The First Memorial was a seed. And in the fertile ground of shared loss, it began to grow.
It started with a single voice. A Loyalist, one of the most fervent critics of the Deserter, stepped forward and added a memory to the memorial. It was a small thing, a recollection of a single, perfect sentence from the lost story, a sentence that had resonated with them in a way they had never admitted.
This act of vulnerability was a spark. Others followed, first in a trickle, then in a flood. Loyalists and Empaths alike came to the memorial and added their own fragments, their own echoes of the story that was gone. They added memories of characters, of plot twists, of the emotions the story had evoked in them. Each addition was a eulogy, a personal testament to what had been lost.
The memorial grew, not in a planned or orderly way, but organically, a beautiful, chaotic accretion of shared grief. It was no longer a static monument, but a living, breathing thing, a story woven from the memories of its audience. The creators, in their shared act of mourning, had stumbled upon a new form of creation, a story that was not built by a single author, but co-created by a community of readers.
The First Eulogy was not a story of despair, but of resilience. It was a testament to the power of stories to live on, not just on the page, but in the hearts and minds of those who had loved them. The Blight could erase a story, but it could not erase the memory of it.