Water arrives first. She emerges from the mist like an old lullaby forgotten mid-verse—hair slick with river moss, skin patterned in currents. Her breath heavy with the scent of iron and rain, of things buried but not gone.

I remember everything you tried to drown.

I have carried your lost things—rings, regrets, entire names—so long they have learned to hum lullabies of their own. I cradle grief the way cliffs cradle echoes: not gently, but inevitably. I am not soft. I am persistence, fluid and slow, carving valleys from stone with nothing but time. You may drink me, weep me, bathe in me—but you will never hold me. I am the memory that slips through your fingers just as you begin to recall why you buried it.

Fire crackles in next. Coiled in smoke and desire, the golden child of chaos, all teeth and yearning. His breath reminiscent of the edge of a matchbox and a secret not meant to be told. He arrives like a secret about to be confessed, licking at the air with the scent of ash and want. Eyes ember-red, hands smeared in soot and stories.

I consume to become.

I was worshipped when you needed warmth and feared when you needed blame. But I am not cruel, I am hungry. I turn what you love into smoke, not out of malice, but because I know nothing else. Desire and destruction have always worn the same face. Do not call me ruin, I am the translation of longing. Every flame is a yearning, every spark a question. I turned your cold into warmth, your worship into wildfire. I am desire’s sharpest dialect. I consume what you love, not because I hate it, but because I ache for it too much to let it rest. You called me a curse when the house burned, but it was you who lit the match with your wanting. I am the heat of your first mistake, the light behind every locked door. I am what follows when a wish is spoken too loudly._

Earth lumbers in slow, as though she has carried the weight of the world on her back and has only now stopped to rest. Her fingers are root and ruins, her spine is sediment. She does not speak often, but when she does, mountains kneel to listen.

I have been walked on longer than you have been alive.

I keep your secrets in my soil, buried beneath things you think you've outgrown. But I remember. I remember your footsteps, for footsteps' mother, the wars you forget to mark. I bloom despite you. I rot with you. I am the silence you return to when language breaks. There are fossils in me shaped like your regrets. There are roots in me who still whisper your childhood name.

Air is last. Always last. She slips in unseen, arriving as a breath before the ears, a shiver down the spine. Her form is never fixed, sometimes a stormcloud, other times a sigh. Her presence is absence, the ache of what has left.

I am absence, and still, I press against you.

I touch you without form, bruise you without body. You curse me when I roar and forget me when I sigh. But I have passed through every prayer you've ever whispered, carried your grief on winds you did not name. I have been the hush in your lungs before a scream. I am the space between heartbeats. I am not seen, but I shape everything you love. I cradle sound, scatter seeds, turn pages. I arrive in the moment before language. I leave just as the truth begins to bloom on your tongue.

Together they murmur in unison–not harmony, but ache. Not quite a conversation, more a confession.

We were never meant to be metaphors, you made us into meaning because you could not bear the truth. That we are not kind. That we are not cruel. That we are not yours.

And still, we let you walk among us. Still, we let you name us. Still, we let you forget.

Because the wind knows your last word.

Because the soil keeps your unifinished stories.

Because the fire knows your first sin.

Because the river carries your reflection, even when you refuse to look.

And in the quiet hour, when the sky is neither night nor morning, we gather—at the hollow of your collarbone, behind your eyes, beneath your ribs. Not to be worshipped. Not for woship, but for recognition.