It is a desert place. Nothing could grow here. They planted corn. Not a sprout. Wheat. Not a leaf came up. Legends say they even transplanted a tree. It withered away in a year. That’s why, I think, they began to plant another crop here, a crop they certainly didn’t want to harvest.
Well, those are stories, ancient stories, scattered among the remaining tribes inhabiting the nearby steppe and those mountains ahead. They, the people, are like their stories, a scattered remnant of a lost civilization. A guessed at history only hinted at in disparate fables and testified to in a few ruined relics.
Then, of course, this one unifying center, this mass grave. Here is a peace which no war is allowed to touch. Though the people of the mountains and the people of the plains hate each other, they will be buried side by side.
One ritual is left that ties all these people together, one aspect survives, generation upon generation. Here, then, is where I hope to find the answers; I go to question the dead. Though they lay silent in the earth, I shall hear the whispers of a long forgotten age.
Tale Told 