The Tower

EPILOGUE

The sun shines and traffic flows freely down the great wide boulevards of Ruin, all signs of the quarantine that held the city in its grip for most of the previous year now gone. The people have returned, the dead are remembered and life goes on.

In the center of the city, looming above it all, the Citadel remains as dark and silent as always. It has cast its long shadow here before there was a city and will do so after the city has crumbled to dust. But those who have held sway for so long inside it and spread their influence way beyond the physical shadow of the mountain are now gone. After thousands of years withstanding everything kings and emperors could throw at it in their attempts to crack open the walls and learn its great secrets, it was a virus, one of the smallest life-forms on earth that brought the mountain down.

But life goes on for the Citadel too.

Today the embankment surrounding the mountain is filled with people and news cameras, there to witness its reopening. Cameras have already been inside, moving through the carved corridors to reveal to the outside world all that it wondered about for so long — the dormitories, the refectories, the great cathedral cave, all preserved exactly as they were when the monks lived there.

At the foot of the mountain, where the ascension platform used to rest, the mayor now gives a speech and the news cameras roam the crowd, capturing the excitement and anticipation of the first people to ride the newly installed elevators up the side of the mountain into what used to be the tribute cave. A man hangs back, hiding beneath a hat and dark glasses. He avoids the cameras, for he has nothing to share. He has been inside the mountain before.

A ribbon is cut and cameras flash, capturing the first elevator shooting up to the dark cave where more cameras are waiting to capture the looks on the faces of the first people to take this journey into a secret world few have ever known or seen before.

A tour guide leads them through the tunnels, explaining how the monks lived and recounting crowd-pleasing stories culled from the Citadel’s long and bloody history. The man in the hat listens from the back of the group, making mental notes when the guide deviates too far from the script he helped write so he can correct him in the debrief later.

He puts the dark glasses on again as the group steps out into the brightness of the garden and the guide tries his best to paint a picture of what the barren space might have looked like when everything flourished. He moves on quickly, sensing the crowd is not that interested, and heads back inside to the grand finale of the cathedral cave. But the man in the hat remains. He removes his sunglasses and stares at a spot by the firestone where the ground has been nourished by the ash of the fire. He walks over and squats down, removing his hat to fan the dust away from the thing he has seen. The dust blows away and Athanasius breaks into a broad smile at the miracle he has discovered. It is a green shoot rising up from the gray ground, straight and sharp, like a model of the Citadel in miniature.

A new life. A new hope. A new beginning.