Keeping the Fire: Flowstone

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Polena could not have comprehended the size of Fortress Edgar. She had seen more than most people at twenty three, even if this was her first tour of duty. The towering columns and high domes of Meeda's cathedrals were familiar to her. The fleets of majestic ships coursing through the Holy Bay, the ranks of Legion soldiers marching one hundred abreast on Revolution Day these sights that song and poem would struggle to capture she had witnessed fully. As a Luminary of the People’s Alliance of Creace she had access to the greatest libraries, the most accurate of illustrations, and the most cosmopolitan of cities. She knew that Fortress Edgar was a wonder of the world and for it she had prepared herself to be in awe. But none of that could prepare her for the power of that place, a towering spire of granite two thousand feet high ending in that great four tiered city-fortress a mile wide and seven hundred years older than any building she had ever seen. No book, no pageant, no legend, can prepare one for that sight of dawn breaking on those shimmering walls of silver rock, for the canal like tunnels and streets of homes three stories high, for the meeting of Eastern and Western civilization in this, the flowstone of the nations.

Luminary Polena had come to do the duty of the People, to serve their grand Alliance, but found herself gawking like a child, getting easily lost on the thousand identical streets of the Fortress, and ultimately, a newcomer to a game long in progress unwanted by friend or foe. Much of her day was spent in the libraries or taking in the weak sun and near constant overcast of this high and cold city.

She felt as if she had not been made for such light, its color bleeding out the deep brown of her eyes, taking the richness from the black of her short weakly curled hair, and her deep grey robes seeming to hold more reality than her almond skin. She would sit on her high balcony looking out into the wide western Dehali valley to the Gem-Road extending west beyond sight into Westin lands and the Silver-Road somewhere almost out of sight to the east then south. And she would wonder in these times why she had been brought here.

Her superior, the Knight Luminary Coralm, seemed to have no need of a scholar. Nor had he need of a diplomat, a guard, an aid or even conversation. Luminary Polena had been taken from her duties in Kerpsatch in far off Meeda specifically to assist Coralm. And had left them without complaint no matter how strongly she had believed in their importance. But she sat unused awaiting Coralm's need. On the good days she felt as if she were a quill placed in a font awaiting a hand. On the bad, she was as a bolt in a crossbow cranked taught seeking a target. So she was on the day when the Knight Luminary Coralm finally came to her. And so it was that she would look back to that day and mark it as the place where she first caught the Goddess of Fate's wrathful eye. 

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