On the darkened street, people came and went again, leaving no impression. The dark river swirled into oblivion and the cobblestones glistened with rain. Horses could not walk here, but that was all right; no one rich enough to own a horse ever set foot here. This was the Riverside. This was where people starved and fought to survive while in their midst the unhappy river roared deafeningly.
    With her back against a wooden building, the girl sat, watching the world through narrow eyes. She was only six or seven. Her long black her was matted and her dress was in rags. She was looking for something, only she kept forgetting what. She kept thinking it was her mother, but she knew that wasn’t right; her mother had died when she was small.
    No, it was something else. There was something she usually did that she hadn’t done. She couldn’t remember what.
    Her stomach growled painfully and she remembered. Pushing herself to her knees and held out her hands as the people passed by, unseeing. She didn’t have the energy to raise her voice anymore.
    The winter had been to strong. There were night she hadn’t slept, but had spent running through the streets, just trying to stay warm. And now it was spring, and like so many flowers, she was losing energy. What had kept her moving during winter was not enough to let her grow into the spring, and she was losing momentum.
    Unsteadily she stood. There were purple shadows moving in the corners of her vision. They reached to her as she walked forward. She didn’t know where she was going. She was following some dark path she half remembered. Closing her eyes, she walked unsteadily forward.
    She walked off the end of the dock.
    But she never hit the water. She twisted in the air, and the world changed around her. When she landed, it was on something soft, and green.
    She was lying in grass, she realized gradually. It was very soft grass. She’d only ever seen the spiky grass that grew between the cobblestones on the Riverside street. She’d never seen this kind of grass, which was short and very brightly green. She’d never seen so much of it either.
    Feeling somehow less tired, she pushed herself up onto her knees. The green stretched around her. She was in a small clearing, surrounded by trees. The whole world glowed silver with starlight.
    A disturbance in the grass drew her attention to the ground. A small creature was moving there on tall legs, a lizard with a many colored back. His gait was strange. In one of his three toed feet he was carefully gripping an apple.
    He walked right up to her, and stopped before her, offering the apple. Hesitantly, she reached out and took it. As she bit hungrily into it, he began to speak.
    “Aren’t you wondering where you are?” he asked.
    The girl wiped her mouth. “I jus’ figured I was dead. Hadn’t eaten in so long, after all. An’ I kept seeing all these purple shadows. I figured they was ghosts.”
    “They were ghosts. They were a different kind of ghosts.”
    The girl shrugged, taking another bite of apple. “One kind of ghosts or another, seeing ‘em usually means you’re dead.”
    The lizard regarded her curiously.
    “Thank you for the apple,” the girl mumbled self consciously.
    “How did you get here?”
    “Fell in the river, only somehow I came here.”
    “I will make a deal with you.”
    “What kind’ve deal?”
    “I will bless you so that you can come and go from this place.”
    “Will I be able to eat apples whenever I want?”
    “If you can find them. This is a place of many paths, and you will have to be careful how you tread, but if you find the right paths, you will be able to find many things that could help you.”
    The girl regarded him carefully. “Like what? What else besides apples?”
    “There are flowers here, magnificent flowers.”
    “People sell flowers up in the park sometimes,” the girl mumbled. “I’ve never been there. There aren’t any flowers on Riverside street, so I got nothing to sell. You’re saying I could pick flowers here, and sell them at home?”
    “You could. You must be careful though, that you do not take too many, or take any too magnificent.”
    “Why?”
    “It is a rule.”
    The girl tossed the apple core into the grass. “That sounds like a fair deal. How will I know how to get here though?”
    “You just will. Would you like to go further into the garden?”
    “Is that where the flowers are?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay.”
    “You must pick a path.”
    The girl peered into the silver wood, where two little roads diverged. One led to the orchard’s center. It was bright and filled with light. The other followed its edge and then wound away into its outskirts. It was filled with shadows.
    “I think I’ll take that one,” she said, pointing to the darker path. “After all, you said I can’t take any grand flowers, and that other path looks awful grand.”
    “You will have to be careful. Do not stray from the path.”
    “Got it.”
    “What is your name?”
    “I haven’t got one.”
    “You got here by falling into the river, and you seem a clever creature. Your name shall be Otter.”
    Otter smiled. “It seems like a good name.” Her head held high, she stepped into the shadows, and vanished into the garden.

    intro
        
    Viola hadn’t thought to bring a coat, but the weather was unseasonably warm as she stepped tentatively away from the tower. The breeze that danced gracefully through the tops of the knotted orchard trees was not sharp, and the leaves did not rattle on their browning stems.  They did glow golden, but not with the faint traces of autumn. The dying light of the evening sun caught their edges and sent sparks through the air.
    Still transfixed, Viola removed herself from the shadow of the tower. A broad path wound away into the trees. She could see only its beginning before it wound off into the unseen regions of the lovely forest, but if she looked very closely, she could see glimpses of it turning and weaving alluringly in the distance, dancing between the trees.
    Even beneath the shadow of the trees it was not cold. Her blue nightgown fluttered around her and in the corners of her eyes she could see echoes of periwinkles beyond the path. They smiled up at the sky and she smiled too, in a dreamy sort of way.
    The little rope swing and the brook were out there somewhere, and suddenly she knew with absolute certainty that if she followed the path, it would lead her to them, to that place that sang out to her memory. Without even meaning to, she began moving forward. Memories unfolded around her as she walked. Beside the path bluebells and violets sprang to birth as she remembered.
    Around her the orchard shifted imperceptibly into night. The leaves lost their metallic edge of color and the forest glowed as if it had been spun from silver cobwebs. The leaves shivered as the continuous breeze moved through them. Every once and a while she would see the swing in the distance, illuminated by moonlight and turning faintly where it hung. The stream  pulsed silver beside it and in its reflection she could see butterflies and the moon looking down on the earth and her mother’s face. She could see Basil and Otter all in a room and they were frightened.
    She could hear Basil too. She could hear him calling out. It came to her muffled, as if heard through fog, or across a great distance, and it was her name that he was calling. “Basil?” she said curiously, pausing, and the cry rang out again.
    “Basil!” she called back, turning to face the tower. “Basil, I’m only in the garden!”
     Like a deer paused with surprise by the sound of the hunter's footsteps, or a bird, halted momentarily in its flitting journey from one branch to the next, Viola became suddenly still. Only her chest moved, almost imperceptibly, as her heart sped up, keeping time with her thoughts.
    “How odd,” she breathed, squinting up at the tower behind her. All along its broad width it was dark gray stone. This was right, and this was good. She had seen the tower many times from its other side, by the entrance to the hall. But half way up its height, where her window should have stood open, candlelight pouring out golden against the silver night, was a spot of warm red. “How odd,” she said again, starting back towards the tower. “It’s been bricked over.”
    Her daydreams dissolved around her. The forest was dark and beautiful, but it rippled strangely, as if seen through water. She trailed her fingers across the surface of one particularly elegant and twisted tree, and patterns moved along its surface.
    Suddenly nervous, she walked quickly back to the tower and stared up at her window. “But that can’t be right,” she said aloud. “For I climbed down somehow. How else would I be here?” For a moment she looked up, unmoving. Above the high and distant stars stared down. They twinkled in myriads, more stars than she had ever seen in Stoneworld. More stars than she had ever imagined could exist.
    Slowly Viola began to circle the tower, one hand on its base. “I will go back in through the front,” she murmured. “Basil and Otter must be searching for me now.” She pressed the palm of her hand to her forehead. “I have been unwell. I know I have been unwell. They will be searching for me.”
    A moment later she came to where she had started. Twice more she circled the tower, seeking entrance, but there were no other doors in the smooth stone wall, nor any other windows. High above a light shone down and a single open window looked across the orchard but who its denizen might be and how she would reach it were irresolvable dilemmas. The stone wall offered no handholds.
    Slowly, Viola stepped back from the wall. “This is not my tower,” she said, benumbed, looking up at the light, high above. “Someone else lives here.” Nervously she looked around. Gloom seemed to permeate the opposite side of the tower. There was no path and the orchard looked overgrown.
    Irresolute, she looked at the ground. “Basil?” she called out tentatively.
    The only answer was the whistle of the wind in the tops of the trees.
    “Well then,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “If I must stay here, and it seems I haven’t a choice, I shall find that rope swing.”
    This time without a backwards glance, Viola set off into the darkening woods.
    The breeze had faded away into an almost imperceptible rustling overhead, and moonlight dappled the path as it fell through the delicate leaves. Heavy bunches of purple flowers hung overhead. The ground was cool and as Viola walked, the dew began to settle. It dampened the path and her hair as it hung in its braid down her back and it dampened the shoulders of her dress, and she began to shiver.
    After a time, she became aware of a strange anomaly. It seemed she had been walking for an age, and yet the rope swing remained always in the distance. She hardly dared turn around for she feared that if she did, she would discover that the tower and its bricked up window would still be just behind her, looming over the mysterious orchard and watching her from its single yellow window.
    She slowed her pace and finally stopped, perplexed. This piece of the orchard looked no different from the rest. The stream trickled and murmured by the path. Thirsty from walking, she stepped off the path to drink. The white frothing water was ice cold to the touch. It seemed that pictures still flickered indistinctly in its bright surface, but Viola ignored them. She turned back to the path.
    But the path was not there; the neat rows of trees continued on in the place where the path had once been. Viola’s knees felt suddenly weak. “This is a strange place indeed,” she whispered. “Surely it cannot be real, and I must be mad or dreaming.
    But if this was a dream, she realized, facing away from the empty orchard that stood where her path had been, perhaps that was why her surroundings felt like water. Things blurred indistinctly in her peripheral vision and the stars were too bright and too many.
    She glanced back at the stream. In its surface an image played of a field of brown and wilted flowers. A gray sky hung menacingly overhead and no rain fell although the air was heavy with thunder. The blossoms were dried out and dying and in the background she could hear the remnants of voices.
    “--be back, I promise--”
    “Promise?”
    “--have to go now--.”
    “Wait don’t--”
    “They’re waiting at Whitehaven. A mob, they’re--”
    “Waiting, and I can’t just stay here until his majesty releases us,” said Basil angrily.
    “We have no choice--”
    “Otter?” Viola whispered. “Basil?” She reached out to touch the surface of the water, but the cold of it almost seemed to burn her and she withdrew her hand. “But the rest of that was just an old nightmare I used to have.”
    She could remember waking with tears all down her face because the flowers were dead and her mother had gone. Belle would come to her bedside and light her candle and tell her that it was only a dream, and that she could control her dreams if she liked, and dream something different.
    Viola reached out to the surface of the water again. “I want to dream something different now,” she said. “I want to dream about the rope swing and the little brook. And if I can’t see the path anymore, well then I’ll get there by following this stream, because I think it is the same one in that little clearing. No,” she said, pausing, “I know that it is, because this is a dream, and so if I think it, it must be true.”
    She stepped forward into the shadows of the orchard. On the surface of the stream, unseen, another story played out. A young girl with brown hair sat on a rope swing in a garden of bluebells and foxgloves and twisted slowly back and forth as daylight streamed in.
    Viola walked onwards, leaving moonlight in her wake.
    Her footsteps made no noise or imprint on the soft ground. The hem of her dress picked up no mud from the bank of the stream where it occasionally trailed.
    It seemed to Viola that the wood was watching her. She could feel its invisible eyes on the back of her neck, and so she stood taller and held her head up high. The rustling in the treetops sounded like the movements of strange creatures, and she could feel a curious regard upon her the further she walked.
    Leaves fell from the tree before her and branches shook with unseen weight, and she halted nervously.
    “Who’s there?” she said quietly. “Please do come out. I’ve been walking for some time. I’m tired and you’re frightening me.”
    On a branch in front of her the moonlight and the shadows between the leaves warped and twisted. Two ice blue eyes blinked open and stared out at her as around them a deep blue body manifested. Pearly scales covered its fine hide. From nose tip to tail it was perhaps the length of her arm.
    “Who are you?” Viola asked doubtfully. “Are you a dragon? I dreamt about a dragon before, only it was white with red flowers all along its back.”
    “No,” the lizard like creature said in a high voice. “That is a different creature. I am the chameleon.”
    Viola stepped forward curiously. “What is a chameleon?”
    “I am,” it said placidly.
    “But what does that mean?”
    “It means that I can do this.” As Viola watched the chameleons body stretched and its thin legs shortened until it became a serpent, the long folds of its heavy body hanging gracefully over the side of the thin tree limb.
    “Can you become anything you want, then?”
    “Yes. Anyone can. I am a chameleon because I know how.”
    “How fantastic,” Viola breathed. “To be able to become anything you please.”
    “Anyone can learn it,” the chameleon said, leaning its blunt snake head towards her. “I can teach you if you’d like. Then you would be able to fly or swim whenever you pleased. You’d be able to hide yourself as a mouse or defeat even the most fearsome beasts as a tiger.”
    Viola looked down at the little stream bubbling at her feet. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “Only, there is a place I am trying to find right now.”
    “But imagine how much easier it would be to find if you could see it from the air.”
    Viola tilted her head. “I think the leaves would only obscure it. Besides,” she said, “I think I have only just discovered how to get there.”
    “And how is that?”
    “By following this stream. It is the same stream that is beside the place that I am trying to find. I tried to take the path, but it kept leading me in the strangest circles.”
    “This garden is made of such circles. Be careful how you go, and remember my offer.”
    “I will,” Viola said. “Have you any advice for me? This is such a strange place. I know not how I got here, nor where I am.”
    The chameleon reached out with its long tail and touched her forehead. “Many people of your world have been lost here,” it said gravely. “Because they look at their feet and so see only the shadows. Their hearts are subverted by the fear that lingers there. Look to the moonlight and the stars, and you will find your way.”
    “Thank you,” Viola said curtsying. “I must be on my way now.”
    “Before you go, will you take this gift?” The chameleon reared up into the tree and took a single apple from a branch. “For your journey,” he said, offering it to her.
    Viola took the apple. “Thank you,” she repeated, backing towards the stream. “I will remember your offer.”
    The chameleon bowed his head and vanished into the green periphery of her vision as she walked away.
    “What a strange and riddle like piece of advice,” Viola murmured to herself as she continued slowly into the depths of the orchard. “How can I both look at the moon and watch the stream as I walk? If I look only at the stream, the moon will be invisible to me, yet if I watch the moon, I will not be able to follow the stream, and I will surely become hopelessly lost.” For a moment she stopped to watch the shadows of the leaves play across the surface of the water. In their movement for a moment it seemed that she could see a picture, a face staring out at her, and  it seemed hopelessly sad.
    “I wonder if that is the ghost of a person who was trapped here,” Viola wondered, brushing the surface of the water with her hand to clear away the image. “And I wonder what the chameleon meant by shadows that subvert the soul.”
    She lifted her hand from the surface of the water. The cool drops beaded on her skin and rolled down along her arm and she had an idea. Gathering her skirts around her knees, she stepped into the icy water of the stream. Immediately her mind seemed clearer. The moonlight in the orchard seemed brighter and the voice of the stream was almost a song as she walked, following the stream with her feet and the moon, which hung perfectly in the center of the sky, with her eyes.
    The orchard thickened around her. The neat rows of trees seemed less carefully arranged here and Viola wondered what strange shapes they were making, and what the orchard would look like from overhead. The moon hung unwavering in the sky. It’s bright form occasionally would be masked by the whispering leaves that bent over her head and cast trembling shadows on the starlit stream but always it reappeared, bright and immutable, the one thing in a landscape of flickering twilight that seemed never to alter.
    Her mind grew numb as the icy water seemed to move through her veins and her consciousness. Stories played out on the edges of her vision and over the face of the moon. She could see Basil, alone in small shadowed space, a dark room, with his head in his hands. Deep angry voices permeated the space and then vanished into nothing. Beneath a tree Otter appeared, her back turned. She was looking out into the darkness between the trees and as Viola watched, she saw that there was candlelight. There were two men in the guards house and Otter was listening, but she couldn’t make out their words, and she didn’t dare to interrupt. The scene faded and Otter turned towards her in the darkness, her hands full of flowers that glowed like the moon.
    For a moment Viola turned her head from the sky and looked but even as she turned Otter began to dissipate in a bunch of purple petals that flew through the air and stuck in her hair and in her clothes.
     From then on Viola kept her eyes locked on the moon. Swirls of petals and luminous butterflies spiraled in the corners of her vision and across the sky and she laughed with delight when she saw them, but she did not look down.
    The moon had not moved at all when Viola felt the trees disappear around her. The open space was permeated with moonlight. The trees and the grass glowed with silver intensity and the breeze played once more, teasing Viola’s hair out of the braid at the back of her neck. She stepped out of the stream and stood for a moment with her eyes closed and her feet in the grass. Here no visions came to her, nor sounds of conversations unseen.     
    Slowly she wondered over to the little swing. The light whispering of the glowing water over the smooth warn stones lulled her, and she sat down in the seat of the little old swing to rest her mind.
    She realized that she felt no fear, oddly, and although she chided herself for her calm, she could make herself feel no anxiety. Even the strange visions of her friends were strangely unmoving, for an overwhelming sensation of peace pervaded the little garden. Its scent of lilacs and leaves brought back the most peaceful of her memories and if she closed her eyes, she could see the gardens of Whitehaven as they had been in the times of her childhood, stretching away into green eternity.
    She could hear her mother singing in the distance and all of the muted noises of the estate and the town falling into place around her. The church bells were ringing out noon and the light dyed the landscape golden. Silver and gold, silver and gold, the landscape flickered in Viola’s vision as she spun in the swing.
    No matter how many times Viola turned her mind towards escape, towards returning to her own tower in Stoneworld, towards the possibility that she was trapped here by some creature or presence of bad intent, she found that, like a boat moved by vagrant tides, her thoughts drifted inexorably away. Her mind wandered and her eyes unfocused and in the little swing she began to slump forward. The patterns of the tree branches and the leaves seemed to be spelling words to her when she unfocused her eyes. Little blue sparks, like fireflies, flitted in the air before her and she couldn’t quite seem to remember where she was.
  Gradually, swinging slowly around, and around again on the rope swing, Viola fell asleep.
    
    The quiet noise of a twig snapping somewhere nearby brought Viola abruptly to alertness. In the soft silence of the wood the noise was as sharp and unnatural as the sound of a crow in summer, or the noise of a human voice when the snow is falling and all the world is muffled and white.
    Like a deer paused in the forest, listening, Viola brought her head up and sat poised in the swing, listening. She heard a faint rustling, the crunch of fallen leaves and the damp noise of the grass. It was the noise of footsteps, she realized, drawing nearer, and for a moment she was seized with sudden hope that perhaps, then, she was saved. But with it came, inevitably, the knowledge that there were creatures other than herself alive in the wood. The chameleon was one such. Who was to say whether the creature she would meet would be friend or foe.
    For a moment Viola hesitated, unsure of whether to remain, and greet the soul which with every moment drew closer, or to hide. But as the noise grew closer it began to grate on her ears, out of place as it was, and finally, her heart beating like a butterflies wings, she leapt out of the swing and across the little brook, where a tree stood with a hollow at its trunk that was large enough to hide her.
    A moment later footsteps resounded in the little clearing, and the small swing creaked as if under the weight of someone very small. There was the noise of ropes twisting as the diminutive creature began to swing, singing in a high and pure voice.
    Viola peered cautiously out of her hiding place. Around the edge of the trunk of the tree that supported the small swing, she could see the delicate hem of a child’s radiant white dress. It was stark and glowing against the unsteady shadow of the tree. Her face was hidden but her light sharp voice pierced through the orchard shadows and made ripples in the air.
    
    “Once there was a fairy people
    following the bright lord-sun,
    living out their days uncounted
    in a world still just begun --”

    Curious, Viola leaned farther to see the creature creating the song. She was a small child, and everything about her was a luminescent. Her translucent skin was so pale it seemed almost to glow in the moonlight. Her hair was as white as ice on a butterfly’s wing or the light that comes from the stars on a winter night. She paused in her song and she laughed as petals floated down around her, and even her laugh was white and pure. The noise was as musical and evanescent as a bird’s song or the notes of a harp, falling into silence. When she turned so that her little swing faced Viola’s tree, Viola saw that her eyes were the same dark blue as the night that surrounds a star.
    Still smiling, the girl continued her song.

    “They danced their days in joy unending
    with open hearts and upraised hands,
    praised their bright and glowing sun-lord
    and walked his green and fragrant lands.
    not a care or worry had they
    as they would sing and dance and run;
    short the nights
    and scattered starfields
    in the valley of the sun.”

    The girl’s voice fell into silence with the same abrupt intensity with which it had first entered the air and she slowed her swing and then stopped.
    “Some people believe that the moon is a person,” she said. She turned her head suddenly towards Viola’s hiding place and Viola ducked back into the shadow of the tree, her heart pounding.
    “They think that she lives here. This is her garden.”
    Her curiosity overcoming her fear, Viola stepped out from behind her tree, though she did not cross the stream into the little clearing where the radiant child played. “Is this the garden of your song then?” she asked boldly. “The garden of the sun? Is this a fairy place that I have somehow stumbled into?”
    The girl twisted the swing around to face her. “Nay, violet lady,” she answered solemnly. “This is not the garden of the sun. That is a garden of noontime. This is a garden of starlight and dust.”
    “But how did I come to be here?” Viola asked, drawing slightly closer. “Is this truly the moon’s garden?”
    “‘Tis. As for how you came to be here, I know not. I know not how other creatures come and go, and as for myself, I prefer to do neither. I stay here.”
    “Oh,” Viola said, looking down at her feet. “But how can it be the moon’s garden,” she asked, looking up again. “Isn’t the moon up there?” She pointed to the sky.
    “Yes,” the child answered. “The moon is up there.” She pointed up, not to the sky, Viola saw, but to the shadow of the stone tower where it loomed not so far away. “Or so some believe. They keep her there so that she will not escape.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they fear her magic, perhaps. I do not know. They say that it was the sun who locked her up there,” the child continued, her voice falling back into the rhythm of a song, “when the star folk

    “distant subjects
    of the king who ruled blue skies,
    left alone and dim and desperate,
    began to plan the sun’s demise;
    held a forum in the darkness
    to discuss what could be done --
    planned to make a white-light being,
    lovely rival
    of the sun.”

    “Are you a star person?” Viola asked, once again drawing nearer, so that she stood just on the edge of the brook. “And if she lives in the tower, why does the window of my own tower lead to this orchard? Why can I see this place, but nobody else?”
    The child spread her arms. “I told you before. I know not. Perhaps, if you did indeed climb down through the tower window, you are the moon.” She backed away. “If that’s true, you must go back. I cannot speak to you.”
    “I can’t go back,” Viola said, raising her voice. “I tried, but I cannot get back in.”
    The child turned away from Viola and began once more to sing in her high and beautiful voice.

    “In the moon’s soft silver light,” she sang,
    “climb down the tower trellis-ladder
    to the garden on the ground.
    I have heard tell of the wonders
    you can find there
    in the light of silver moon,
    of butterflies the size of birds,
    and stars abroad at noon.”

    “Where should I go then?” Viola asked, stepping into the stream. “Where should I go now? How do I get back?”
    Without turning the girl replied. “The garden likes you,” she said, reaching out a hand to the tree beside her. “Or you would not have found this place. If you continue on the path, you will come only to the tower and the tower again. That is what most people must do, but you are different. The wind tells me so.” For a moment she was silent. “I know not if you are the moon,” she said gravely. “But if you let the wood lead you, you will find the way. It will make itself known to you. There are many paths in a forest after all. It’s just that most of them cannot be seen.”
    “Thank you,” Viola said doubtfully. “Although I’m not sure which direction I should start in, or where I will end up, or what I shall eat along the way.” The girl did not respond, and after a moment, Viola turned and walked back towards the tree which she had hidden behind. As she neared it she paused and then continued onwards. It seemed as good a direction as any to start in.
    As she passed the tree, she placed her hand on its trunk in thanks. As she pushed her way through the low hanging branches the star-girl’s voice came floating indistinctly back to her from the clearing with the swing.
    
    “Blue the grass and pure the flowers
    that accent the fairy bowers
    in the garden sweet and silver
    in the garden of the moon.”

    Viola shook the haunting song out of her head and continued to stumble through the trees.
    “There are many ways through a forest,” she whispered as she walked. “And I know I must follow the moon. But how will I know the way if I do not even know where I am going?”
    She stopped and looked about. The trees were so evenly spaced, there was no way to know which way she should go, or which way she had come from. Already the little clearing, which had been so difficult to find, had vanished behind her, to be replaced with rows upon rows of blossoming trees that faded off into a purple gloom in the distance on every side. “It seems this garden goes forever,” she whispered into the silence, looking up at the sky. The stars hung overhead. As she watched they seemed to flicker and change, and she could imagine that they were myriads of butterflies and fantastic creatures pacing the sky.
    “Perhaps it is a path my mind must follow.” Viola closed her eyes. The whispering of the leaves, an incessant noise that had never left her mind since she left the clearing, seemed to grow louder. In her mind’s eye she could see the shapes of the leaves. They wove together and they danced and in the spaces they made she could see darkened silhouettes moving. “These are the faces of the past,” she murmured, as she began walking through them.
    This time no images of her friends assailed her. When she opened her eyes the starlight poured in. The trunks of the trees twisted and reached out white and silver arms bangled with leaves. They smiled at her with unseen faces and offered her fantastic things. With their leaves they whispered secrets and they sang of poetry and as she walked Viola became suffused with joy.
    A shadow crossed her path once, and then again, and Viola paused to watch it. It moved with doubt, without a purpose, and the trees sang out to her to ignore the pale voice it left inside her head, the mournful melody it played across her thoughts.
    “But it seems so sad,” she whispered, focusing her inner vision.
    In her mind’s eye she saw him then, a pale, stick-thin sort of person, a young man with a melancholy face and dark eyes. Their eyes met for a moment and Viola felt her own eyes fill with tears. “Are you trapped here?” she called to him, reaching out. “Follow me. I will help you.”
    “You cannot,” whispered the trees. “You cannot help him. He is only a ghost.”
    Before Viola’s eyes he moved away. He walked to a tree and reached out his arm and took a fistful of flowers.
    “But he’s only picking flowers,” Viola said. “He’s done nothing wrong. Let him go.”
    “He is not ours to release. We cannot release him.”
    “What is his name?”
    “His name is Vesper. He came here by mistake.”
    Viola let his face fade from her vision. “Surely there must be something I can do for him,” she said to the quiet forest.
    As the leaves rustled their disagreement, Viola stepped away from the path that she had made herself, and moved towards the faded silhouette where it sat now next to a tree, its head in its hands.
    “Hello,” she said, reaching out her hand to help him up. “Why don’t you walk with me? The trees here say I cannot help you escape this forest, but at least you will not be walking alone.”
    The shadow looked up at her fearfully and quickly faded back into the tree which it sat next to.
    “Where did you go?” Viola cried out in alarm. “You need not be afraid of me.”
    The shadows beneath a nearby tree merged and he reappeared, one hand on a tree branch.  He was watching her curiously.
    Impulsively, Viola reached into her pocket and pulled out the apple that the Chameleon had given her. “Here,” she said, holding it out to him. “This was a gift to me for my journey, but you look as though you need it more.”
    Warily the wraith stepped forward to close the distance between them, and cautiously held out its hand to take the apple. Viola placed it carefully in the center of its open palm. Up close the ghost, Vesper, looked as if he were made of water. Strange shapes played along his surface. His eyes were large and dark and his dark hair looked as if it had been taken from a raven’s wing.
    Releasing the apple, Viola stepped back again politely. Vesper stood for a moment, staring at the apple where it sat on his palm. As Viola watched, it slowly sank into his palm, and then fell to the ground. He looked up at her with desolate eyes and she bent to pick it up.
    “That’s quite all right then,” Viola said kindly, cleaning the apple on the hem of her dress. “I’m not offended. We’ll just find you something else to eat later.”
    Vesper had already begun again to fade.
    “Wait!” Viola called to him as he disappeared, but he was already gone. “Whatever was it that happened to him?” She asked the quivering trees.
    “We may not say,” they whispered, shaking their leaves. “He is not ours to release, nor ours to redeem.”
    In the distance she could see him walking. His eyes were downcast.
    “I can see no harm in following him,” she announced to the orchard, turning down one of the copious endless lanes between the rows of trees.
    A lone glimmer of pale blue in the violet twilight, Viola continued silently through the orchard. In the distance Vesper’s shadow grew dim and flickered in between the trees.
    The moon never moved, she realized, although it had been sunset when she arrived, and she was neither tired nor hungry, though she had slept only briefly and eaten nothing. Her feet did not ache from walking, although she had been walking for quite some time.     
    Her own footsteps made no noise as she proceeded through the orchard. She glided silently across the petals as if she herself were made of the same evanescent breeze that stirred the branches. And all around her the silver landscape unfolded; row after row of gnarled trees consuming the horizon for as far as the eye or the imagination could see. In the corner of her eye it sometimes seemed that she could see the shadow of the tower watching over the garden, but when she looked, it had always vanished.
    And the shadow she was chasing, that strange silhouette named Vesper, remained always ahead of her, always just in the distance, barely visible but still just within sight. “Are you leading me somewhere?” she wondered aloud.
    Her mind began to drift again and visions that came down from the moon impeded on her thoughts. First she thought she saw a sailboat traversing the sky overhead. She stopped to stare up in wonder as it floated by, far above, before dissolving into a thin bank of cloud as it passed the moon. Once she thought she saw a serpentine shape moving in the distance. A tree raised its branches like arms and stretched towards the moon before settling back into its original shape.
    In the distance the forest appeared to be burning. Yellow orange light poured out from that grove, and yet she felt no heat as it grew nearer. Vesper’s shadow was outlined clearly against it, black smoke against the glow. The trees appeared illuminated against the dark sky, the blazing orange of their leaves a warm defiance of the cool silver of the moonlit orchard.
    She stood for a moment on its edge, looking in. Nearby Vesper stood with one hand on a tree trunk. As she watched he pulled away, his hand full of some pale sap. His hands cupped carefully, he lifted the substance to his mouth and drank and for a moment his whole body glowed orange from within. Still radiating strange light, he turned to walk onwards.
    Carefully, Viola stepped into the grove of vibrant trees. Weaving her way through the trunks, she made her way slowly towards the tree where Vesper had stood. Approaching it slowly, she too reached out her fingers to touch the trunk.
    “I would not eat the sap that’s found here, were I you.”
    Viola jumped, her hand hitting the tree sharply. The moment she made contact with the strangely smooth bark, yellow and orange exploded around her. For a moment she was blinded as the whirlwind surrounded her, but as her vision cleared, she could not help but gasp in wonder. All around her and the now bare tree, a myriad of golden butterflies spun like a column of fire, spiraling towards the invisible sky.
    “How beautiful,” she whispered.
    “They come to eat the nectar of the trees.”
    Viola looked up at the tree, and was unsurprised to see the luminous eyes of the Chameleon staring down at her.
    “You are still a snake,” she exclaimed. “Why have you not changed back?”
    “Oh, but I have changed many times since last I saw you. Why do you follow that ghost?”
    Viola glanced to Vesper where he stood not so far out, drinking the nectar of another tree.
    “I do not know. I was following a path in my mind when I found him and it seemed like the best thing to do. The trees told me I should not.”
    “The trees do not know how to find what is best. They only know how to find the garden’s center.”
    “So I was not wrong to follow him?”
    “You were neither wrong nor right, for nothing has come of it yet.”
    “I suppose that is true,” Viola said contemplatively. “What is at the center of the garden that the trees want me to find?”
    “How do you know that the trees wish you to find it?”
    “Because they did not hide it from me, and a star-child told me that they like me.”
    “The home of the star people is at the center of the garden. It is where the star-girl came from.”
    “Then why did she not take me there herself?”
    “Because the ways that the star people go are not the ways that a human can go. Take for example this grove,” the Chameleon said, gesturing to the glowing garden with his tail. “The butterflies and the star children eat the nectar of these trees and makes them grow stronger. It gives them visions and lets them see into the past. But a human cannot drink what is created here, or their soul will evaporate into starlight and be consumed by the sky.”
    “What of Vesper? How does he drink it? What does he see?”
    The Chameleon looked at the distant shadow. “He is a strange ghost, neither human nor spirit. He drinks it because it makes him feel real. He cannot feel warmth.”
    “I am sad for him,” Viola said. “Do you know a way in which I might help him? I tried to give him the apple you gave me, but he could not hold it.”
    “He is a creature that does not know what it is to be human any longer. If you discover the choice that he made and the price that he paid, perhaps you can release him. That is all I may tell you.”
    “The trees said that he was not theirs to release. Should I continue to follow him?”
    “You must find your own path to follow.”
    “But I do not know what is at the center of the garden, and I do not know where I will go if I follow Vesper. I do not know where any path will take me.”
    “Perhaps the ending of the path is not determined by the first step you take,” the Chameleon suggested.
    “I suppose that if there is somewhere I truly must go,” Viola said quietly, “I shall end up there no matter how I go.”
    The Chameleon nodded its blunt head and receded into the shadows of the tree. “We shall see,” it hissed.
    Viola faced back into the grove. Vesper had not moved. Stealing herself, Viola approached him quietly. He stood in silent communication with the tree, one hand on its gray trunk. As she watched, he removed his hand. The orange molten glow of the strange nectar trailed from his hands as he lifted them to his mouth to drink.
    The butterflies whirled around her head, blocking her vision. They filled her eyes with gold, and for a moment she could taste the nectar and the visions it would bring her. She could see Otter and Basil sitting together in a cold room and Lupin all dressed up in his finest armor and war on the streets of Stoneworld.
    She shook her head and rubbed her eyes to clear her vision. “I will take what visions the garden sees fit to send me,” she said to the butterflies swirling around her. “But I see enough on my own. I do not think I need the nectar in this garden.”
    Which a whispering of crystalline wings, the butterflies whirled away, joined the cloud of orange as it departed, fading slowly into the star lined sky. Beneath the leafless trees, Viola watched them depart, and in their wake they left a vision, a gift because they pitied the girl who was human and so could not drink the nectar of the forest.
    In a gray landscape Otter circled the tower while to her left a strange wingless dragon prowled.  On its white hide red flowers bloomed and black vines twisted. “But that is a creature I have seen in my dreams,” Viola exclaimed. “I have dreamt of it since childhood.”
    Otter turned to it, her face a thundercloud. She opened her mouth and spoke to it be Viola could not hear the words. Pulling her ragged dress up around her knees (Viola saw that once more her clothes were in a state of torn disarray, and her face was growing gaunt with hunger) she ran down away from the tower.
    Viola could see the edges of the garden in the distance, but no matter how far Otter seemed to run, or how fast, it seemed she could not reach it. It stayed always beyond her grasp and meanwhile, as she left the shadow of the tower, she grew more and more a shadow. Viola imagined that she could see through the her wavering form.
    “Go back,” Viola cried to her. “Go back before you too become a shadow trapped here, as this poor silhouette is.” Vesper looked up from his pursuits and met her eyes with his dark liquid stare. “Go back, Otter. There is nothing here for you in Garden.”
    As if she had heard, Otter stopped, clutching her side and her shoulders heaving as she sought to catch her breath. Speaking again, she shook her head tearfully and stepped back towards the tower. Immediately the tower was behind her once more and she backed into it with an unheard exclamation of surprise and fell to her knees.
    Looking up to the star filled sky she spoke again, and this time Viola heard her, as though her voice were being carried through water.
    “I could not find you...sorry...could not...safe...”
    “I am safe, Otter,” Viola called out to the sky, but Otter did not seem to hear her. Turning back towards the tower, she vanished in a burst of scarlet butterflies.
    Alone in the forest of shadows and ghosts, Viola curled her knees beneath her and sat on the damp ground. Around her she saw that minuscule flowers were growing, two inch wide roses and foxgloves that stood only as tall as a pin. They were wonderful, and strange, but for a moment Viola had no interest in them at all. Her eyes flitted to the trees, still radiating their yellow orange glow.
    For a moment she wondered what else they would show her. She wondered where Basil was, and what Lupin was doing as she wandered in this strange orchard, this world outside of worlds. She wondered if a war had started yet, and if it was her fault.
    Her heart heavy, she edged her over to the nearest tree without standing. Kneeling at its base, she craned her neck and looked up into its gray branches. For a moment she reached towards its bark, where the nectar formed a strange coat over the tree.
    Without moving she sat there, poised to take the nectar of the tree. Everything seemed to slow around her and all sounds dimmed but the sound of her own beating heart.
    “I will be a ghost,” she though. “But at least I will know what is happening to my friends. And am I not a ghost already? How would I know if I were? Otter became one merely by entering the garden. Perhaps that is the truth, and I have nothing to lose.”
    Slowly she withdrew her hand from the tree. “But if I believe that, then I will have no hope ever of returning home. And the trees want me to go somewhere, so it must be that I have some greater purpose yet.”
    A shadow flickered in the corner of her vision. Turning, she saw Vesper standing just over her shoulder, his expression grave. She stood and met his gaze.
    “I do not know how to help you, nor how you came to be as you are,” she said quietly. “But the Chameleon says that perhaps I can help you yet, and so I feel that I must try.”
    Brushing past her, Vesper approached the trunk of the tree she had just been standing at and took the nectar from its bark.
    “How come you will not speak to me?” Viola asked as he stepped away, wiping his mouth. “Are you afraid of me?”
    Vesper shook his head and began walking. Viola fell into step beside him. “Are you not able to speak to me?”
    Vesper nodded.
    “Why?” Viola thought for a moment. “Is it not allowed?”
    Again Vesper nodded.
    “Oh,” Viola said thoughtfully. “I suppose you will make for a rather dull travel companion then,” she said. “although I mean that in the nicest way possible. It’s just that you’ll never be able to tell sing songs, or tell very good stories.”
    Stopping suddenly, Vesper reached out and touched her forehead. Images assaulted her head, chaotic and unorganized. She saw the butterfly trees and she saw a bird taking flight from a tree branch hung with snakes. She saw an apple hanging on a branch and a hand reaching out to take a bunch of flowers from a tree.
    She saw Vesper, standing at the top of a hill. His face was pale and he stood very straight and he looked nervous. Behind him she could see the towers of Stoneworld. As she watched he began to walk forward, and as he did the landscape twisted, and suddenly the trees of Garden loomed around him. He reached up and took a cluster of purple flowers, and suddenly the landscape changed again, and he was surrounded by a different sort of trees. These were not the trees that she knew, the ones that whispered of fantastic things and stood in neat rows. These trees stood close together and smelled of the decay of leaves, and though she could not make out their words, she knew that they whispered insidious and terrible things, and Vesper’s face grew pale with fear as he walked between them, his flowers clutched to his breast.
    Removing his hand from her forehead, he released her.
    “I suppose you can tell some sorts of stories, then,” Viola said cautiously. Vesper resumed walking.
    They walked together in silence through the unending forest. Once or twice Viola raised her voice in song, but it fell oddly sharp into the dusk, and so she stopped and returned to quietude.
    The trees, too remained quiet as she walked. Viola wondered if they were angry at her for taking a path other than the one that they had offered her. Stopping by one she placed her hand on its trunk and felt an overwhelming sense of sadness.
    “Is this where you live?” she asked, turning to Vesper. “It seems like such a sad place here.”
    Vesper did not seem to notice her words. He was using his feet to brush leaves and petals away from the ground.
    “What are you looking for?” Viola asked, walking closer and peering into his indistinct face. “Perhaps I can help you find it.”
    He shook his head and kept pushing at the leaves.
    “Is it something that you lost?” Viola asked, bending to inspect the ground.
    Vesper reached over and touched her forehead once again. Again she was assaulted by images. This time one came quickly to the forefront.
    “It’s a road,” Viola said with surprise. “You’ve lost a road?”
    Vesper nodded. In Viola’s mind flashed many images of Vesper searching in the leaves and between the trunks.
    “You’ve been looking for it for a long time.”
    Vesper nodded solemnly.
    Viola sat down in the dew covered grass. “Perhaps you are looking the wrong way,” she suggested. “Perhaps you need to let the path find you.”
    Vesper shook his head resolutely.
    “Have you tried following the moon? That is what the Chameleon told me to do.”
    Vesper ignored her and kept looking.
    “I suppose you’re right,” Viola said. “Just because the Chameleon told me to follow the moon does not mean it is what everyone should do, I suppose. After all, the orchard does like me. It does not appear to like you very much at all. But I cannot stand to see you carry on this way.”
    Vesper dug at the roots of a tree with his fingers.
    “How do you know you will be able to see it?”
    Vesper reached out impatiently and took her hand, and suddenly Viola could see him standing on a wide stone avenue. Around him pale star people watched, their faces expressionless.
    “You have seen it before.”
    Vesper nodded.
    Viola stood, brushing off her skirts. “Perhaps I can find it, then,” she said, walking away.
    He shook his head.
    “Well now you are just being stubborn. I’m sure you’re life would be much easier if you would let people help you once and a while.”
    Turning her back on him she walked in the opposite direction. “This forest goes on forever,” she said doubtfully. “How ever would a person find something that they’d lost?”
    Closing her eyes she reached out to the trees but found nothing. They were still hiding from her.
    Opening them again she turned back to face Vesper. As she turned her eyes were caught by the reflection of moonlight on the ground. Beneath her feet, where her dress had swept away the leaves and the flower petals, the stone of a road sat. Looking forward again, she could see it stretching, nearly hidden, towards the horizon.
    “Look!” she called joyfully to Vesper, who was on his knees digging at the dirt with his fingers. “I have found it!”
    He turned and stood, his wide eyes full of incredulous surprise. Viola stood in the center of the broad avenue, holding out her hand to him, but he brushed past her, his face eager.
    “I wonder where this path might lead,” she asked aloud, following him.
    Now that it was before her, Viola was amazed that she had not seen the little road before. It curved smoothly through the orchard and off into silver oblivion. Petals shone against its pale gray surface like little ships against a flat, calm sea.
    Viola had the distinct feeling that as they moved, they moved inward, and that there was some center waiting for them at the end of this path. The misty leafy twilight began to subside and moonlight poured in once more, illuminating the orchard and making silver waves along the road. The voices of the trees grew louder in her mind once more, their stories a constant flicker in the corners of her eyes, and in the distance she glimpsed the little brook tumbling along, choked by petals and leaves. Once she thought she saw the eyes of the Chameleon staring back at her from a tree branch, but he made no move to speak to her, and when she reached his perch, he had vanished.
    Once in the distance she saw a moonbeam transform into a white deer that leapt through the orchard, kicking up petals and leaves, and played in the water of the little stream. She stepped  to the edge of the path to better see it and as she did so it paused in its capering to regard her. Transfixed she lifted her foot to step off of the garden back, but as she did so she felt a chill come over her, and turned to see Vesper watching stonily from the center of the path.
    “The path will not vanish if we move merely a few steps from it,” Viola said reassuringly. “I’m sure of it. The trees will show me where it is again.” Of this she was certain. This was the way that the trees wanted her to go. This road was leading her to the heart of the garden, the place they had wanted to lead her all along.
    “This is the right way to go,” Viola said, trying to explain it to Vesper. “I will never lose it now.”
    But Vesper shook his head nervously and continued to walk.
    Viola turned back and peered into the orchard, but the glorious white deer had vanished, and so she set off after Vesper once again.
    He did not make for very good company, she thought, watching his wavering form vanish momentarily in the shadow of a tree before reappearing on its other side, for he was too afraid of the orchard to be any fun. He was much like Basil and Lupin, in a way; they never seemed to see the things that she saw, and they never seemed to understand why it was she saw them. Their worlds were much more boring than she preferred.
    But focusing on Vesper was no more interesting than trying to communicate with him, and so she tilted her head back to see the sky, and opened her mind to the voices of the trees, letting them surround her with their half seen visions and unheard words that washed over her like water.
    In the edges of her vision flower petals fell and gathered into pale violet silhouettes that danced along the edges of the path and offered her wonderful gifts. She walked right on the border of the path, neither on the broad road nor in the orchard itself, and within minutes her hair was all hung