diary entry from today's short visit.

----------------------------------------------------------

it woke to snowfall. the flakes never touched the ground, and they melted the moment they drifted onto its skin. the forest wasn't cold - but it was grey, and oddly quiet.



the pond's waters were grey, too. but they tasted as they always did, and it drank without thought.



doe and fawn were nestled not far from where it had drank. it greeted them: the first deer it had ever met directly, save perhaps for those it might have met as a young, forgetful fawn.



it felt a pull to the Crying Idol. a tug somewhere behind its breastbone that urged it upriver, brushing past poppies as it went.



it listened. the idol said nothing. it wondered if it had offended them somehow, but doubted it. the statues of the forest were old and tired easily. often they simply had nothing to say.



it took poppies from the riverbanks, unsure of why it felt compelled to. an offering for the idol, perhaps, or a mark of remembrance: yes, i see you. you are not yet forgotten. the world had changed. few were left to remember the old ways.

no wonder the statues slept.




nearby, it settled down to rest. it could still see the bridge, but the doe and her fawn were out of sight. the falling snow neither quickened nor slowed. constant. unchanging. the landscape here seemed stuck in time; its denizens changed and warped and twisted and left when they outgrew it, but the world around them never did. nothing in the forest grew or died. but its inhabitants had learned, somehow. they could do what it could not.



it settled down, pitying the idol, the statues, the ruins. the trees and flowers and birds and butterflies that remained stagnant, stuck decades or centuries in the past while strange creatures trampled through their home and replaced the deer of old.

when it fell asleep, the snow still failed to settle.