An Exile's Notes

Summary

 * Location:
 * Author: Anonymous

Content
The memory-stone. That's what they say Ulbazar stole. It is a secret known only to Ulbazar and the heavens. The rest of us? We all have a story. We are, in fact, from all over.

Baram is the oldest. He was a merchant in his home, a place he cannot bear to name, when he was driven out by slander.

Naya is a Forebear doctor who was driven from her home when the Crown child in her care died of a disease for which there is no cure.

Salamas is a mediocre poet who tells marvelous jokes. We are all in a better mood because of him. But he made the wrong joke at the wrong time, and so he too joined us on the road to Evermore.

There are so many of us and we pass the time telling tales of where we came from and how it was that we went to Evermore. We have become a kind of family.

All except Ulbazar. He is a hard man, an angry man. He believes we will not leave this place alive. But no matter how little he says, still there are rumors. That he was a great warrior who should have been welcomed as a hero, but instead he was exiled. That in revenge he stole his lord's most precious possession, a thing called the memory-stone. These are just rumors though. Fantasies conjured by minds that have gone too long without daylight or the feel of the morning breeze on our skin.

In Evermore they know us only as "the exiles." We have been told to wait here until our status is resolved, but they have sealed the doors on us like we are prisoners. I wonder if Ulbazar is right—that we'll never leave this place.