[quote]Spoilers for the S3 finale[/quote]

At the heart of Brightmoon, trapped on all sides by gleaming ivory towers, there is the Sanctum. Here pristine whites and shining golds give way to earthy greens and muddy browns. Instead of the endless roar of cascades, the water here is still; instead of the blare of royal trumpets, the music here is birdsong. And though it is but a small clearing in the forest of towers, it is the only place in Brightmoon where one can easily forget that one is in a city.

Only three people ever knew that the Sanctum existed. Now there is only one.

Queen Glimmer tends to the shrubs and the trees that her father planted for her mother’s pleasure. She kneels in the dirt to prune dying branches; she pulls up weeds and waters the bushes in the dry summer months. She brings food for the birds and the squirrels, and she sits and watches for a while as they chirp and chitter and eat, until the empty space at her side becomes too much to bear.

“Sometimes,” her mother once said, as she patted down the cool dirt around a newly-planted sapling, “when I miss your father so much that I can hardly focus, I come here. To focus my mind on loving as he loved. That, I think is the best way to remember those we’ve lost.”

Glimmer always had wondered how her mother would remember her.

She makes her own new traditions, as time passes. At the height of summer, she takes a basket into the Sanctum, and she picks the ripe blackberries from the brambles. Her hands come away stained with juices, and covered in tiny scrapes and cuts from the thorns, but her basket is full, and the cooks never question when she asks them to make jelly. She gifts the jars to her friends and allies; the Sanctum’s gifts are to be shared, not hoarded, even as their source stays secret.

(If Adora and Bow ever wonder where she goes twice a week, when she vanishes from the palace proper and returns covered in dirt and sweat, they don’t ask. Some days she resents them for it as though they are ignoring her pain, and on others she is grateful for the chance to mourn alone.)

It is a place that is heavy with the damp earth, with memories and with shame.

There is a single stone laid flat, barely rising above the earth, right in the heart of the Sanctum. Polished and smooth, its grey face is obscured by low-lying branches and overgrown roots left unpruned as if to clothe its naked surface; it doesn’t belong here, in this monument to nature, where all things are grown, not built. It is here only because it is wrong that it should even exist.

She promised herself long ago that she would inscribe upon it the perfect words to immortalise her mother again, and they would be left here in the Sanctuary, a place that exists for remembrance. She still doesn’t know what words to choose. In hindsight, it seems an impossible problem.

What do you write as an epitaph for someone who could not die?