Nobody moved for a long while after the Garden settled fully into view around them.
The impossible beauty of it made movement feel almost disrespectful — the grass underfoot softer than any grass should reasonably be, the enormous trees rising higher than the mist had ever suggested they might, the streams catching light from a sky that belonged to no season any of them recognized.
Birds called from branches in voices unlike anything on Earth, and flowers grew directly from bare stone in colors that seemed to shift depending on how long you looked at them.
The Garden felt older than the universe and, somehow, more like home than Earth had ever managed to feel.
No music swelled to mark the moment. No visible miracle demanded their attention.
Just presence, vast and unhurried, settling around them the way morning settles around a room.
