My Dear Fiona

Chapter 2.2 - Lore

I stopped by the church yesterday and the mystery of the black tombstones was explained: the graveyard experienced a massive fire, yet the church was unharmed, not even a speck of smoke or soot.

I bet you'd be asking yourself right now, Fiona, how does one set stone on fire, and you'd be right. The priest couldn't explain it either, hence the miracle designation of the phenomenon. It happened so long ago no written records of it remained, and oral history can be very imaginative in these parts. It's hard to separate truth from fantasy after all these centuries.

I'll make a record of my notes and organize them later, I don't want to forget the stories I heard, which, although they may be unbelievable to most, are still too fascinating to ignore.

Legend has it a beautiful young maiden, which strangely matches your description, used to sneak out at night and come to the cemetery to meet her beloved. The affair went on for years, and the maiden's parents started to worry when she turned away every suitor that knocked on their door. Why, she was turning twenty and she was already an old maid, right, Fiona? Anyway. Her parents thought, maybe she pledged herself to faith and they would have been thrilled for her to join the convent in the next town, but the mere thought of leaving the village of her birth was enough to set their daughter into a wretched panic.

Suspecting foul play, her father followed her to the cemetery one night and saw her wait there by a tombstone, and a beautiful young man appeared, but not of flesh, an eerie creature glowing faintly in the darkness.

He was too terrified to intervene, of course, one takes the Otherworld seriously around here, but he understood his daughter had fallen for a spell, so the next night he gathered the elders in secret and tried to set the fateful tomb on fire.

Of course, stone doesn't burn, so the pointless pursuit did nothing but start a commotion in the village, drawing everyone's attention, including the maiden's.

In anguish, she ran to the graveyard, dashing to the desecrated stone, and the tales say that her light increased in intensity the faster she went, until her form was too bright to look at, like looking at the sun.

Her brightness turned night into day and consumed her in an extraordinary flash of light, and after people's eyes readjusted to the darkness, they noticed she had disappeared.

She'd never been seen or heard from since.

It is said that she went to be with her beloved and was never spoken of again. If a person has gone with the fairies, the humans are not allowed to interfere, because the fairies will be wrathful when one of theirs is taken.

It seems God miraculously spared the church from the blue-white fire that burned the stones and turned the dirt around them barren. When the vegetation started growing again, it always came in pairs - two trees, two rose bushes, two blades of grass. Some even swear that's how the four-leaf clover came to be. It couldn't bear a leaf without a pair.

Sometimes I think that the only reason I joined the field of anthropology was to uncover these wild stories, which tend to be more fascinating than the actual history. The latter is usually dull, random, and motivated by human pettiness and greed. What really happened? I'm probably going to find out, because I have to, a research grant is a research grant, but I really don't want to, Fiona. If I were to venture a guess, the place was probably struck by lightning.