Northgate
Winter 76, the evening after the card heist
Snow drifted silent and gentle from the night sky, settling onto the sea of accumulation laying thick and pristine around the headstones. All but the largest slabs lay buried beneath a season of snowfall, their names and dates mostly concealed from the cool glow from the fragmented moon. The full depths of the snowbank could be seen from the embankments that lined the pathways winding through the graveyard. The grounds themselves were left to carry the season’s snowfall until the summer’s sun burned away their burden, but the paths snaking through the gentle hills were shoveled weekly by the groundskeeper. It would be several days before the pathways were cleared again and three inches of virgin snow now covered the paths.
An unseen force depressed snow with the unmistakable sound and gate of footsteps. The sounds died on the gentle breeze, falling back onto the white earth, joining the corpses that lay entombed all around. Ethan’s figure materialized as the magic from his cloak expired and the mysterious invisible force became mundane legs carrying a man towards the back of the cemetery.
He hiked unseen and undisturbed, the sounds of the city almost entirely deafened as if in reverence to the solemn grounds he was wading through, though in truth this was likely a simple consequence of the tall trees lining the cemetery’s perimeter and the heavy snow caked onto their branches. He looked ahead to his destination: a large, dark slab – an obsidian obelisk that lay on its side at the top of the hill, laying broken beneath an enormous tree.
Using the small shovel he’d brought with him, Ethan cleared a path through the wall of snow lining the pathway before trudging through the deep mounds. The snow thinned and cleared as he drew closer, the hilltop protected by the tree’s heavy branches; the grounds around the broken monument were almost entirely untouched.
He stood before the broken monument, the once staggeringly tall, uniform black column now broken on its side, split at the base and along its frame, its weight evident by the depth to which to sunk itself into the ground. Even on its side, the thick monument was nearly as wide as Ethan was tall.
Ethan studied the odd rock as he had each time he visited, the queer layers of it. The thin, stiff layer of obsidian appeared to almost be a coating around its white marbled center. By whatever means someone (or something) or some bizarre act of nature allowed for marble to be glazed in a layer of obsidian… how this ever occurred was far beyond his understanding. Yet it happened, somehow; the evidence laying unmistakably before him.
Stranger still were the additional layers sandwiched between the obsidian and the marble, paper thin but evidently uniform – gold and silver. Ethan doubted if you could put together three coins if you somehow shaved the entire stone down and painstakingly chiseled the film of both layers, which probably helped explain why no one had ever bothered to try.
The base of the broken obelisk had strange writing etched into, the characters shining brightly in the moonlight. The artisans, whoever they were, used the different layers to allow the strange characters to have a beautiful, rainbow like effect. The characters shimmered and almost made the writing appear to move as you looked at it from different angles; each ‘letter’ (or whatever they were) almost seemed to glow in any light, aided by the stark contrast of the pitch-black canvas in which they were etched.
The broken monument lay heavy and dead, like the corpse of a god that would never decay. Aside from the strange writing, there was a small, modern plaque dedicating the monument to the denizens who could not afford a place to be buried. Clearly sentiments had changed throughout the decades or centuries since the plaque was established as the cemetery now lay within a wealthy neighborhood with tall walls and a shuttered gate to prevent most from entering. Aside from the two distinct sets of writing, the monument was clean and barren, if still broken in two places from its collapse untold ages ago.
Ethan made his way to the other side, to the back that faced the giant tree. There was a small vase with a cement base holding frozen, wilted flowers. Ethan removed them and replaced the remnants of the seasonal foliage with a handful of Ice Lilies. Closer to weeds than flowers, they were among the hardiest plants in the area, albeit far from the prettiest. He knew these too would die eventually and there would be no one left to replace them… but they would have to do.
He turned his gaze then to the unfinished relief that was etched into the backside of the monument. The impression of a small town nestled somewhere in the woods, with quaint homes and small bridge spanning a river and the visage of its denizens. Ethan traced his finger along the images, wanting to somehow feel the place and the figures so masterfully crafted.
He traced his hand over a half-elf lying lazily on his back near a shoreline, an open book laying forgotten on his chest; odd trinkets lay half completed as the young boy looked wistfully into the heavens.
Then a human, a heavyset boy with broad shoulders and wiry hair, standing protectively in front of a smaller friend, an earnest but combative look in his eyes and a clear sense of genuine strength radiating off his body. A boy who would never back down from confrontation, even if his gentle heart later regretted the actions instigated by his hot blood.
He brushed aside a small bit of ice that hung from two small figures in the woods, perhaps with tails – sisters holding hands and sharing secrets, their figures barely visible through the thick brush. Wandering in search of their future, frightened by the violence and isolation of the world they were born into, but reassured by the constant presence of one another.
And he knew there would be more still to come: a half-elf with a lopsided ear and a radiant but desperate smile; a young man, so tall it would appear to be an exaggeration, prideful and mean with the arrogance of youth and beauty; and a small, scrappy boy near the edge of the village, talking with an older man who was showing him the trades of weapon and respect for the hunt for which it was made.
Ethan would not be around to see these additions, but he knew they would be added just the same. And like Garbon, Rowen, Tolan, Sor’rel and Sireli, their images would be true. Ethan never told Alistair a description of their faces; the stories – the true stories of who they were (as best Ethan could tell them) – had somehow been enough.
And while their bodies lay scattered across two kingdoms or more, and while the tapestry itself was of a time that never truly existed, the intent behind it was sincere enough to convince the old man to craft it. For here, in this one scene of fiction, each of his family would live on, frozen in the innocence of their youth, in a time when their futures had yet to be written.
Here, for this one moment, they were once again all together and dreaming of the lives they wanted for themselves.
Here, in this secret place, their memories would live on.
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