[Elora]

Uien

As the moon steadily rose, the night sky was alive with a bright glittering array of silver motes. Uien's silence though was not introspection of the stars that heralded the ending of Twilight. Something else pulled at her awareness, inexorable... whispering.

The landscape was awash with a fragile light which she slowly walked through, towards the ruined stones that had earlier bore quiet witness to her distress. Uien reached the nearest, wound about with ivy that had the print of a long summer upon it's dark leaves. They were dry and she brushed them aside with light fingers, brow furrowed. The murmur of night creatures rustled further along, deeper into the tumbled stones of the ruined city of Men.

It was not that which drew her forward, deeper into the night. Uien's long pale hair shone a delicate silver as she bent forward and pressed her cheek to the stone. It still held warmth from the day that softly radiated through her skin. Beneath that warmth, a thin patina of a day's passing memory, something older abided. It was that which intrigued her.

Her brow furrowed as she strove to listen to the memory of the stone. It was a sighing whisper, beckoning, slipping away and then tickling back as it returned. Uien straightened, bemused. Curiosity inclined her to go to the next stone. It was taller than she. Perhaps a door lintel, Uien wandered as she neared. Who had passed through? Who had lived there?

She pressed her ear to it, listening intently. The song it sang, sorrowful memory, lament at the burden of the lonely years, was similar to the one she had heard just before. It was the same at the third stone Uien harkened to, and the fourth. As Uien wandered about in a place of ghosts through the tangle of stone and night's shadow, she was staggered at what was emerging.

The ruins of Fornost were alive, with melancholy, memories so old as to be dust now, fine and fragile in the winds of time, yet kept alive, locked in the stones that had been shaped, raised and then abandoned. The melancholy flooded into her, and her feet strayed here and there as she wandered deeper into Fornost and the night.