I am alive. 

Touching my solid head with one giant sandstone hand, I press my chest with the other. I am nothing but rock, but then, I am not nothing. 

“Oi, craggybum!” A pebble hits the side of my head. I turn, look down. “Stop woolgatherin’ and get back ta work!” 

Young Rory flashes me a grin then skips away. I raise my hand. Everything I do is slow and lumbering. Perhaps I even think slowly. How would I know? 

I squat down and pick up the charred remains of a wooden beam from the rubble of a home. With it balanced over my shoulder, I head toward the outskirts of the village to clear the beam away. 

As I walk, I think.

Because I have a mind. I have language. I speak with the soft ones, and I work. I often consider my place in this ruined world. First feared, now appreciated. With our help, they are slowly rebuilding their lives. Lives I and my kind tore down in a matter of months at the height of the war. In some, trust can be hard won, even if I explain how little I knew of my creator’s intention. 

Hewn from mountainside and senseless with an anger that wasn’t mine, I ravaged this land for a master I knew not. When the mightiest of the soft ones made the greatest sacrifice, the ruinous magic was defeated, swept aside like smoke fighting the wind. We collapsed to cairns where we stood, our stone bodies emptied of that black ire. Only some rose again, lost, confused by the newness of a life thrust upon us. 

Now, as I work, I watch those around me, and I learn. Of their sorrow and grief. And of stronger things like their friendship and love or the stubborn persistence of hope. 

“Morning, Hillock. Fine work, that.”

I turn, beam end rustling the ash tree at my side, and look down to find Jean hanging washing from a frame. I nod, turn back, carry on.

Hillock, the name given me by the village. The old man Sutton sat with me one eve and explained what a joke is. He held his belly, thin body jerking with laughter, and explained how it comes up from inside you, a warm feeling you can’t stop that makes you huff and twitch and cry with joy. Said he hopes one day I get that feeling too. That I feel like laughing about something. 

I think I want that. Want to try. 

Soon out of the village, I set the beam in a neat pile with all the others and head back. 

“Hillock, would you go up the mountain today? Our Callum‘ll point you in the right direction.” I nod at Jean and her eldest son. “My aunt Lillian up in Newton Forest needs some help with her home that’s damn near collapsed. I tried to get her to come live with us, but…”

Jean shrugs her round shoulders, and Callum chuckles as he beckons me with a wave. I follow him to the horse and cart and fall in line when he sets off. I’ve noticed Callum is silent when he is around others. But with me, he never stops talking. 

“Old Lillian speaks her mind too much to live with us. Don’t know what ma’s thinking, askin’ her to come stay. They’d be at each other’s throats by sundown. Some in the village used to call her a witch, but that was before”—reins in hand, Callum cranes his neck back to look at me—“they’d seen real witching.” 

His lips spread to a smile that fades quickly, and he turns back around. 

I’ve heard Callum crying by himself in the wood some evenings. The old man Sutton says Callum’s father was a good man. That he is missed by many, not just Callum.  

After a time, we come to a path that tears away and up the mountain. Callum says if I stick to it, I can’t miss Lillian’s. I nod and head upward.

It’s not long before I emerge from the trees into a clearing and find a woman digging in a vegetable patch. 

“Heard you coming a ways off and so did half the forest.” She shakes the soil from a few carrots and drops them on a square of blue cloth before standing. “Well, Jeannie said she’d send you here to help, but I wanted to meet you anyway.” She marches over to stand at my feet with her hand out. “Lillian.”

I’ve seen soft ones shake hands with each other, but this is my first time. I lean down slightly and extend my own hand carefully. Lillian looks at it, tilts her head with a hum, then takes hold of one finger. I move her hand up and down a little and she smiles. 

“Good to meet you. Hillock, is it?” I nod. “Don’t talk much? Well, never mind.”

She’s quick to show me the problem. Stone walls weakened in the quakes that shook this warring land. I’m no builder, but Lillian knows well enough what needs to be done. She points me to an oak to fell and, together, we fashion a kind of support. 

The thick trunk seems an awkward visitor snuggled up to her home, but Lillian wastes no time decorating it. Settled on a low stool, she begins at the bottom, marking out a pattern of delicate leaves with a small knife. 

Watching quietly, I notice other touches. A carving here, a woven basket there. A ragged, ancient tree stump filled with wildflowers. Old, mossy bones pressed into the ground in a three-pointed swirl. When the wind picks up, chimes of hollow wood clatter together somewhere around the other side of the cottage.

Distracted by a simple circle of stones standing on end, I wander toward it. No taller than most of the soft ones, they block the sun as it dips lower in the sky, leaving some of their shadows to gather in the center. I watch as they stretch and lean and finally begin to fade. 

I have forgotten Lillian until I hear her groan. She rubs her back as she stands and ambles over to join me.

“Friends of yours?” she asks, gesturing to the stones with a smile.

I shake my head, and she laughs, shoulders shrugging like the old man Sutton. Then Lillian steps to the nearest stone and runs her fingers through one of its crevices. 

“These have stood here for longer than any of us can remember, and they will be here far after I’m gone. Like you, perhaps, Hillock?”

I consider this. It hadn’t occurred to me to think so far ahead. I imagine Lillian gone, then Jean, then Callum. I turn and look through the forest toward their village and wonder what will become of them all. What I am bound to witness over the years to come.

Lillian hums as she pats me on the arm before heading back to the cottage. I watch her go.

“There’s more to be done tomorrow. Stay if you like.” She waves without looking. “Or come back in the morning.”

I nod. 

Some nights I walk the roads. Others, I stand and think. One night I lay down like Callum does when he is left alone to work the fields. I watched stars creep across the night sky, found shapes among them. I have done the same with clouds during the day. 

Tonight, I reach out and gently rest my hand over where Lillian’s was on the standing stone. I imagine standing here myself, longer than anyone can remember.

She finds me like that in the morning.

I wait while she chews through her breakfast slowly. Only halfway done, Lillian cackles, wrinkled lips stained purple, and opens wide to show me her missing teeth. 

“Where there’s tops, there’s no bottoms, and then bottoms but no tops!”

I nod and she slaps her knee, popping in a few more fresh berries. 

When the sun is sweeping higher, she takes me further up the mountain to a stream stymied by fallen boulders. I spend the day clearing them and digging out a path to aid the flow. 

Lillian ranges about the area, busy foraging for mushrooms and other plants. She chatters to herself mostly, though sometimes raising her voice to show me anything she declares a particularly rare find. When she decides she is tired, she groans, hand pressed to her lower back, and we return to the cottage.

After she has eaten, she comes to rest on a dry, gnarled log in the clearing ’round the back of her cottage and passes the last of the waning daylight carving a hunk of lime tree. Smooth, creamy curls are sliced away, one by one, until a shape begins to reveal itself. A wren, Lillian tells me once she notices I have been watching.

She explains how she offers the wood her thoughts and then cuts away the ones she would be without. The scraps become kindling, and she feels lighter after they have burnt. I wonder which thoughts I would keep and which I would shear away if I could. Perhaps I might decide thoughts are a weight to carry, burdensome or not.

“Do you want to try?” I tilt my head to the side. She laughs while waving the small knife in the air. “Not with this, of course. But would you like to?”

I spread my hands out in front of me and look at them. Thick, stone fingers. Cracked palms blackened with soot from village beams and soil from the stream bed. I try to touch each finger to its thumb one at a time. Finer movements are difficult. Struggling, I make a fist instead, which comes easily. I was made for destruction, not creation. 

Lillian sets her carving down and sighs as she stands. The light is fading fast now. The forest around us tumbles into darkness. She rests her hand over a knuckle of my fist and pats it three times.

“Tomorrow morning, Hillock.”

I nod. There will surely be more work with a new sun up, and like all the soft ones I have met, Lillian must rest. 

Once she has gone, I return to the circle of stones and stand in their midst.

The next day, Lillian guides us further up the mountain until we come to a nook of ragged cliffs. The ground is littered with large pieces that have escaped. She climbs up on one and beckons me to her.

“I think you should try these.” She gestures to the mess of slabs and boulders around us. “Carve stone as I carve wood.” 

I tilt my head again, but Lillian insists.

“There’s magic left in that form, as sure as I live and breathe, or I wouldn’t be talking to a pile of stones!” She raises her hand, fingers flat, pressed tight together, and makes a slicing motion. “Give it your thoughts. Ask it to hold them for you.”

She crosses her arms and nods with a proud smile. I turn to the messy slope and wonder if it could be possible. “Take your time,” she tells me. Find the right piece. One that speaks to me. I want to tell her that I cannot communicate with other stones any more than she can. But then I spot one. A jagged lump a little further along. Darker than the rest and streaked with white. It speaks no words, but it does call. 

I make my way over and rest my hand on its side. Lillian calls over for me to take as long as I need, and I hear her hop down and head back the way we came. 

It is a challenge at first, to decide which thoughts to keep and which to give away. In one way or another, they all seem important. I think of the village. Of Jean’s wrinkled apron and Sutton’s hunched back. Of Rory’s reed-thin legs and Callum’s tears. All pieces of them that are now pieces of me too, somehow. 

No, not these. These I will keep.

But then I think of the rubble I have been helping to clear. Of homes burned and battered, their crumbled walls burying everything. None of it was of my will, but despite the sturdy columns of my legs, I feel unsteady.

More memories surface. 

I place my other hand on the rock.

The thoughts mine deeper. Flames crawling across thatched roofs. Boulders hurled at the backs of soft ones as they ran. Screams as I swung a tree torn from the ground. 

These thoughts are not mine. They are in me, and they are a part of me, but I was not me when they were made. I have no need of them now. 

I begin to run my hands across the stone, and as I do, it smooths. I do not know what I am asking of the rock, but it lets me work. I pinch and press. Push one finger in here, swipe away sharp corners there. I think of things I never care to think of again, and the stone takes them all.

When one piece is full of my pain—because that is what this is, I know this now—I move to another, heeding the call from each. 

Moonlight comes and goes, and in the morning, I am surrounded by them. A field of shapes, each unique in the gentle glow of a new dawn. Sweeping towers and torturous spirals. Low rounds and stacks of flattened discs. They tell a hundred or so tales of my own mind. But those stories are more distant now. Still present, but less a part of me. 

It is a relief. A weight lifted from my stone body.

When Lillian returns, she finds me seeking shapes in the clouds. She stops beside me, hands on hips, and cackles.

“Been busy, then?”

The sun’s warmth seems to burst in my center. It travels upward until I can’t contain it, and I clap one hand to my middle. A few booming roars rush out of me, and Lillian covers her ears with a broad smile.