The first time she took notice of it, her mother was still around, providing her the freedom and carefreeness to explore the Spring Goddess' lands to her heart's content. She found them lovely, those little dark flowers that sprouted along an invisible pathway that sometimes appeared across the fields with no clear start or ending, leaving her to question everything about it.
Whoever this person was, they always traveled alone and with purpose, long strides barely straying from a straight line, leaving not footprints behind, but a trail of starkly dark blooms against the lush grass.
She knew not to touch said flowers. As beautiful as they were, the first and only time she gingerly plucked one from its delicate stem, it instantly turned to ash in her hands, prompting the rest of them to do the same. So she watched from afar, stood between the two neat rows, looking down the path one way and then other, following it until something else forced them to crumble and disappear with the wind.
But then, the Earth called upon the goddess to return to it and slumber, much like it had gently awoken her in the first place, and the newly freed power sought refuge within her daughter. With it, came the duties of tending to the natural life around her, which she lovingly did, but the elusive dark flowers never failed to bring out a childish wonder in her whenever they appeared.
One day, while she walked along the edges of her fields, she noticed either the starting point or the arrival of the path, where they went from mere remnants of dark energy and transformed into flowers when mixing with her own.
The fact that she was now the Goddess had her doing something she had never dared before, and giving into the curiosity that had been plaguing her for years, she stepped out of the Spring's territory and followed the energy back to its owner.