ELDER of the oldest rank, kin to the Solitary Elder, a thing of stone wearing away toward nothing. He appeareth as a great blunt tower of pale rock pierced clean through by a single eye of empty sky, with a long-dead tree standing sentinel at his side, bare-limbed and gray, keeping him company in the desolation. His office is to show the slow ruin made visible: the hole the wind has already opened in him, the absence that grows while the rock remains. The dead tree neither reddens nor gilds, for it has no life left to answer the hidden light; it and the stone are two kinds of the same patience, the one already finished and the one not yet. Around them the low scrub gilds faintly, the last living things in a country going to bone.
The words above arrive with your print, pressed onto fine-art card.
