Fate of the Legacies

Chapter Six

Looking for Ella, Marina found herself once again at the Loric and Invasion Memorial Cemetery.

After John had fixed up the cave where Eight had found the prophecies years ago, he did help with building the village within the forcefield, but he first focused mostly on this cemetery: a monument to those that had been lost during the war against the Mogadorians—and to the Loric and other heroes of the war that would be lost in the future. It was one of two graveyards in New Lorien: the other was in the village and was for human Garde and New Lorien residents who died after the war, in the new world. So far, that one was much smaller than this one.

The Loric and Invasion Memorial Cemetery was higher on the mountain than anything else within New Lorien, constructed on a shelf overlooking miles of the vibrant mountainside and the distant level ground. Marina liked the view from so far up. From there, she could nearly see the pool where her, Six, Ella, and Crayton found Eight—it was obscured by a veil of foliage, but she had learned where it was. She had wanted that to be part of New Lorien, but the forcefield generators couldn't reach that far.

When it was first being put together, this cemetery constantly had people coming up to honor the fallen and add new graves, but, by now, it was usually empty. After the pride and elation of defeating the Mogadorians began to wear down, it seemed that the sight of so many graves for everyone who was murdered by the Mogs began to engender feelings of loss much more than pride, and most didn't want to hike up all that way just to feel more depressed.

Marina had that issue, too, but the graveyard was the quietest place in all of New Lorien, making it the best place for her to try to clear her head, and the graves of those they had lost connected her to the past so easily, making it the most effective place to try to wrestle with the trauma and regrets that still gnawed away at her even after all this time.

The graveyard was divided into three sections—Loric, humans, and Mogadorians, each section separated by a low stone wall. The section for Mogs was tiny, little more than a small patch of grass with one bench off to the side. It contained three graves. Two were honorary future graves for Adamus Sutekh and Rexicus Saturnus, both of whom were still in Alaska, hopefully successful in their attempts to rehabilitate the remnant of their race.

Most of the graves for Chimærae were in the Loric section, but the one for Dust was beside Adam's. That grave was filled: John had made sure that the people excavating the mountain that they had defeated Setrákus Ra in surrendered Dust's body.

The human section was the biggest part of the cemetery. A winding dirt path led around rows of graves that had been erected for humans lost in the invasion. In the center of this section was a monument that several of the human Garde designed of a group of people standing tall and proud in the ruins of a fallen building to collectively honor all the humans who had been killed during the war.

All around the monument were individual graves made by or commissioned of people who could make them by New Lorien residents who lost people in the conflict. Though they had dug graves and filled them in for all these people, they were all empty; all the bodies of those lost in the war had been either buried elsewhere or completely obliterated. Most of the graves were for friends and family of the human Garde or the native Indians who lived in the village, and Marina didn't even recognize their names. But there were several names she was connected to plastered onto graves she was drawn to visit whenever she made her way up there.

Many of the graves were decorated in some way to honor the people they stood for, and the grave of Mark James was no exception. He didn't have any close friends left among the Loric and their allies who had survived the war, but, on a trip back to Ohio, Sam managed to track down one of Mark's old football jerseys, which they placed over his tombstone, turning the hem at the bottom to stone to keep it heavy enough that it wouldn't be blown away in the wind. And there it remained—fluttering like a flag in the breeze to honor a guy who threw everything away to help stop Setrákus Ra.