We see the world without eyes. 

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It’s a slow, gray thing, this world. Life seemed so fast, long ago. So short. Back when we moved with shuddering steps and grabbing hands. Back when we were afraid. It was so easy not to see, then. All we had to do was look away. Close our eyes. 

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We had eyes once, didn’t we? 

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Yes, we had eyes. 

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We did have eyes, but they were worn away by the wind and the rain. Many things have worn away. Memories. Remorse. Even pain. Perhaps it had hurt once, the cold and the cracks, but pain is so slow. Too slow to know when it begins, if it begins at all. The cold is still here, but it is always here, deep in our crumbling fingers and hollow lungs. 

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We weren’t always cold, were we? 

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No, not always. 

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The walls they built to imprison us have fallen. Those towering chambers—immune to miracles and built to withstand fire and flood—even they fell to time. The trees crept over the hill and across the once-empty fields. Their roots crawled through the mortar, and the forest followed in their wake. But trees have long memories, longer even than our own. The soil here is still. No roots pass beneath our feet. The trees remember to be afraid, and perhaps they even remember why. The people don’t remember. We are a forgotten story, a superstition without a name. Sometimes they find us, the travelers who stray too far from the paths. They look up at us, all of us standing together in our ruin. They look at the faces worn smooth, all that distinguished us now eroded away. They see the web of cracks down our backs, the holes in our clasped hands. But they do not see us. They do not see the people we were, how we were feared, revered, and hated. All they see is empty stone.

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Except for one. 

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One? 

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The girl. 

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Yes, the girl! 

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She could see us, couldn’t she? 

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She could. 

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She spoke to us, didn’t she? 

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She did. 

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We remember a girl. A little girl who fluttered. Yes, everything about her fluttered, her hair, her eyes, her hands. She lived in an orchard, in a house where the fields met the trees. A warm, fragile house built on the love and regrets of a good but ailing man. She was not lost when she found us. She was never lost, simply searching. Searching for somewhere to explore, somewhere like the places in her stories. A place where her own adventure could begin. 

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“Is this your castle?” she asked us. She was so small, standing alone in our broken prison.

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No, we wanted to say. And yes. 

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The wall at our backs was all that remained, an arch of stone and a crumbling spire. Trees sprouted from the cracks in the stones, the canopy of branches a memory of a fallen roof.

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“It’s beautiful,” she said.

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And for a moment, it was. We had seen so much—too much—and the world had started to fade. We saw the wind and rain, the towers being raised and felled. We saw so much time, so many things that aged and withered, that the color began to wither too. We lived in a world of smoke, of shifting light and stagnant shadow, but for a moment, we could see it. We could see that it was autumn and that the trees burned red. We could see the sun beneath the hill and how the moss and stones glowed in its light. And it was beautiful. 

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Are we beautiful?

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We were, once. 

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“Can I come back?” the girl asked, her breath flickering in the air. “I’ve always wanted to see a real castle.” 

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Yes, we thought. Yes.

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So she came back. Every day, she came back with a flurry of words and a warbling laugh. Seasons changed, and still, she came, bundled in scarves and hats and a red wool coat. She brought blankets—worn, tattered things beyond repair—and draped them over the walls. “Tapestries” she called them, breathless and bright-eyed. She brought baskets of dried apples, warmed in the open sky of her family’s orchard, and made swords from fallen branches.

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Why did she come back?

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We don’t know.

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Did anyone else come back?

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No, no one else.

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Why?

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Because they were afraid.

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Afraid of us?

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Yes, of us.

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“I’m going to be a knight when I grow up,” she told us. “A traveling knight on horseback. My dad says that if you follow the river, and keep going long enough, you’ll reach a cliff where the land ends, and then there’s just water stretching out forever. I’m going to see it one day.”

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She told us this and many other things. She told us of her family, her house, and the orchard. She told us about her dreams of travel, the books she had read, and all the ideas that burned away in her imagination. And for a time—in the shadow of a fortress built to stifle us—we felt as if we could breathe. As if we could move. As if we were free. 

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Do we remember how it felt to be free?

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No.

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Yes.

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Some of us do.

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She wrote stories about us in a little pink notebook. She read them to us, her voice breathing life into every word. In her stories, we were heroes—great heroes who watched over the forest from our castle.

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But they were just stories.

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Yes, a child’s stories. 

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We believed that we were heroes once. We told ourselves that we could give our power to the world—a world so real, so inflexible. We thought that together we could bring an endless harvest, heal the land, and create life from the scorched ground. We thought that we were performing miracles.

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We were wrong.

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Yes, we were wrong.

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But the girl imagined that we were something good—something better. In her stories, we fought monsters and demons and kept the whole woodland kingdom safe. But, she wrote, one day, we were turned to stone by a beast with the talons of a bird and the eyes of a snake. Now we guard the castle as statues, waiting for a brave knight to return us to what we once were. The stone angels, she called us.

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We are not angels.

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No, we are not.

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Are we monsters?

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Perhaps we are monsters.

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Yes, we may have been monsters. Before the forest grew and before the walls were raised. Before they bound us to this place—our prison and our gallows. When storms washed over the fields and the world itself withered before us. Reality is brittle in the face of magic, but that did not stop us. We were too proud. Too bitter. 

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But the girl knew nothing of us nor of those who imprisoned us. Sometimes even we don’t know. Their names and faces blurred as our own wore away. 

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Do we remember our names?

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Sometimes, sometimes we remember. 

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Time passed, and she grew, the girl in the red wool coat. She grew tall and thoughtful, her footsteps sure. The winters had grown harsh at the house on the orchard. The girl’s mother had passed away long ago, and her father could not tend to the trees as he once had, but still, she fluttered, bearing the weight unbent. And she would always return to her castle in the forest and to the stone angels that guarded it. Where she could tell us all the new things she had learned and all that she had written in her little pink book. 

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“All my imperfect worlds of paper and pen,” she said.

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And how we ached to say something back. How we ached.

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We still think about her, don’t we?

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Yes.

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Yes!

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When we remember.

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Because she left, didn’t she?

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Yes.

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She left.

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One day, the girl left. The world had turned while she was here. So quickly, it turned. The years had started to show on her face and her hands. White streaks ran through her warm brown hair. Still, she came to her castle in the forest one last time. 

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“Do you remember when I told you I was going to travel to the end of the world?” She was sitting with her back to the wall, the last wall, still standing after so long. “I never left. How could I? I couldn’t leave him here alone. It would have killed him.”

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We could see her, then. A woman sitting alone in a crumbling ruin. It was autumn once more, and fallen leaves were scattered at her feet.

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“But I didn’t mind. I had my books, after all. And I had you, the guardians of my imaginary fortress. I never grew out of playing pretend, did I? But we were happy, my father and I. Even when it was just the two of us.” She was silent for a long time, staring through us and into the forest. “I’m selling the orchard,” she said at last, her voice wavering. “I’m going to see it. The place where the land turns to water. I’m going to see it.” She smiled at us, then. A bright, flitting smile. “Thank you,” she said, the words hovering in the still air. “Thank you for letting me come back. Maybe . . . maybe I will again some day.”

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No, we thought. Keep going until you see it. Keep going to the end of the world, and don’t look back.

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So she left us, our girl in the red wool coat. She left and didn’t come back.

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Why was she kind to us? 

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We don’t know. 

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The others weren’t kind. 

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What others? 

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The ones who lured us here. 

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No. 

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They wanted us dead. 

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Yes.

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Why?

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Because we deserved to die.

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Then why didn’t we?

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Because we were afraid.

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Afraid of what?

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Afraid of death.

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That’s why we did it, isn’t it?

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Yes.

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Because stone can’t die?

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Yes.

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But stone can’t sleep either.

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No, it can’t.

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So, was it worth it?

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What?

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Escaping death. 

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No.

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But it was worth seeing a world without us.

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A world where she could sleep.

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Where she could dream.

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Where she could be free.

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Yes. 

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Yes, that was worth seeing. 

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Do we think she found it? 

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What? 

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The place at the end of the world. 

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Perhaps. 

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We hope that she did. 

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We hope that she saw all that we never could.