| Once again I awoke, not surprised this time, but covered with blood and raging with hunger. My first concern, however, was Sauron. Was he alright? I could not, however, find him at all. For some reason, I assumed he had returned to the temple, though why he would leave me hurt and alone in the road, I did not know. So, I gathered up what supplies were still there and finished the walk home, a blessedly short one as I felt as though I was starving and exhausted. He was waiting for me when I arrived, standing beside the chair on its dias that had always been his. I noticed almost immediately that the bush behind the chair, the only rosebush with anything other than red roses, had broken out in another pure white bloom. He smiled at me then, and I knew that something was different. Even as I blinked at him in confusion, and blinked several more times as the sunlight of the garden was making my headache and hunger a great deal worse, he told me that he was dead. For a moment I did not understand, but the information came crashing home as he showed me the hidden drawer in the dias beneath the chair, now my chair, and told me of the tomes kept by each Priest or Priestess. Then he told me that he would rest for a while, and faded away like the other specters of the temple were apt to do when bored of tired. I was now the Priestess of Sorrows. While the effects of the temple eased my pain as they had with my mother's death, I soon found myself to have a much different problem. I thought myself to be sick. I became less and less tolerant of the daylight, finding that it caused me a great deal of pain to be in it. I was constantly hungry, but the scent and sometimes the mere sight of food made me nauseous. I was also in a constant state of exhaustion that no amount of rest seemed to relieve. Amazingly, the temple adjusted itself to my needs. It came to be a more or less constant state of twilight within the temple, which I found to be far more comfortable for me. The white rose bush behind the chair began weeping one morning, and I was shocked to discover not only that those tears were blood, but that blood assuaged the horrible hunger that I had been feeling. I had no word for what I had become, and no knowledge of it, but the Temple saw to my needs and my comfort and my life was not unpleasant. The years began to blend into one. I performed my duties flawlessly, guiding the lost, the new, and the seeking to what they sought. I cared for the garden, and at times even performed such magics outside the temple as were required of me to help a spirit move on. Somewhere over the years the people outside ceased to call on my aid, and gradually also ceased to come to the Temple. It was slow enough that days would pass without any visitors, then weeks, then months, then finally years, all without my particular notice. Somewhere in this time, some point after my five-hundredth birthday, I am told that the area was swept by a plague. The people of the area died by the hundreds, and new roses bloomed by the dozen. The healthy fled, and even their many times descendants refused to return. I was not lonely, as my predecessors would often sit and talk with me over the years, as would the many and varied spirits of the Temple proper. I think that many of them missed the friends and loved ones that once came to visit, and sought me out more and more often for what solace I could offer. A few were ready, and let go, an event always celebrated lavishly even as it made us sad. We grew to be rather like a very strange community over the years, though spirits are not at all the same as the living. Whole decades would often pass when they all seemed to be resting, and no one spoke to me. I didn't mind, as this peace allowed me to rest in much the same fashion, and dream those dreams that had once caused my mother and I to fight. It was with a slight shock that I woke from one such rest to the fact that four thousand years had passed since my birth (though that particular daydream had only lasted for fifty of those), and also to a living visitor in the Temple. He was indeed strange to me, especially as he did not seem to be seeking any of the spirits there. He sat a long time with me, talking, telling me what seemed to be outrageous tales from the world outside the Temple. He told me of his own land, called Stonegate, and that what he was searching for was good people to help him... |
| The Chronicles of Sorrow Marikalay's History |
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