Amnion

Lillibeta, the lost ones often ask me in dreams, where does your garden grow? Bells and shells and pretty maids, upon dreaming's most dangerous row.  Breath like the hiss of a knife.   Dancing, twirling.  Pirouette on the point of this blade. My garden?  By the lake, of course.  Near the trees.  The Drowning Hill.  Place of the threshold where Ava spills her amnion into the waking world.  And still, the fallen continue to ask me about the secrets of clay and light and life.  What hidden truth it takes to shape the twinning river.  Temesh of All Waters.  The mouth, and the mouth.  But I ask you, what safer passage is there than the passage from the hill?  The lie of Man's dominion over sky and flesh?  I think not.  We are naught but the trick of our mother's mothers.  The consent of our fathers, if we’re lucky.  We are little more than angels new-born, enrobed in living leather.  Wings trembling, damp and hidden.  Memento Mori, as ye lost ones of Roma often tithe.  The bittersweet sagacity of these augured birds.  Black as crown.  Pale as shadow.  Did we blithely attempt to murder the evermore, in hope of bettered tribes?  For love and misplaced grief?  Did we slay our swordsmen well enough?  Some of them have returned.  Lake, and hilt.  For nobler causes, I would like to imagine.  Indeed I pray for such causes in this House of the Holy.  The Mori and the Moirai.  Hear me now, fallen.  I stood at the inner gate before the birth of your first tentative dreaming.  Broken, yearning, blinded by the black.  But hatred is not greater than love.  There are secrets within these secrets.  My daughters cast with kisses like seeds upon the winds.  That they might be more than I was.  More than we imagine ourselves to be.  Twirling, dancing, healing.  At last.  Breath like the lilt of a song.  A thing of tears, and joy.  Knowing what it truly means to be born again.  So, you ask me, where does my garden grow?  It grows with them, and all who heed them.  With Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa.