How little is left: ashes, blown away in the wind without even a grave, no earth where they might rain down, no land to fertilize in their death. Our stories, our language, our heroisms—yes, and our sins, our struggles, our great fall—nothing will be passed on or remembered. Our destruction is complete.
Yet in this, a word, a name, woven into so many tongues—I think even Time cannot fully erase, not until the end of all things. Though we may be forgotten, the name, meaningless and disconnected with these salted ruins, might still be whispered in the night, and there remembered.
And as that name goes on beyond ourselves and changes and morphs and means so many things, there will perhaps be an echo of us on their lips, a curse, a blessing, a measurement, verb or noun, there we may go on.
The wraiths of the empire will be carried forth by winter’s storm or summer’s breeze, and mayhap, if somewhere a mind connects the scattered dots and reweaves a weblike outline of what we were, we might in such a day finally find rest.
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