back up can be a pain.
The stairs and crypt are always well lit. Torches are kept in sconces along the walls at intervals. The duty guards maintain them, and in my years in the kingdom, I had never come across a burned-out torch along the route. They burn almost smokelessly, and there is just enough ventilation through the center of the stairwell and through air shafts bored through to the outside to keep the crypt from claiming new residents for itself with a buildup of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
King Pregel’s headstone was already mortared in place, with his name and dates freshly carved on it. Wellivazey’s body had been returned to the room also. Despite the months the elf had been dead, there had been no decomposition.
I stopped by my father’s niche first, at the end of the Heroes’ section of the burial wall, near the door, nearly eighty feet from Pregel’s place.
“You’ve got someone down here to talk to now, someone you knew, though you might have to shout at each other to be heard,” I said. I had my hand resting on the marble capstone, the way I usually stood during those one-sided chats. I may have been heavily into the Hamlet routine, but I wouldn’t say that I ever really heard Dad talking back to me in one of those sessions. My father, Carl Tyner, Hero of Varay before me … why would he talk to me about Varay’s problems now? He had never said one word to me about the kingdom or his “job” while he was alive. I usually didn’t feel the same sharp resentment against him that I still held against Mother, though. Sure, he was equally to blame, but my soliloquies had eased my anger toward him. Dad never argued. Mother was still around, still alive, and every time I saw her, every time we talked, I thought of the Big Lie my parents had woven around me until my twenty-first birthday.
“I’m still on the hot seat, worse now than before,” I said. “I’m stuck with being king as well as Hero, and everything is falling apart—more than you ever had to contend with. And there’s no sign of this legendary Golden Age, and wasn’t that the rationale behind the lying, the deceit?”
I stood there for a while, then moved on down the row of burial slots. The Heroes and kings of Varay. The Heroes were stacked three high, the kings only two high. And right in the middle, Vara was all alone. At one point, not long after I recovered from the wounds I suffered in and before the Battle of Thyme, I made an effort to memorize all the names and dates. I asked questions about who did what and when, and read some of the old books and scrolls that Parthet and Kardeen kept about the history of Varay and the rest of the buffer zone. But I gave that all up fairly quickly. The answers tended to be too depressing.
I made a long stop at Vara’s niche. As I had many times before, I wondered if his remains were really in there, if he had really lived and wasn’t just part of a legend cooked up to fill a gap … which led me—this time—to wonder if the set of family jewels I had swiped from the shrines of the Great Earth Mother had originally been his. That apparition of the Great Earth Mother in the shrine had promised to destroy me when she realized that I wasn’t really Vara.
The balls, one ruby and one emerald, were they gemstones only or the somehow transformed testicles of Vara?
“If they are yours, at least they’re back in the family again,” I mumbled.
Two separate legends .
One told how the Great Earth Mother had wandered the void before the beginning of time, before Creation, until she found a mate that she considered suitable. Their coupling had resulting in the Great Earth Mother’s giving birth to the entire universe. At some point after that, she had decided that she liked the offspring but not the sire, so she killed her mate and cut off his nuts as a keepsake. And they were apparently hanging with my own now, swallowed in desperation on the island out in the Mist when
The stairs and crypt are always well lit. Torches are kept in sconces along the walls at intervals. The duty guards maintain them, and in my years in the kingdom, I had never come across a burned-out torch along the route. They burn almost smokelessly, and there is just enough ventilation through the center of the stairwell and through air shafts bored through to the outside to keep the crypt from claiming new residents for itself with a buildup of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
King Pregel’s headstone was already mortared in place, with his name and dates freshly carved on it. Wellivazey’s body had been returned to the room also. Despite the months the elf had been dead, there had been no decomposition.
I stopped by my father’s niche first, at the end of the Heroes’ section of the burial wall, near the door, nearly eighty feet from Pregel’s place.
“You’ve got someone down here to talk to now, someone you knew, though you might have to shout at each other to be heard,” I said. I had my hand resting on the marble capstone, the way I usually stood during those one-sided chats. I may have been heavily into the Hamlet routine, but I wouldn’t say that I ever really heard Dad talking back to me in one of those sessions. My father, Carl Tyner, Hero of Varay before me … why would he talk to me about Varay’s problems now? He had never said one word to me about the kingdom or his “job” while he was alive. I usually didn’t feel the same sharp resentment against him that I still held against Mother, though. Sure, he was equally to blame, but my soliloquies had eased my anger toward him. Dad never argued. Mother was still around, still alive, and every time I saw her, every time we talked, I thought of the Big Lie my parents had woven around me until my twenty-first birthday.
“I’m still on the hot seat, worse now than before,” I said. “I’m stuck with being king as well as Hero, and everything is falling apart—more than you ever had to contend with. And there’s no sign of this legendary Golden Age, and wasn’t that the rationale behind the lying, the deceit?”
I stood there for a while, then moved on down the row of burial slots. The Heroes and kings of Varay. The Heroes were stacked three high, the kings only two high. And right in the middle, Vara was all alone. At one point, not long after I recovered from the wounds I suffered in and before the Battle of Thyme, I made an effort to memorize all the names and dates. I asked questions about who did what and when, and read some of the old books and scrolls that Parthet and Kardeen kept about the history of Varay and the rest of the buffer zone. But I gave that all up fairly quickly. The answers tended to be too depressing.
I made a long stop at Vara’s niche. As I had many times before, I wondered if his remains were really in there, if he had really lived and wasn’t just part of a legend cooked up to fill a gap … which led me—this time—to wonder if the set of family jewels I had swiped from the shrines of the Great Earth Mother had originally been his. That apparition of the Great Earth Mother in the shrine had promised to destroy me when she realized that I wasn’t really Vara.
The balls, one ruby and one emerald, were they gemstones only or the somehow transformed testicles of Vara?
“If they are yours, at least they’re back in the family again,” I mumbled.
Two separate legends .
One told how the Great Earth Mother had wandered the void before the beginning of time, before Creation, until she found a mate that she considered suitable. Their coupling had resulting in the Great Earth Mother’s giving birth to the entire universe. At some point after that, she had decided that she liked the offspring but not the sire, so she killed her mate and cut off his nuts as a keepsake. And they were apparently hanging with my own now, swallowed in desperation on the island out in the Mist when
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