During the Dark Age, survivors sat vigil over the dead. Many would fashion stone circles in the shape of the Traveler and laid their loved ones at the center, waiting prostrate for Ghosts that never came. When it was time to move forward, the living stacked those same stones atop the dead. Dirtied hands tied messages to each grave's marker—tattered epitaphs of devotion, bravery, and sacrifice abandoned to twist mournfully in the breeze.

REFUSED MEDICINE SO OTHERS COULD LIVE

KNEW ABOUT THE MINEFIELD, INSISTED ON CROSSING FIRST

ONLY 16 – HE LIVED A BOY, BUT DIED A MAN PROTECTNG HIS FAMILY FROM THE FALLEN

Lakshmi-2 had read too many such elegies to remember them all, but the ones she had written stayed with her. There was the father who went back for his children, only for all three to be crushed underfoot by a Walker that didn't even see them. The old woman captured by the House of Devils, tortured, then shot dead when she refused to reveal the location of her settlement. The child that starved to death before given the opportunity to accomplish anything, but whose mother insisted that Lakshmi at least try.

"Please," she'd said, "you're better with words."

And so, Lakshmi wrote: A CHILD SLEEPS HERE, LEAVING HER MOTHER ONLY WITH HOPE SHE MIGHT SOMEDAY WAKE

Hundreds of years after she had positioned the last stone atop the infant's grave, in her final moments of life, Lakshmi wondered if the Vex would leave enough of her to bury, and what—if anything—would be written on her behalf.

She would have never expected an Eliksni called Namrask to request visitation with her crumpled remains. She would have laughed, incredulous to learn that he sat by her side for hours in contemplative silence.

Finally, he said, "I wish we could have both been better people."

And maybe Lakshmi someday would have been, had she known that he'd close her eyes with the tips of his fingers and weep.