City on a Hill by Ted Neill

Author:Ted Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tenebray Press
Published: 2018-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

It was a day of ruins. They passed a number of ancient structures: cracked domes, toppled towers, and lonesome walls covered in moss and ivy. Sabrina preferred these to the decay of the more recent buildings—in those the sense of loss and rot was as real and recent as bodies left on the roadside. The stone ruins, on the other hand, brought to mind paintings she had seen in her school tablets. The paintings had been lost in the Cataclysm, but some images remained and were stored in the Ministry of Education’s data cores. She had enlarged them on her screens many times to admire the sunlight slanting through high windows or the novelty of trees growing between walls, their branches touching crumbling rafters. Her favorites were those where spires and archways loomed out of thick mist, hints of grandeur lost to time. Lindsey had never liked the pictures … she said they were too sad. Looking back, Sabrina understood better now. But she had always loved the haunted, dream-like quality that each picture held.

Throughout the day they encountered scenes like those of the paintings. Pillars lay fallen across boneyards like slain sentinels. Here and there, Sabrina glimpsed between ivy stone latticework carved so intricately that it resembled lace. These buildings would have been old before the Cataclysm. She knew they were religious structures, even though signs of which sects they had belonged to had been removed. Grange explained that the L’veds had done most of the damage. Many of the structures had been used until the Cataclysm. But after the Transition, when the walls had gone up around their land and the populations moved into the Fortinbras and Lysander, the L’veds had systematically scoured the countryside for such buildings and “rained fire down upon them,” according to Grange. He looked sad as he said it, as if mourning the loss of sacred places. But Sabrina preferred the buildings this way, ruined, inert, harmless.

Another structure, much larger than the small ones they had encountered, covered most of the hillside on the far side of the valley. It was so large that Sabrina had taken its sheer walls for cliffs. As they neared it, she realized it was a fortress. With its slanting brown walls, round towers, and parapets, it looked like the sand castle she and Lindsey had made on the beach. That night felt like a lifetime ago. She looked to Lindsey to ask if she was thinking the same, but the words died in her mouth. The grandeur of the place had turned the party quiet. Sabrina decided it best not to disturb it.

They camped in sight of the fortress, dropping their packs within another set of ruins. Statues with their own small shrines stood watch over a cemetery, the headstones disappearing in a field of wild flowers. The interior walls were decorated with small colored tiles. The windows had been shattered but what bits of glass remained in the frames was also colored. The sight made Lindsey forlorn as she nudged the shards at their feet.

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