A closer examination of the statues, shaded by the willow, reveals that while there are three statues on pedestals around a small square ... there are four pedestals. One is vacant.

The first statue, facing northward, is that of an old woman, bent and weary with age, with each wrinkle carefully chiseled into her passive stone visage. To the right, there is a statue of a woman in her prime, perhaps a fertility statue of sorts, for it shows her with full, pregnant belly and a generous expanse of stone bosom, all 'concealed' with artfully chiseled folds of cloth, a simple 'dress' for the stone figure. To the right, facing southward, is the empty pedestal. And finally, the third statue is that of a baby, a young girl in a high-chair. Perhaps a bit satirically, if nature can be said to have such expressions, a birdsnest is built on the flat surface of the high-chair's tray.

Your attention is drawn back to the empty pedestal, and an overwhelming urge to stand atop it catches your fancy. Before the rational part of your mind can react, your young girl's form is already clambering atop the pedestal, and turning to face the south. You hear the faint chime of bells behind you, and before you can turn to investigate, the world goes momentarily gray.

And after that brief moment of disorientation, you find that you can no longer move at all, having become the fourth statue in the series depicting womanhood.

While it's not an eternal fate -- eventually time and the elements will erode the stone of your form away to nothing, it won't be until long, long after your mind itself has eroded, and what then does the wheel of rebirth have for the spirit of a mindless stone statue?