nailed it!

Nicely done Miles. Wasn’t this challenge fun?

You show a great command of beautiful language, but I feel that to truly know this character we need some sense of what she gave up, why she lost hope.

Thank you for the comments! It was definitely a lot of fun.

Sanglorian: You might be right. I’d like to see what somebody else could do with this.

This is an effectively sad piece, with a lot of memorable images. Sometimes I feel like your description tries to pack together too many metaphors at once, especially the second paragraph, but it suits the heavy mood of this story.
Sanglorian: Interesting. I thought on first reading that the singer was male.

Holy smokes this was gorgeous.