What is the Black Garden? It's a forest of bones watered by blood. It's a hall where the voiceless sing. It's a tunnel that leads to the sky. I walk its pathways every day, sit under its trees made of stone, and cool my toes in the streams of time. You wish to enter? You cannot. The garden enters you. Find yourself in a lonely place of the world where words are faint and far. A high cliff perhaps, jagged and cruel amidst crashing waves, where the air is thin and you are close to the whispers of the moon. Or perhaps in a frozen pond, looking up through the ice and recognizing that to drown is to breathe, and to live is to kill. Stay in this place for so long that you forget your mother's name. Stay in this place until your clothes rot and your hair grows into the dirt. Stay in this place until the world can no longer remember if you found it, or if it found you. Day by day, year by year, life by life, like tides washing over the shore, time itself will break upon you and drift away. If your mind is now clean, you will awaken in the arbour, and you will lose all knowledge of color, touch and light.

Sadness will seize you then, but not for long. When it passes it will take with it love and passion and self. Then your eye will begin to open, changed so that it will have a new vision. Touch will slowly return, cold and stabbing, and light not born from a sun will cover the sky like snow. The sands of the endless shore will clutch at your feet while you walk, and when you look down, you will see the hands of the dead. The sea is milk here, milk and glass. Air is gone and in its place is fog. Everything you touch will cut you, and if you dare to eat or drink you will die, only to be reborn in the lonely place where you started your journey.

This is the Black Garden; where flowers burn and your own voice will be gone from your ears and mouth. The mountains here never end; they rise into darkness and become the sky. Trees hiss and snarl and reek of rot, and your dreams are haunted by the muffled cries of the world you left behind. Stay here long enough and you will see the Heart. What is the Heart of the Garden? It's a throbbing fountain of nameless liquid that steams, spilling over into a fanged pit that spews the Heart back into itself. When you look into the Heart you will learn your first real truth; the truth of the mind. There is no deeper pit, no darker night, no higher wall. When you find yourself within the Heart of the Garden, your time there will have reached its end, and you will sit in your lonely place once again. I go to the Garden every day and look into its heart, and from there I have learned that the tide has a beginning and an end. From there I have seen the pages of history before the pen was set upon them, and from there I learned that all I have ever done was a dream.

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If you are in the Garden, you will see many things, but you will not see me. Walk along its paths, eat of its fruit, swim in its pools, be pricked by its thorns. Be ousted and be brought back, for time will mean less to you than dust. There is no end to the garden nor the truth it contains, and yet sometimes I think that although it is endless, it is still growing. And sometimes I wonder if I've ever truly been in the Garden before, or if I am seeing it for the first time, and I am struck by the heat of a thousand suns, the screams of a thousand moons, the heartbeats of a thousand kins from a thousand ages, and they all tell me that the wind cannot be calmed, the course cannot be changed. This is the River. The River is its own beast, and it travels through many lands.

The Garden grows, and the Garden knows, so tread softly. Stars lie within the grass, stars and bones, stars and bones and the Worm. Did no one tell you? If you are in the Garden, you will see many things, but you will not see me. Still, I will search for you there. I will cry your name until the Garden sews my mouth shut, and then maybe we will meet each other in our lonely places. There we can speak together of our truths. There we can speak from mouth to ear, we can speak from mind to heart, we can speak from blood to bone, until the Garden calls us back.

-The Black Garden, from Dreams of Alon in the Book of Tides-