Stains of rain freckle the earth with claret and blue, wine and sorrow, and they trickle and dribble across her body, the trees' bodies, with slow and agonizing kisses. Wetness falls from the skin of branches above her head despite the calm of the skies, beads of humid warmth twinkle on the tips of all things green, quivering on the edges of her brows, her nose, catching in the knotted nests within her mane even though the angry clouds have not yet split, cracked, wept or sweat, and she watches through star-dust and lashes as the storm-less rainwater swims in the hollow veins of lichen, of oak-blood, the gnarls of elder roots that leap from the soil like slithering spines, failing to carve their own paths and instead cruelly following in what the Gods have provided for them, and she feels a peculiar stillness. The taste of rustic and nature's things is strong, here, in this unknown and wicked-forsaken meadow, and Liriope savors how it draws past her teeth and prickles on her hide and the dew and sweat and smell of midsummer, of dampness and birdsong and horrible, horrible peace, and she wishes immediately to fill it with something. With the rich tenor of faraway thunder her song and the darkening world her canvas, she balances on a risen foot of a vermillion ancient, her guardian, her sentinel, unleashing upon the gentle, tender noise between the brother-birches her own poison, her own brand, her own art: silence.

Had she not paid notice to this place, her heart would not have ached, her mind would not have hurried to answer inquiries, to fill voids with possibilities where there could have been memories, and nor would she yearn to return if she were to continue on, to perhaps discover better, lovelier things whilst she roams, whilst she learns the map on which her new home has been drawn. It is nothing special; doubtfully even a garden let alone a secret one, but she is tired, and she is weary, and she is in need of cleansing, of recollection, of immortalizing, and so she is immaculately still, ginger upon the patient and stagnant life within the wood, and she will remember her son; broken shards of color and shadows molded and glued, fractured mirror-pieces of sculpted chests and inky ropes of leonine tails, boyish touches, roses and blushes and the sticking flesh of a messy embrace, and she smiles, for today she sees only that which was before his death. The heat of sunlight is lurid and comforting and bounces with a brassy lull, breathy and resounding and gathering like a vision of a fire-bird before her eyes, her closed and silent eyes, the notes of agony once riddling there upon its beak transformed into an instrument to use, a beast once of malevolent thrashes now pressed and finessed into a bonded, a companion, a loyal purr, and it flutters away with its new sound like morning bells.

She is content.