Taken or Given garden and the weight of a

and the weight of a promise that was never kept

slipping cleanly over the narrow neck of a bottle that shouldn’t have been so easy to catch

paling further

hands in her lap

burnished in shadow

Taken or Given garden and the weight of aYou dont find a scale like this. You take it quick, careful, knowing exactly how close you are to something that could end you if it chose to. The dragon notices. Of course it does. A shift, a breath, a flicker of attention that settles on you and stays there just long enough to matter. Long enough to understand that leaving with it is not something you get to do twice. It lets you get anyway. The smaller fragments come later, gathered where its