Belladonna

member of the family, or I could continue my wild ways alone, shunned by all who had loved me. If at the end of three years I had not found my place or my purpose with the Light, I could come home and take up my old ways with no familial penalty.
    "So for three years I worked in the community and studied with the elders and tried to find my purpose in the Light. And every day I prayed that something or someone would show me what, in my heart, I knew I was missing.
    "And then you appeared one day, a girl from a strange part of the world, trying to make herself understood. The elders decided that you suffered from a sickness of the heart, a ... poisoning. I was twice your age, and most unwilling, but the elders assigned me the task of staying with you as you wandered the land that made up our holy place. So I followed you through our gardens, through the fields and woods. Then you stopped suddenly, lifted your face to the sky, closed your eyes ... and drank peace. I watched the Light fill you, felt it rejoice in the vessel, saw you bloom like a plant responds to rain after a dry spell.
    "I watched, and I felt something shift in my heart. I understood the kind of work I could do in the world — helping others find that pool of calm, that moment of peace when they can truly hear the wishes of their own hearts and see the paths that are open to them for their life's journey. Because I was asked to watch over you, I found my place in the Light."
    "If I hadn't gone to your community that day, the Dark Guides would have succeeded in sealing me in my garden at the school," Glorianna said. After a silence that seemed to fill the world, she asked, "Why didn't you tell me this story before?"
    "Until we became friends and trusted each other enough to talk about delicate matters, I didn't know how you, as a Landscapes saw the world around you. After I began to understand how you saw the world, it never felt like the right time to tell you this story. Until today. So now I will ask you, Glorianna Dark and Wise. Were my prayers, my heart wish, the reason Ephemera created a way for you to reach my part of the world? If they were, am I to blame for the sorrows in your life?"
    "No, of course not," Glorianna said. "We make a hundred choices every day, and each of those choices, no matter how trivial, changes the landscapes we live in just a tiny bit. Enough tiny changes can change a person's resonance and open up another landscape as the next part of their life's journey."
    "Or close a landscape?" Yoshani asked gently.
    She nodded. "Sometimes people cross a bridge and never find the way back to a landscape they had known because they have outgrown that place. They have nothing to offer that landscape, and it has nothing to offer them."
    "And sometimes when they reach that point, they know it is time to leave." Yoshani took her hand again. "You reached that point today. I think, in your heart, you never truly left the school. I think that by holding on to a landscape that was not yours, you denied your own heart's attempts to manifest a heart wish." He gave her hand a little squeeze. "You spoke the truth, Belladonna. You are not like them. You never were. Let them go. They have their own journey. It's time for you to look for the people who are like you."
    It washed through her, a wave of power, as if a dam had finally broken to free what had been trapped for so long.
    A heart wish.
    Hers.
    "Guardians and Guides," she gasped.
    "What is it? What is wrong?" Yoshani grabbed her shoulders to support her.
    "I think it's called an epiphany — or a heart wish released from its cage." She felt faint resonances. "Something is already in motion. I couldn't feel it before."
    But she had felt it — in a stone Ephemera had brought into her garden.
    "I need to go back to the Island in the Mist," she said as she sprang to her feet.
    "May I come with you?" Yoshani asked, rising to stand beside her.
    She hesitated, almost refused his company, then allowed the ripples still flowing through the currents of power to decide for her.
    "Thank you. Your company would be welcome."
    "And since you are so gracious, I will even cook a meal for you," Yoshani said as they walked away from the koi pond. "Do you have rice?"
    "Yes. No. Maybe." She did cook when she was alone on the island for a few days and wanted to putter in the kitchen, but that wasn't the same thing as knowing what she had in the pantry at the moment. "Lee eats things."
    Yoshani made a sound that