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Ida was dreaming of flight, of alabaster wings spread wide, feathers catching the wind. A swirling vortex of color surrounded her, protected her. She soared endlessly, never knowing where she would next land, but never lost.
Ida awoke. She was curled into a corner of the monument, the smooth walls pressing against the back of her dress. She scrambled away and pulled herself to her feet, heart racing. Something was meant to be at her back, something that would have been crushed between it and the wall. It was as if she had phantom wings.
Ida closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and slowing her heartbeat. She adjusted her hat so that the rounded peak pointed upwards, a perfect cone. She admired the strange beauty of it, running one hand against its silk-smooth surface. It was the only one of the shapes, she sensed, that belonged to her. The others were too big, too bright, for her. When she returned them and they rose to their places, she marveled at them. She understood why she would have stolen them, still jealous as they clicked into perfect place in the monuments, fitting in a way that she herself never would.
Though she wandered these twisted passages, these stairways and turns and entrances and exits that made her mind feel like it was nearly splintering apart with their complexity, she knew they were not home. She climbed and climbed, always optimistic that around the next bend or through the next doorway there would be an answer to why she was still here, but she was always disappointed. She hated being trapped. She dreaded those moments when she had to turn sideways and shimmy through narrow halls, that uncomfortable acceleration in her chest as the walls came too close to her back, closer than they ever should have been.
She dreaded the crows, too. As she walked, she always felt their eyes on her, unblinking specks of black trapping her in place, examining her as if she were a butterfly with its wings pinned to a board. She imagined that they, too, dreamed of flying. They had wings, she thought, but she never saw them in use. She liked to think, selfishly, that they were as trapped as she was here within these monuments, but they weren't. They couldn't fly, no, but they could sing. And though their grating voices brought sharp hot tears to Ida's eyes, they sang. Whenever Ida tried to approach, they sang to each other, sang in warning. Ida could sing once, too. She remembered streams of notes pouring from her beak, no, her mouth, and an audience listening in unblinking rapture.
She could feel the song building in her throat once more in response as the crows spoke to her, but she could not remember how to open her mouth and let the notes free once again.