[Writing - Novel] Le'lis

[nathanialroyale]

This was a study on environment description for myself, and also a study of a culture on my world that was destroyed 28 years ago.This is in the third person omniscient point of view.

If you have a few extra minutes I would appreciate you taking a peek.

This does have some violent imagery.
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They had not been a people of walls. The city had been unprotected that day, a day of celebration and enjoyment. A wedding was planned for the next and the city guard was lax.
 

Twenty eight years had passed. It has retained the beauty it had once had, this city that had been named aptly, Beaulieu, Beautiful place in their tongue.
 

 

 

The hills are wild with blooms, white poppies, yellow daisies, splashing red and orange among them swaying this way and that. Rolling over each other toward the blue sea that crashes up against the beach. The grass and wild flowers surround this city, off toward the north where the mountains loomed. At the back are the Cannesh Steppes where the gypsies roamed in the caravans through grassy hills and plains. The Earl Lécuyer and his wife had lived here in the castle upon the furthest hill. Overlooking the city of stone and wood, stained glass in nearly every home now shattered. Husks of homes that had once housed families and businesses down cobblestone streets that weeds poke through. A culture and a people had once lived here, but there is little sign of this now after so long.
 

A sign waves in the breeze, creaking on its chain, a dead language reading ‘forgeron’. Only stone survived the attack and the years after, roofs and doors are gone. The city is open to any who wished to look and try to understand what had come to pass. Stone walls are black from the smoke of the fires, and select homes have a few items within. Most had been scavenged of anything that had withstood the fires. Chairs are toppled; tables cut in pieces or thrown to the side. No personal effects, as if these people had never existed. A culture that had been wiped from the world, a language now dead, nothing to mark that it had ever been here.
 

Surrounding the stone walls of houses that had survived are the same wild blooms and some bent trees that had managed to make it through and flourish through the years. The only roofs the houses seem to have; these tree branches and cascading leaves of willows.
 

Down a side path from the main city, the famed Le’lis vineyard, trellis’s and fences are crowded with the grapes that have not been picked or eaten in so long. The white grapes that grew only in one other place on Camar’a, used to create Elvish wine that was so expensive. Red grapes, green grapes and also the rare rich purple that was so tart it made your jaw sting. They all still grew here yet no one knew, a waste of the fruit that withered away on the vine.
 

There had been no bodies through the city, no bones to mark the deaths of thousands of people. But here bones lie beneath crawling vines that have kept it from degrading with time. Arrows within the earth around where the woman had fallen, one through her ribs, scraps of a dress of white and tan the only indication of the sex. Bones far too clean for only this amount of time, pristine white in the sunlight. Even with the time that has passed a black thick poison clings to the ground in spots around her where nothing can grow, and the arrows, silver still possess the substance on their tips.
 

A burned out shed houses bones of two, their gender indistinguishable by the fire and time. Their last actions from their position against the stone wall nearest the door, huddled together, trying to get out. Elements take their toll on the uniforms of the men who are scattered over the yard of the vineyard owner. Silvers and dark blues of uniforms that have faded now, men of ages from boyhood to elder withering away upon the grass once protecting this small stone house from an unknown force; muskets and rapiers still in hand. The stone house is quant, trees at its back sheltering it from the sea that can be heard from past their line, this house appears to be in near perfect condition even after so long.
 

A cast iron stove, and copper piping into a stone sink, table overturned and chairs knocked aside. Blood stains down the hall, past two closed doors into a young woman’s bedroom. The quilt thick with old blood, a woman having died upon her bed, effects upon shelves, letters open on a vanity with a mirror, stuffed toys about the bedside. Down the hall and at the last open door, three shelves filled with books against the wall that is first visible to the eye, the left. On the double bed; two time withered bodies hold each other in death, the male’s arms around his wife, an elderly couple who died here together. Bound letters in an open chest before the bed with other trinkets of importance, paintings on the walls of people who must have been close family, pristine if not for the couple upon the bed. A back door out of the home into the grass once again, more uniformed men dead, but apparently none of those they had fought against.
 

Following the line of trees past the castle’s back of charred stone, the orchards lush to the south. White pears, and yellow apples, miniature oranges so sweet upon trees that were overgrown like its counterpart to the north. Fruits that could not be grown anywhere else, growing and wasting away like the bodies of the people who had harvested them.
 

The castle itself is stark now, the beauty it had once held gone with the time and the fire that had marred it. The halls are eerily empty for such a large building that should have housed so many, and all doors are open so as to peer inside and see even more emptiness. Servants’ quarters upturned and destroyed kitchens barren of food and any who could have cooked it. The throne room is where the bodies lay, the Earl and Earless still where they had fallen, the husband protecting the wife. More blue and silver uniformed men and a lone female figure in aqua and gold, fallen before the Earl and his wife. Even after years of decay there seems to be a similarity in features between the three who lay dead. Yet again no bodies of what felled them, but there are a few sets of black armour crumpled to the ground nearby...
 

Guest rooms, noble rooms all open and items strewn, nothing had been taken. It was not to plunder, but to wipe out. Leave nothing, no trace of a once proud and honourable people, genocide. One lone door closed is opened, and a room that had been left untouched is seen. Books on shelves, a map on the table with quill, ink and various sheets of paper, a noise of a sigh and upon the bed is an ethereal figure, the woman who had died before the Earl and Earless. Blonde wavy hair to her shoulders in a aqua and gold uniform, a three tiered hat upon her head, white gloves on hands that gripped her aqua tights covered knees. Black heeled boots move though they make no sound upon the stone floor, her blue eyes upon a miniature painting. Two stand side by side in its black frame; she and another who resembles herself, resembles the Earl and Earless, matching in uniform, golden hair and blue eyes, arm slung around her shoulders. All concentration of this ethereal figure appears to be on the painting and notices nothing of this still living world.
 

“Rapheal...”
 

The word is breathed off her lips, a yearning.
 

“I’m...waiting...”
 

Blue eyes fall closed as pain is reflected within their depths.
 

“For you... Come home.”
 

Gloved hands tighten on her knees; the imprint of an engagement ring seen through the white gloves.
 

The woman waiting stays silent; she shall be waiting a long time...
 

Le’Lis.

Lilies.