The Stones That Still Count
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Stones That Still Count.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Moss covers a circle of pillars. The moss is thick enough to round the edges of the stone and not thick enough to hide a rune. A hooded woman sets her palm on a rune burning through the moss. The burn is gold. The stone around it is the cold one. She counts on her fingers, slow, touching each count to the air. The counts do not become words. Her free hand rises and falls. The gold under her palm does not scorch the skin. It stays a light, not a coal.
The circle is otherwise empty. On the nearest pillar, an unfinished rhyme is scratched and stops mid-word. The last letter is only a stroke. Wind moves the moss and does not finish the word. She takes her palm off the rune. The gold remains. She sets the palm back. The count in the air resumes where she left it.
A stone hand rises from the moss at her feet, no arm beyond the wrist, and offers three small stones. The wrist ends cleanly in the moss. She takes them. Two are dark and wet. One holds a golden rune that keeps burning in her palm. She closes her fingers over the gold and opens them again. The rune is still lit. The other two stones are only wet. Water from them runs to her wrist and stops. She closes her hand a second time. The gold does not go out. The two wet stones begin to dry at their edges while the gold stays wet and lit, a small change that follows the keeping and does not dim the rune.
A door stands in the trees where no wall is. It closes. Nobody is holding it. The sound is small and final. The unfinished rhyme gains one scratched stroke after the sound and stops again, still mid-word, still unfinished. When she looks back at the circle, the pillars are empty. One rune on the moss is still lit. The stone hand is gone. The moss where the wrist was is unbroken. The rhyme is still unfinished.
She does not open her hand to offer the stones back to a wrist that is no longer there. The moss over the circle is unbroken where the stone hand rose. Gold in her palm burns at the size it had when she first closed her fingers. The drying edges of the other two stones go a shade lighter and then stop changing. The door in the trees shows no hand on its edge and does not open again. Wind moves the moss on the pillars and does not add a letter to the rhyme. Her hood stays up. Her free hand hangs at her side with the count finished in the air and not begun again.
She keeps the wet stone with the gold in it. The door in the trees stays shut. The lit rune in the moss burns at the same size, and her free hand has stopped counting.