Elendal

✎ Art by Smalahove

Story By PunchingSolas

Elendal was a firm believer in that the past was always the key to unlocking the future. She breezed on outstretched wings, against warm winds and gliding across the glistening sunlight. She saw the world she loved. Towering pillars that stood against time, defiant and strong and beautifully carved as she took out her book to record its status. Her fingers outstretched as she ghosted her claws over the physical memory, gaze filled with a love unknown to so many. Elendal lived within history’s gilded walls. In the early winds of morning, she would escape the clutches of sleep to monitor the stones. With each open maw of a wave, come tempest or merciless sun, she would be upon the sky to record the stones. Her home’s foundations depended on her, a world of history so easily left to decay and crumble should she abandon her care for it. And for every scar that would mar the surface of the cliff, every broken stone or weathered architecture, she would press her palms to the cold surface and burst her magic within its foundations. Plumes of magic would flood every orifice until the structure cracked and sealed itself, tighter and protected. And she would leave, exhausted, but satisfied that she had done her duty. Come evening, after she had set down her book back onto her hip, she would skitter across jagged, crumbled stone, pushing up into the air and searching, as she gasped, body tipping as she touched upon the stone ground. A tablet, old and worn, bearing carvings of a time long lost. She had, in the privacy of the abandoned stone, squealed with childish delight, eager to bring it to her home. Elendal had returned to her home. A space in which she had made her own, from the long ruins trailing underground from the area she surveyed. Upon her neat desk, she had set her book, and beside that, her new tablet. The strong scent of earth and sea had lulled her busy mind to a comfort. And in the small space of silence, she had offered her tablet a smile, and a heartfelt whisper of a promise to uncover its once forgotten secrets. Her room was filled with similar promises. Vases throbbing with magic to keep them repaired, cracks shimmering with strength. Notes strewn across her bed of frantic, late-night works on decoding stone tablets. Elendal had pondered endlessly on the lineage that belonged to the Radiant Sect, long before its new residents had filled it with their new memories. She worked with fingers that took astounding care, to restore these lost artefacts. And it was in private she kept working, away from the prying gaze of others. Elendal wondered, as she lay curled up with her tomes, if it was possible to miss something she had never been a part of. Of an ancient world she had learned and loved like a part of it herself. She let herself dream of its rebuilt glory, of its towering gigantesque beauty. And some part of her tightened, as if she would cry thinking of all that had been lost in the time it had taken her to start restoring. And she would sleep. And after her limitless dreams of exploration had been broken by the morning call of birds and the whispering sea, she would take her book and flutter off into the winds, meticulously studying the location once more.

●●●●●●●●●●●●

Whispers long gone weave through the pillars,
their words as cracked and faded as the stone around them,
lamenting wordlessly, their voices nothing but echoes on the wind.

She walks amongst the debris, running her healing claws
over the tired architecture, mending the wounds and hoping against hope
that somehow, some way, this would restore everything.
Somehow, the filled holes in the stone walls would beckon forth
everyone who long ago left, the ghost who still haunt the halls
remembering what once was, and what could be again.

The past is gone, she knows, and she can’t help but wonder
if another dragon walked these very halls, their demeanor as awed as hers,
hoping that their beautiful home never falls to ruin.

pathfinder