Brightening 47, Vhalar, 718
There was something about graveyards that tugged at Eliza, and she couldn't quite explain what it was. Many people avoided the places at all costs, in her experience, and for any number of reasons. Maybe they found them to be morbid places. Maybe they worried that the spirits of the dead were wandering round the monuments and stones. Or maybe being there, forced them to confront their own mortality. Other people, the ones who'd loved, lost and couldn't bring themselves to let go, spent entirely more time than was healthy, haunting the graveyards themselves.
Eliza wasn't either one of those kinds of people. She wasn't put off by death. Having lost and buried dozens of friends and loved ones over the course of more than two centuries, the concept of death tended to become more a matter of curiosity than worry or fear. On the other hand, none of those loved ones she'd buried, were buried here in Scalvoris Towns graveyard. And if they had been, their souls probably weren't hanging around, waiting for her to come visit.
But she was still drawn to graveyards. The monuments were sometimes centuries old and it was the oldest ones and the history surrounding them that captured her interest the most. They were also private and quiet places. A peaceful setting where a person could sit, think, contemplate things and keep to themselves in private. And on the forty-seventh trial of Vhalar, a bench in Scalvoris Town's cemetary under a brilliantly colored canopy of fall foliage, was well out the way of the flying blue fish that were terrorizing anyone and everyone who strayed too close to the water's edge.
She had the place mostly to herself. Except for festival trials, the dead tended to have fewer visitors during the cold season than they did during the warmer ones. With the exception of course of the most dedicated of mourners. There was only one of those visiting the cemetary that trial, and Eliza had been watching him for the past quarter trial or so, and sketching his portrait in the notebook that she carried with her, almost everywhere that she went.
Eliza was good at drawing and painting portraits. She'd been told from a very young age that she could make a very good living as a portrait artist. But she'd never liked the stiff seeming, posed likenesses that presented the subject at their very best. Or in many cases, as a much improved, and dishonest, version of themselves. Instead, she liked to catch her subjects as being their authentic selves. Imperfect, or in her eyes, perfectly flawed creatures, sometimes caught at their most vulnerable. To Eliza, it was the brutal honesty that was the most beautiful, and the most able to capture the interest or heart of those who viewed a finished work.
The old man was crouching on the ground beneath a tree, and beside a small headstone that appeared to be several decades old. He'd already cleared away all of the twigs and fallen leaves that littered the grave, and had placed a small, smooth stone atop the marker itself. But afterwards, he pulled a small gardening box closer that he'd brought with him, and began the work of planting bulbs on and around the grave. The first freeze of the arc had yet to arrive and so the time was just right. Whatever he was planting would come up in the spring.
The man hadn't noticed Eliza, or if he had he didn't seem to care. His clothing was that of a farmer's or hard laborer's, his hair had thinned and turned white, and his face and hands were leathery and deely wrinkled. What Eliza noticed most of all however as she sketched him, was how his shoulders slumped...as if they were being pushed down by the heavy weight of a decades old loss. Every once in a while she'd catch a glimpse of his eyes, and the grief there was inconsolable. He spoke quietly while he worked. So quietly that whatever he said was lost to Eliza, carried away on the breeze. And it touched her, how tenderly he worked the soil, as if it was the most important work he'd do, all the arc long.
She could feel his pain and loneliness across the distance between them, she could see it in the portrait emerging on the sheet in her notebook. It was enough to bring tears to her own eyes, and the loneliness was contagious. Moreover, the intimacy and raw emotion of it caused her to rethink having watched and drawn him without his permission.
