The songbirds don’t sing here,

The morning dew is empty without them,

And as their corpses sink slowly into the roots,

The sky weeps for nature’s stolen anthem....

Her ghost-thin fingers delicately brushed away the dust of the shattered glass. Cobwebs were strung like washing line across the fragile, gilded edges of the upright looking glass, and they seemed to flinch away from her touch. Distantly, across the marshes and the rocks, a breeze picked up; the wicked pines howling in pure terror at the creaks in their old bones. They complained, but any sane min...