stone arch holds her still, blossoms lean to share her grief, hills dissolve in rain.

More about stone arch holds her still, blossoms lean to share her grief, hills dissolve in rain.

She was born on a day when the valley lost its voice. Her mother said the mountains were once a choir, their waterfalls singing in seven tones, but by the time she came into the world the sound had faded to a pale hum, like ink diluted in water. They named her An Lạc, but the villagers whispered another name: the girl who listens for echoes.

She grew up beneath those arches, ruins of a temple no one remembered building. In the evenings she would sit where the stone was warm, a blush-coloured dress floating about her ankles like captured dawn. Blossoms from the old cherry tree would drift down, stick to her hair, cling to her eyelashes. She never brushed them away. She said each petal carried a fragment of someone’s lost dream, and if she held still enough she could hear the stories murmuring through her.

On her sixteenth spring the mist began to rise higher than the hills. It crept into the arches, down the corridors of the forgotten temple, into her chest. With each breath she started to taste memories that were not her own, a lover waiting, a traveller praying, a painter dropping his brush. She realised then that the valley was not silent at all. It was full of voices too soft for anyone else to hear.