Noah read all of it, and felt the grand effects moving over his own existence, and every line of it pointed the same direction. Rejuvenation. Preservation. A place built to refuse a death. He wanted to ask himself why a being like Ryaenara would spend three-quarters of everything she was on a garden, and the first clear answer was already standing in his mind before the question finished forming.
She had someone sick here.
He looked around further as they moved. Vibrant canvases floated everywhere through the seasons, paintings drifting untethered between the trees and over the rivers, hundreds of them. Most depicted Ryaenara herself, rendered in careful loving strokes, laughing or ancient or mid-transformation. Others showed grand places Noah had never seen, temples and skies and seas belonging to no realm he could name, painted by a hand that had either visited them or dreamed them thoroughly.
Ryaenara drifted ahead of him, deeper into the seasons, and spoke without turning.
