Wex casts the ritual. After a long silence, a voice. A man, mid-thought, like how people sometimes talk in sleep.
"Like everyone who lived near the hill, Mother said it would be warm. But the stone they laid me on chilled the depths of my soul, and by then it was too late to have learned that everything about this was wrong.
No one ever told me if Ela made it to our uncle's, although I begged Mother to send her right before they took me. The priests.
My people were not the old people. The old people were there first, and we lived among their stones and learned their songs as children without knowing what the songs were for. The old people had understood the hill. Whoever among them could reach the sleeper's mind had been told what it needed to stay asleep, and they had given it, freely, for as many generations as anyone could count. When the empire came, the old people made a bargain: the songs for their lives. The empire took the songs and killed them anyway. My grandfather's grandfather helped bury them,