Some people, he knows, are made to be Cathedrals - holy, towering into the sky, indomitable and pure. Some people, he knows, are made to be a Palace - somewhere only lovely and wicked things go, somewhere meant for magic as much as it is meant for lies. Ceylon thinks, fleetingly, that he was made to be only a tomb. 

He is the grave of his father's memory. "You have his eyes," his mother tells him over and over every night in his sleep. Perhaps she repeats this endlessly because that is the most common thing she ever said before she left. His mother loved him, at least that's what his sister says. Truly, Ceylon has so little to go on - vague memories from boyhood held like autumn on his tongue (they go too soon, so soon, into nothing); some forgotten scent that makes him think of the way she used to cook with spices (but never love, not really, that isn't a flavor) and make them gather around the dinner table to eat; and then there is the laughter of the wind, this reminds him the most of his mother before she left. 

Wherever she went, he hopes the buildings are beautiful. 

His mother never liked anything too simple, she had an eye for something beautiful. Is that why she loved his father? 

Ceylon was punished for being his father's son. Stored away in a monastery with layer upon layer of dust from monks that couldn't quite keep up with the size of it. Their monks, he recalls, are a dying breed. Fewer come each year, fewer devote themselves to whatever god his father tried to destroy. It is these same men that Ceylon was entrusted to as a boy; they raised him as best they could, overseeing his studies, guiding him where they could and finding instructors who could push him further, past a breaking point he's never discovered. 

If you ask him now, he won't tell you why he left. He won't tell you of the journey into this land. 

If you ask, he'll just walk away and stare at another stone, another possibility written in the rocks. 

Thank god no one has asked. 

They've looked, but they never came near, and, were he more inclined to socialize and be concerned about the on-goings and welfare of others, he would have wondered why they never approach. Perhaps it was because he is a shadowed figure under the stars, glinting gold as he goes and nothing more. There is nothing precious on him, no valuables to be seen. He is, by definition, just a man and nothing more. If you look, you'll find nothing special to him - no astounding strength nor beauty, certainly nothing to compare to the roaring of the river that flows proudly next to him. He is blue, but not that crystal clear blue. He is gold, but not like the bellies of fish that wink from below the surface. He is alone, but not as lonely as the wishing stones swept away in the undercurrents. 

It is night again (he prefers this, nights are always cooler at home where he can be left alone to work, to focus) and Ceylon walks like a man surrendered to the savage wiles that nature has to offer. Eyes follow the patterns of stone, looking at cracks and crevices as though they are priceless. Perhaps, to him, they are. 

There is a world of possibilities just beneath his feet, but he wouldn't tell you about them, not really, not at all. 

 Ceylon