Editing Asphodel (section)

== Backstory ==

Raised to tend to the Dead in the city of Sijan, she had learned all the rites, in multiple languages. Had stood the long watch of sunset-to-sunset, in honor and guarding. Tended the ivory spires and the ebony caskets, the intricately carved memory-scrolls of white and black jade, and velum accounts of payment. She had even bled herself ritually, to give the newly dead the most ephemeral grave good, maiden's blood. More than once she had been attacked by the crazed and confused newly dead, saved only by the morticians' guards.

And when the Lover's armies marched on Sijan's walls, she stood with the living and the dead of the city. When the sculpted ghosts of the Lover would woo away the defenders, she led the litanies of duty. When the dead stood against the horrors that the living could not, she led the prayers to strengthen their dead. And when the walls were breached, she volunteered to carry one of the soul-breaker orbs into the breech. The Lover's necromancies undid the old sorceries in the orb, rotted the metaphysical connections necessary to its fission, and she was left with an inert sphere of blue jade in the midst of the leering enemy. She threw it and screamed the cries of Sijan, and as the orb fell lifeless in the gore, the Sun blazed through her, destroying those who stood against her.

But though the enemy was thrown into confusion and routed this time, all of Sijan knew the Lover would be back. And all knew that she must go, although she broke down and wept inconsolably when they shut the gates behind her.

She has wandered far, looking for how she may help her people and realms of the Dead; the Unconquered Sun has shown her what used to be, and that all Sijan stands for is wrong - and yet what else is there for them? What promise is Lethe, when the rest of Creation is wretched and full of despair?