Irella threw her whole being into building Eramepi's tomb. For three days and nights she drew sketches, made calculations, and pulled raw aether into the mortal world. _Biladiyn_ stood guard, first Alem and later others. She ate mechanically whenever food was offered, slept only when her eyes blurred and hands shook, and if any of her superiors from the Temple of the Architect came to demand an accounting of her work, she ignored them so thoroughly that she couldn’t recall their faces. Finally, as the setting sun turned the Lysar River red, the tomb stood complete. The isosceles trapezoid, translucent enough to see the crystalline channels shot through the divine stone, towered over the central palace courtyard. Water from the terrace aqueducts flowed through the channels, and when his bones were interred, they would be protected by the Lysar itself. Irella's first impulse had been to place the tomb in the center of the Lysar, for all to see, and remember — but, in the end, had been unwilling to disrupt the fishermen and traders who depended on the river for their livelihoods. Instead, she'd focused her efforts on the design. Nine stelae towered over the tomb, one for each of the Lysarian cities Eramepi had come to rule. Aetherock was a poor substance for intricate relief work, but she’d willed it into line, and each stela detailed the story of how each had come under his aegis, some by siege and others through bribery and once, through single combat with the champion of a noble house. “Were you there for all of that?” Alem asked quietly as she sipped water from a ceramic cup someone had set beside her. She could taste the dust on its surface. "Most of it," Irella said. "Thaumaturges have pretty wide latitude, it's not as though Eramepi was trying to destroy any cities. We didn't so much as scratch the city walls.  Eramepi was pretty clearly on the side of spreading civilization." "I'm not sure the Temples in Keldehss would agree," Alem said. Irella's lips tightened. "I could make the argument that the gods were clearly on our side, but in the end? Sargov put Marna under siege for _seasons_ because Eramepi found another source of bronze and refused to split the trade — which is the only reason he wanted to marry amir-Valentia in the first place. My parents _died_ because of all the stupid Nahrian raids Eramepi put a stop to.  I don't really care what they think." Her parents, like most of the Voldshee, rarely ventured down from the mountains. But they’d had timber to trade, and the hunting that year had been bad enough to warrant the risk of raiders; they'd gambled and lost their lives. Too young to fight back, she'd been chained to a cart bound for the slave-ships that ported in Arais before Eramepi rescued her. “I’m sorry,” Alem said. "The two of you seemed close." "We believed in each other," Irella said, staring at the memorial because bring herself to consider the future. Her sovereign considered her a liability. Her High Priest hated her. Most people in Oruku thought she was a barbarian witch, and half of her own guards thought she was a heretic. Irella sat and, as the sky turned black, mourned. > 📗 The [next section](https://eleanorkonik.com/civil-mage-memorial/) %% ( [[2022-09-21 Civil Mage Memorial (13)]] ) %% is available. --- ## Afterword I did a ton of research into tombs and mausoleums for this section, and referenced yet more, some of which made it into past editions of the newsletter: - [Tombs](https://eleanorkonik.com/tombs/) %% ( [[2020-09-07 Tombs]] ) %%: Burials with dyed bones & deadfall stones - [Funerals](https://eleanorkonik.com/funerals/): Methods for corpse respect & preservation, burial practices & grave goods. As far as Irella's impulse to put the tomb in the middle of the river, many cultures have a belief that the dead must voyage across a body of water to get to their final resting place. Recently, a [pre-Hispanic canoe burial in Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272833) was discovered. The metaphor for the voyage to the final abode of the dead is still important to modern Mapuche society. For societies that used particularly large ships — like ancient scandinavians — [ships were sometimes burned](https://scandinaviafacts.com/myth-or-fact-did-the-vikings-really-burn-their-ships/), although this tended to be reserved for particularly important people. As Irella points out, though, this works less well in a river valley civilization like Mesopotamia or Egypt, which Lysaria is. Another thing I wanted to fit in but didn't have a good opportunity to was how towards the end of the Bronze Age, [iron tools were broken during funerary rites](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ktqfar/it_is_1000_bce_and_im_a_farmer_in_the_eastern/) as a status symbol, and iron tools and weapons would have been limited mostly to the elite. It really sucks how so much of what we know about the past (and the present!) is so focused on elites. Even _Civil Mage_ is guilty of it, although, the Siege of Marna was featured in [Beetle Siege](https://eleanorkonik.com/beetle-siege/) %% ( [[2021-06-02 Beetle Siege]] ) %% if you're interested in reading more about what life in Lysaria was like for more "normal" people.