You may hear this song if you listen at midnight. It sounds like your own name, spoken by someone who loves you, in a language you forgot you knew.
You will never want to leave.
There is a place not marked on any map, though every map folds toward it at the corners. It is called the Nursery, though no one here is young in the way mortals understand youth. The Immortal Girls—there are seven of them, or twelve, or perhaps three hundred, depending on which door you open—have lived so long that their childhood has become a kind of continent. the immortal girls nursery travelogue
No one leaves the Nursery. Not really. The girls have tried: walking out the front door, climbing down the ivy, growing old on purpose. But every exit leads back to the Wicker Gate. Every attempt at aging turns, at the last moment, into a game of hide-and-seek.
Do not step on the cracks. The girls will forgive you, but the floor will not. You may hear this song if you listen at midnight
Being an Account of the Eternal Children and the Gardens That Raised Them I. The House at the Edge of the Cartography
You will never be able to describe why.
We begin our travelogue at the Wicker Gate, which opens only at dusk. The gatekeeper is a girl named Primrose, who has been seven years old for eleven thousand years. She does not remember her mother’s face, but she can recite the names of every bee that has ever visited the lavender hedge. “You’re late,” she says, though you have arrived exactly when you always were going to.