Fragment II — Under the Broken Columns
The moon was full enough to cast shadows like ink.
We went by the lower path so no one in Reedglass would mark our steps. My wife carried the small bowl wrapped in linen. My son walked between us, instructed not to speak. Even at his age he understands that some prayers are not said aloud in daylight.
The stone columnade stands broken now. Pillars bitten down by weather, capitals split, the long roof gone. Only ribs of stone remain against the sky. They say it was raised when the clans still answered to one god without apology. Before the Empire named our hills and numbered our sons.
We chose the farthest arch, where the moon passes cleanly between two columns.
I saw him then.
On the opposite rise, beyond the fallen lintels, a single military figure sat among the older ruins. Not one of ours. The posture gave him away—back straight even in solitude, cloak folded precisely, a blade across his knees as if it were a second spine. He did not move. He might have been carved there.
I turned my son’s face back toward the stones.
We laid the bowl at the base of the column. Inside: ash from my father’s hearth, a strip of cured sinew, three drops of my own blood. My wife placed her palm flat on the stone and closed her eyes. The column still holds warmth from the day. Or memory. It is hard to tell which.
They say there was a time when this ritual filled the land below these stones. Fires in every arch. Horns sounding from ridge to ridge. Children lifted high so the god would see their brows and judge their bone. Men striking their chests with iron. Women braiding red thread through hair and beard so no name would be forgotten.
Now we whisper.
I pressed my forehead to the column.
“One,” I said softly. Not a plea. A reminder.
We ask for strength not to conquer, but to endure. To carry weight without bending. To father sons who remember their fathers. To keep the line unbroken, even if it must live in shadow.
My son repeated the word after me. His voice did not tremble.
The moon cleared the column and poured white across the floor. For a moment the ruins looked whole again. I imagined the old banners hanging between the pillars. I imagined the chant rolling outward into the dark forests, unanswered by any emperor.
Across the way, the soldier shifted.
Just slightly. Enough to tell me he was not stone.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at these columns. A ruin. A survey mark. A future quarry.
We finished quickly.
Ash scattered to the wind. Sinew tied around my son’s wrist beneath his sleeve. The blood smeared into the mortar seam where lichen grows thickest. Nothing left for patrols to note. Nothing to report.
When we descended the path, I glanced back once.
The military figure remained seated, alone among the older bones of the world. The moon cut his outline sharp against the broken stone.
For an instant I felt a strange kinship.
He, too, sat beneath something larger than himself.
But he served a different continuity.