The pitch of the engines increased, and the Lamplighter jostled gently into the air. I looked up into my mother’s face. She stared back at me. Mushrooms crowded one of her eye sockets. A chorus of sound filled the air, a strange undercurrent to the engines: whispers; weeping; splintering rock, like the language of stone. The garden of ghosts, packed neatly in their crates, awakened by something—the Lamplighter, perhaps, but most likely by the swelling presence of the dark aspect, the thing that was Mars, so heavy in the air that it slicked the back of my throat. It was like a holy visitation.
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