealing the last page of Madeleine's notes - the wedding vows, bookmarked in leaf veins, lying in a network of fibers.
"You stole my oath." Emily smiled and let him tighten his veil, and the astrolabe's hair accessories flashed at the temples.
Empty wine barrels in the guest seats suddenly hum at the same time, and the sun of 1953 penetrates the oak lines and casts a millstone shadow of 1927 on the lawn.
Old Joseph's reliquary spontaneously combusted at the beginning of the ceremony. The flame has no temperature, but melts those undelivered wooden whistles, bloody horseshoe nails, fluorescent ore specimens into liquid amber.
When the first drop fell into the champagne glass, all the guests tasted the bitterest and sweetest taste they could remember.
Louis's father, the blacksmith who had disappeared for twenty years, suddenly appeared in the shadow of the vine. He spread out his palms to reveal melted Roman coins, and in the eye sockets of the idol were the bronze spikes Emily had lost.
"Final commission from Madeline.
" Rusty voice mixed with liquor swallowing, "
she said when two wounded souls learn to graft with each other..."
The hurricane swept through the wedding without warning. When they opened their eyes, the long dining table of 1953 overlapped with the mill cellar of 1927.
Young Joseph and Madeline clink glasses in a rift in time and space, while Emily on crutches hands the astrolabe to Louis in the trenches.
As the comet passed the twilight line, Emily threw a bouquet. Withered lavender bundles break down and reassemble in flight, turning into grapevine graffiti on a 1948 plaster leg.
Instead of a bouquet of flowers, Louis caught the iron box he had buried seven years earlier in the North African battlefield, containing the earth and hair of Saint Cyril.
"You always say I run away."
He opened the iron box in public, and the grapevine carved by the shell case was growing around the cogs of the pocket watch.
"Actually, I was waiting for all the wounds of jet lag to scab simultaneously."
There were sobs from the guest table. People find that there is not only wine in their glasses, but also the fragments of memories: the tears of first love, the blood of childbirth, the smile of dying... Each drop of liquid is reflecting the moonlight of a different year.
The herd returned to the mill at midnight. On the tusks at the head, faded union flags have been woven into the velvet lining of a wedding ring.
When Emily and Louis kissed, the emerald monument burst into luminous flowers, each petal is a slice of time and space:
A soldier in 1914 wrote a love letter in a wine barrel, a teenager in 1927 carved an astrolabe on the edge of an acid spring, a nurse in 1943 bandaged a grapevine, and a scientist in 2013 cultivated acorn seedlings in a space capsule.
Madeline's voice swept the earth in the wake of the comet:
"Look, all unreturned love will eventually become the rootstock of another love."
The newlyweds walked north in the morning fog.
Emily's wedding shoes sank into the soft soil, and each step gave birth to new grape varieties: "Eternal Covenant" with vow veins, "Memory Aging" with astral green flesh, "Time Rootstock" with double helix roots...
Louis buried the box at the top.
As the last pile of earth covered the surface of the box, seven acorns broke from behind them, their branches winding into arcades to all space and time.
"Time to water other wounded years."
Emily threw the astrologer into the clouds, and the bronze spikes turned into spring rain to the different generations of Saint Cyril.
In the vineyard behind them, the twenty-year-old himself was quarrelling over the pinecone necklace he had met for the first time, while the hundred-year-old figure was still brewing new wonders. The moonlight of every era is gentle, and the roots of every love are connected.
Where Emily's white yarn had fallen, a young plant was breaking through the rubble.
The dews on the leaves reflect the seven dimensions of time and space: twenty-year-old Louis clutching stolen grape shears on a stormy night, forty-year-old Louis carving shell casings in a trench, sixtieth Louis caresses his wife's unfinished star chart on a gravestone, and centenaries sit alone under the moon, burying acorns at the beginning of an eternal cycle.
Louis's wedding ring slid across the nascent vine, and the moment the metal touched the plant, the entire vineyard line began to sing.
The notes were the faded notes in Madeleine's notes, the grain of wood under Joseph's carving knife, the unformed sighs in the forge's furnace. At each rest, there is an amber condensation, sealing a moment of moonlight.
When the clock struck midnight, wedding guests found themselves holding different tokens: a winemaker holding a 1914 soldier's letter home, a nun holding a 1943 medical bandage, and a child clutching a 2013 space seed bag. All the artifacts oozed wine liquor in the moonlight, converging into a stream to the jade monument.
The inscription began to flow.
Madeline's aphorisms intertwine with the memories of her guests, the writing sometimes lingering like tendrils of grapes, sometimes as cold as a ballistic trajectory.
As the comet's trail sweeps past the last letter, the monument turns into a glow of fireflies, each point of light a love-drenched space-time coordinate.
Emily's bouquet is in full bloom right now. From the tangled stalks of lavender and grape flowers, emerge all the unfinished love stories:
the unsent letter of the secret lover, the pocket watch of the widow, the silver spoon in the swaddling clothes of the orphan. This unspent love falls into the soil and becomes nourishment for the new vine.
In the pre-dawn silence, the newlyweds walk to the mill where they first met. Louis's army boots hit a half-buried snail shell, where the juice of the 1948 grape was still flowing. Emily crouched down to tap, and a youthful echo floated out of the shell:
"You stole from the Schafans!"
"Love came into my pocket."
The Louis of the present speaks to his former self.
As they smiled at each other, seven acorns fell at once. The first one was buried on a stormy night in 1927, and the last one crashed into the lab in 2013. The five in the middle form a beidou in the sky, guiding all the lost stardust back to its place.
When the first rays of sunlight Pierce the morning mist, all the cracks in the vineyard are quietly healed. Only the observant will find that on the back of each grape leaf there is an extra golden vein - a projection of the chart's longitude in this world, a physical index of Madeleine's prophecy, and an immutable contour of love.
Emily's wedding ring began to fade, and the old vine in amber sprouted new buds. Louis dropped the ring into the acid spring and watched it disintegrate as it sank:
the silver returned to the Roman veins, the carbon merged into the grape roots, and the sealed energy of the 1902 lightning strike became the morning wind that swept over the vine vine of the seven times.
"Time to brew a new miracle."
She squeezed his tree-ringed hand.
Behind them, the quarrels of twenty and the smiles of a hundred are cycling with photosynthesis. Every vine is the tombstone and cradle of love, every fruit holds a moment of eternity, and every drop of wine tells:
Wounds will eventually scab into flowers, time forever brew love for wine.