At the eastern boundary of the North Memorial Ward. There, the dry gravel rise sloped gently down toward the stilt carp ponds of Fen Hollow, stood the grave of Oren Voss.
Six seasons ago, when Tomas Reed had first carried the broken cedar delivery box to this ground, there had been only an unmarked mound of dark peat earth and a slender ash sapling no thicker than a carrier’s thumb, planted by Mirelle Voss’s own hands in the frozen soil of winter.
Now, that sapling was an amazing, spreading ash tree twenty-five feet high. Its trunk was thick as a man’s thigh, bark smooth and gray as river slate. Its branches forming a was wide, even dome of golden leaves that caught the morning light like a suspended canopy of amber. The roots had spread deep and wide, knotting into the living silt, anchoring the turf so firmly that not even the highest autumn tides could wash a single grain of earth from the grave.
Beneath the tree lay a simple, box-shaped slab of dark river slate, plain by gold leaf or heraldic crests. It bore only six words, chiseled in the clear, unrushed script of the old Lantern Company:
