The Place I Come To

The morning air was calm and soothing. The sun had only just risen over the horizon a few minutes ago. The space within visible reach was coated with a thin level of fog that gave everything a misty atmosphere. Everywhere were various tall, rounded stones sticking up out of the ground. The hill was covered with them from the bottom, all the way to the top where a great fence marked the outer edge of the settlement. Being as early as it was, very few people were up in the settlement, and as a result the hill was deserted. Deserted that is, except for a single person.
That person was a teenager, and everyone in town knew who he was. He was about fifteen years old, had different colored eyes, was the student of Aymer Eilgeiros, and worked out odd jobs all over town. His name was Darovit Jone.
No one ever knew that Dorovit would come to this place when he did, but they knew that he might have a good reason to do so. This place was the town cemetery, where everyone who had passed since the town’s founding laid to rest beneath three feet of solid dirt and the rocks that weighed it down. It wasn’t as if Darovit was all alone in the world, he had his father and his good friend Forest, but he did have those that he had lost during his journey to get here. Darovit had climbed up to the top of the hill, in full view of the fence, and reached the grave he was looking for. It seemed to cast an ever larger shadow than the rest of the graves there, but the writing was still as visible as ever. It read “Here lies Mira Jone, Beloved Wife and Mother”. Darovit took out a golden locket from around his neck and opened it up to reveal a picture of her. The woman buried here was his mother.
And then the strangest thing started happening; Darovit started crying. Now this was unusual because he rarely showed his emotions around other people. But it seemed to go on and on as he looked at her picture and the grave. “Why?” he thought, “Why did you have to die?”. Losing your mother is usually a very hard thing to swallow, but for Darovit it had a lot more symbolic weight to it.
He had always known his mother was going to die eventually. Growing up she was always bedridden with a strange recurring illness and had trouble standing up for herself. Despite that, she was a loving and caring person, and the one person that Darovit loved more than anything in the world. He would comfort her, and cheer her up when she started feeling down. He was willing to do anything for her, and had done some pretty nasty things to get her the help she needed. Then out of the blue, his father suddenly announced that he had accepted an offer in the new settlement of Mythrite that could help him pay off all his debts. His friend Suud would pay off all his local debts with him working in the mines here for a few years until that new debt was paid off in full. His father was always so selfish, only ever caring about himself without so much a glance at what others around him wanted or needed. Darovit knew his mother was too sick to travel, but his father forced them both to make the long journey there.
For a long time, it seemed like they would make it without an incident, but just as they crossed the mountain and could see the town in full, Darovit’s mother took a turn for the worse. She lay there dying in their transportation as Darovit’s father raced toward the town for help as Darovit sat by her side comforting her. As Darovit held her and begged her not to die, she took out a locket with her picture in it and placed it in his palm while holding it with both hands as she smiled at him for the last time. The first thing they did after they reached the town was give her a proper burial. Since the loss was so tragic, the townspeople allowed her to be buried at the top of the hill as a reminder of the tragedies associated with this place. It wasn’t just heartbreaking to lose his mother, but from that point on Darovit hated his father for bringing them there and causing her to die over their objections.
He had tried to move on from the incident, but then his father’s accident occurred shortly afterwards. His father’s legs were crushed by a rock and his spine was injured leaving him in constant pain. Because he had not paid off his debts at that point, Darovit was left to pay them off instead. He was only fifteen years old and now he was straddled with a mountain of debt that wasn’t even his. It would take him years to pay it off if ever, and as a result he was now stuck in this forsaken town with the memory of his mother’s death and a father that he absolutely resented.
Looking at his mother’s grave, Darovit knew to himself that there was no one to blame but his father, and he vowed to his mother that one day he would make it out of the town for the both of them, and he would find a way to do so by any means necessary. He came here once a week to repeat this vow, as if it were a religious way of reaffirming it in his mind. The debt would one day be paid off, and he would finally be free of his father and this town forever.
After a few minutes, the crying stopped and Darovit looked at the rising sun over the horizon. Putting the locket back around his neck, he began the climb back down the hill.