They walked through an avenue of four thousand children who had never grown old.
The avenue stretched three leagues straight into the north. It was bordered on either side by quadruple ranks of life-sized figures carved from pale, semi-clear ice-slow jade. They weren’t sovereigns or generals. They bore no armor, no royal tablets, no heavy ritual sleeves. They were the common folk of the Third Epoch. Farmers holding horn sickles, water-bearers with wooden yokes resting across slender collarbones, stone-masons with adzes tucked into hemp sashes, weavers with shuttle-boxes slung across their hips, and children holding the hands of their mothers.
Every figure stood with its feet planted squarely upon the frosted flat stone slabs of Entry hall 772. Their eyes were open, gazing with calm, untroubled clarity toward the distant northern horizon where the Glacial Nave lay veiled in blue shadow.
Within the ribs of each statue, hovering exactly three inches behind the chest bone, rested a small, ball-shaped bead of azure starlight. Some glowed with the soft brightness of a glowworm in wet grass. Others pulsed with the steady, deep indigo of an evening sky after rain. But all shook at the exact same micro-sound pitch—twenty-four cycles every minute, like the collective breathing of a sleeping town.
