Seeds

Tanric had tried to send men to reopen Vells, it was in a strategic location and he wanted the city filled with soldiers again. The few hardy souls who had scaled the walls and forced open one of the smaller gates came out and refused to ever go back in.

 

A few thieves came intending to look around for something worth looting, tombs were always an easy day’s work. But Vells was not a tomb. It was a city, destroyed and terrible. Even they did not linger, and the few things they managed to take out were returned within a year. They claimed that everything within the city was cursed.

 

Loved ones broken by grief came and went, outside the city a small shrine was built and some of the people who could not bear to leave stayed to keep it. In time they became the Keepers of the Dead. They gathered the names of those lost in the burning and spoke them as they stood outside the gates hoping to soothe the unquiet spirits within.

 

After Lady Vaeri was laid to rest there, it became known as the City of the Dead. People sent their loved ones there to be tended by the Keepers, names spoken from the rolls and never forgotten. The city began to fill with people once more, but not the living. The city also began to fill with flowers.

 

For ten years Vells had been an open wound for Draim. Lady Vaeri, the daughter of Commander Eshenesra, had killed the man who burned the city. Her last words and the painful anniversary had brought things to a boil. Had the three remaining Meazyr Princes not chosen to step forward and pay their respects at Vells, acknowledging the wound, there would likely have been another war.

 

Lady Vaeri’s kin came from Redreath with sweet vaerian seeds and met with the Meazyr Princes. The six of them and her cousin Tandas, who had been sent from Kingholme, walked in the City of the Dead to her resting place and scattered the seeds around her and as they walked slowly back, the Princes spoke of her by the name that Halvhandt had last given her, Zoldendochterblum. To this day the flowers are known as soldier’s daughter.

 

But more seeds than those were sown in the ruins of Vells. The seeds of the Rebellion of Redreath.

Author's Note

Too much jumping? What should I elaborate on or pull out? Is there anything I should change? Does it make sense?