Memory

Memory.

That is what passes on into both history and legend.

Recounts of traditions long gone and best left forgotten. One young girl recalled slightly cool air with the sun glaring down when she rose well past noon. Her mother had already left, but her aunts were there to see her off to her class that day, armed with her lunch, usually a concoction of leftovers from the night before or breakfast. It would either be history or art on the third day. The fourth would be sums or physical training. Her walk to and from was swift, but her mind captured the bazaar bustling, the orange pickers returning with full baskets, the salty seamen returning for their midday meal before making their way out onto the boats again, children and tutors here and there making their way towards their various classes. Sheltering in a small hut set apart for such purposes.

She prefers not to conjure the fire in the background, the red hot rock visible from her walk, a volcano in the distance, far from her and far from harm.

One old man who served as a gardener for the Sovereign upon his retirement from a life of nomadship recalls older, more glorious days. Men and women within their prime riding horseflesh through the brackets and the coastlines, trekking through steeper rock and lighting fires outside the villages that bid them welcome. Breaking bread with the protectors and guardsmen and sharing what news they had discovered in the more isolated areas, ready to serve the Senate, the Queen and the Sovereign. Everyone always had a room to offer or a seat at the fire or a morsel to eat. It was the way.

He wonders how many hands offered help and how many of those friendly faces fled in fear, hopelessly, when the earth shook, the fires fell, and the water rose above them.

A former ambassador who had visited recalls the culture quite well. The towering fortresses housed the needy or the lone wanderer, while the chiefs, the lawmakers and the guardians preferred the comfortable villas. The round senate chamber could fill a thousand, but a penny could drop when one voice alone spoke; people were everywhere. The teeming docks with their fish and their fashions, the long roads with striking animals walking alongside those making their way, the settlements with shouts through the day and silence at night. One hard of hearing would marvel at the beauty instead, the white palms against the black volcano surrounded by ripe fruit trees and rainforests, trickling water all the way to the shore.

There had been peace, she recollected. Even the loudest brawler could not shatter that feeling of long-held calm. An empire with nothing to fear. A sanctuary that welcomed all.

Now there are fewer and fewer who recall. Time is cruel to lost treasures. Those who survived may prefer to forget. Others know the stories but never the truth.

How the walls started to crumble, and rocks tumbled down hills, cracks in the clay that held structures together, the air grew thick with perspiration, before they saw the stream hurtling towards them. The water did little to cool them, slamming into many like cement as the waters they sought relief from thirst and cleansing turned on them. Those who scrambled onto high surfaces would prove far less lucky when the volcano emptied.

The few who made it onto the boats barely fleeing the shore face forward but their ears are filled with the dying gasps of the nation that will forever haunt their dreams and the walls of the bare rooms they huddle in, the rooms in a square gray block in a country they only heard of when they had nowhere else to go.

Many try to recall their loved ones they never saw again but can only remember the blistering air and their island vanishing beneath the waves. The girl recalls the neighbours, the orange pickers, the seamen, her mother and her aunts and how normal everything had seemed that day when she went on her morning route, not knowing she would be evacuated to a boat that afternoon and never see any of them again.

The old man had long been widowed and thankfully his only child had been abroad at the time but his home of half his life, with his garden and his canine companion Bandit were forever lost and he did not have so much as ashes to sift through. His sovereign dying in disgrace alongside his queen, the traditional mourning wreaths never set upon the pyres of the dead and the last coherent thought he has before he passes out, whisky glass in hand every night is that In the past, nostalgia was easy to filter when your past still existed.

The former ambassador returned to her native lands, surrounding herself with whitewashed walls and the music of the harp that trilled through her girlhood so she does not picture the melting stone walls and hear the faint screams of men she had served alongside for years, embracing their spouses in their last moments and crying for their children to run. That small selection of rooms she had spent years residing, now no one will ever lay their heads on the pillows again. The senate chamber she had served in, the palm trees, the docks, it was her home for over a decade and now she keeps her eyes to the ground as she walks through the streets, trying not to think of the neighbours who will never wave welcome to anyone anymore. Now they are just a page for the history books. And that is the most terrifying thought of all.

Within the next millennium, it will be as nothing ever happened. All with memory of the lost empire will be dead. These records will be gathering dust along with the bones of the survivors of this doom. A footnote. Nothing more.

One day there will be no memory.