distance; and from the front wall to the back, at least three hundred. The light of the torch died away, and collided with a wall of impenetrable shadow, in all four directions. Ranged in rows all up and down the room, there were narrow platforms, atop which lay identical stone coffins. Row after row, column after column, these coffins went on; but in the very centre of the mausoleum, just before the doorway, there stood a beautiful casket wrought all in marble. Greyson was drawn to this structure as if it were a magnet, and he a powerless lump of metal. Before he knew what he was about, he was walking all around it, and running his hand over the lid. He read the name of Vaya Eleria inscribed upon it, carven in pure gold across the hard marble. Below these two words, again, there was the Lumarian crest.
The caskets to either side were covered in a thick layer of dirt, dust and mould; but the marble coffin was clean to the touch, with its gold carvings shining brilliantly in the torchlight. It seemed that Ephram’s tormented love had managed, somehow, to reach across the sea that parted him from his daughter, and to manifest itself by the usually careless hand of Filipovic, who somehow could not bring himself to exercise his wonted indifference upon the tomb of the sleeping Princess. Perhaps he would have told you, if you had asked him very nicely, that the care of the Princess’s resting place was his most prized and honoured employment – and that, rather than as a chore, he considered it a supreme accomplishment. It made him, as he thought, very different from the rest of his peers: the distingué aide of Byron Evigan, and the right hand of King Ephram’s distant devotion.
There was even a little chair tucked up neatly by the side of the casket, where Filipovic liked sometimes to sit, after he had finished with the ritual of revitalising the tomb. Greyson wondered at its strange placement there; but he thought about it very little, before he sat down in it himself.
Now – a useful nugget of wisdom for the uninformed. The act of reviving a Lumarian is strictly unlawful, and is looked upon as pure heresy, in a manner almost akin to the human belief that it is unholy to raise the dead. For, when it was first learnt that to pierce the heart caused death, it was not known that such death could be undone. Therefore, when criminals were executed by that method, sometimes they were raised whole hundreds of years later by those they left behind. After the Lumarian traitor Cusil was raised, and went thereafter upon a rampage in which he killed some three scores of his old enemies, the act of waking a sleeping Lumarian was ruled to warrant the punishment of death. When Cusil was finally returned to his tomb, then (this time with his head removed), his son Husil went with him.
There have been no examples of such an awakening, since the alleged revival in 1467 of Tarus Elin – who, we should note, was beheaded only one month after the event was said to occur, without ever having made record of it.
It should be said, too, that it was never Greyson’s true intention to wake Vaya. He wished only, infatuated as he had always been with her portrait, to sit for a while beside her coffin. Perhaps we might argue that his subconscious had urged him towards it, right from the start – for he had gone to the great and illicit lengths beforehand of sneaking into Vaya’s old chamber. That place where she had lived was very different from the one where she presently slept. Nothing had been touched, nothing had been moved from it after her death. Ephram only ordered the room locked and sealed, and never gone into again.
No one else had ever been mad enough to even think of breaking this most strict of the King’s laws. But it seemed that Greyson was driven by a force outside himself, an external power which had little to do with him, and which did not even originate with him. Call this power fate, if you like. Call it whatever you
The caskets to either side were covered in a thick layer of dirt, dust and mould; but the marble coffin was clean to the touch, with its gold carvings shining brilliantly in the torchlight. It seemed that Ephram’s tormented love had managed, somehow, to reach across the sea that parted him from his daughter, and to manifest itself by the usually careless hand of Filipovic, who somehow could not bring himself to exercise his wonted indifference upon the tomb of the sleeping Princess. Perhaps he would have told you, if you had asked him very nicely, that the care of the Princess’s resting place was his most prized and honoured employment – and that, rather than as a chore, he considered it a supreme accomplishment. It made him, as he thought, very different from the rest of his peers: the distingué aide of Byron Evigan, and the right hand of King Ephram’s distant devotion.
There was even a little chair tucked up neatly by the side of the casket, where Filipovic liked sometimes to sit, after he had finished with the ritual of revitalising the tomb. Greyson wondered at its strange placement there; but he thought about it very little, before he sat down in it himself.
Now – a useful nugget of wisdom for the uninformed. The act of reviving a Lumarian is strictly unlawful, and is looked upon as pure heresy, in a manner almost akin to the human belief that it is unholy to raise the dead. For, when it was first learnt that to pierce the heart caused death, it was not known that such death could be undone. Therefore, when criminals were executed by that method, sometimes they were raised whole hundreds of years later by those they left behind. After the Lumarian traitor Cusil was raised, and went thereafter upon a rampage in which he killed some three scores of his old enemies, the act of waking a sleeping Lumarian was ruled to warrant the punishment of death. When Cusil was finally returned to his tomb, then (this time with his head removed), his son Husil went with him.
There have been no examples of such an awakening, since the alleged revival in 1467 of Tarus Elin – who, we should note, was beheaded only one month after the event was said to occur, without ever having made record of it.
It should be said, too, that it was never Greyson’s true intention to wake Vaya. He wished only, infatuated as he had always been with her portrait, to sit for a while beside her coffin. Perhaps we might argue that his subconscious had urged him towards it, right from the start – for he had gone to the great and illicit lengths beforehand of sneaking into Vaya’s old chamber. That place where she had lived was very different from the one where she presently slept. Nothing had been touched, nothing had been moved from it after her death. Ephram only ordered the room locked and sealed, and never gone into again.
No one else had ever been mad enough to even think of breaking this most strict of the King’s laws. But it seemed that Greyson was driven by a force outside himself, an external power which had little to do with him, and which did not even originate with him. Call this power fate, if you like. Call it whatever you
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