beneath the stars i laid you to rest, beneath the sun you came back again
Waters become a graveyard, corpses dotting their surface with only fronds and cattails along the shore to stand in as headstones. No names are carved into the dirt, those who did not survive the strength of the current of the bite of another left to be forgotten. Everything that is mortal, that is made of carbon linked with something more, is so easy to forget and wash away.
This mausoleum of memory yawns, tired of the past, closing it out already.
Even the breeze sighs with forgetfulness.
Ceylon enjoys the chill for a moment, knowing there are no pages to be destroyed or tapping feet to interrupt his thoughts. Private moments are treasures, cherished, beautiful. Only in the silence with his breath caught in the wind does he cast himself into the past and future. An age before destruction. An age of enlightenment, of creativity, of people made of stone and towers more ornate and coveted than that which they housed.
Yes.
Yes.
The past is wonderful. And it will live again in the future. Ceylon will build something to be remembered even when he is not.
Something akin to a smile might have been curving along his gold-lined lips, soft blue eyes lost in a daze. He might have seemed a dream, some scholar or storyteller caught on the lip of the river, cobblestone and dust beneath his feet, lost to even time itself.
Then, his reprieve shatters. Glass tumbles in great painted windows, everything churning into a disgusting shade of brown and bile and black until only the present remains. In that hell of existence, Vercingtorix rises like a beast, like his dragon that looms behind him as some megalith cursed with life itself, and speaks. It is his voice that is warm where his face is not.
Ceylon does not care for that warmth.
“It seems I am found,” he states plainly. If he is perturbed by the disruption or more than agitated, it does not show. Before Torix, Ceylon is the glass surface of the Vitreus at night. Only the world is reflected from him, his own world hidden beneath.
“You’ve taken the whole pathway,” he notes with the barest flicker of his lips downward. Eyes trace the outline of both man and dragon, thinking of stone sentinels and gargoyles who are silent protectors, too.
