he keeps growing, and yet her heart remains feather soft. Maybe it is this lightness that allows her to steal across the ocean in the middle of the night. Pitter and patter and titter and tatter, as if she walks across the wooden planks of a pirate’s ship rather than dancing over waves. If she were not an artist, Elliana would be a dancer. Though maybe the two are not so different. One paints with a brush, another with their body. They still form pictures and tell stories all the same. 

It is a child’s face she sees first, as dark as obsidian, his eyes close as if in concentration. Next there is one of ivory, mouth poised in such a way that tells Elli that those lungs once held laughter instead of stone. She finds two flowers, tucks one behind each of their ears. Their lips twitch with words of warning, but Elli can only kiss their cheeks before departing. She has to go further, and further. More and more statues open up before her. Elliana has seen gardens before, those in Dawn, those in Dusk, those in Night and Day. They remind her of a garden, but this is not the kind of garden that belongs to little girls, this is a garden for the gods. 

Go, go, go, her brain murmurs.
Come, come, come, the voices call. 

She can hear them. They want for her to come closer echoes inside her head, in the marrow of her bones. 

It is the beginning and end of time, the moving things’ want.

And who would she be to deny them?

She goes so willingly. Lovingly. She surrenders to them. She belongs to them.
How ecstatic she is to belong to anything at all. Finally.

She is a figment of their imagination. She has come home.

And the statues begin to move before her. No, not the statues, their spirits, they appear before her one by one, rising from the stoney faces that litter the land. An army of darkness. Their shapes warped by the peculiar lighting that settles over this land. So dark that they appear purple. Or some shade of some color she’s never seen before. They are grinning shark-tooth smiles at her. Ink-black mouths. Freakish yellow eyes.

A sigh steals across her lips as she watches them. The fluttering of her heart settles into a calm cadence as if accepting of her fate. Her gaze, bright blue and silver watches, unable to look away as she speaks. “There are so many that are dead, no matter where you go.”