The lake’s gentle ripple splashed the cold pebbles and cobbles. No two stones were alike; each was stout and, moreover, unique in both form and colour. According to Bluewood’s original inhabitants, the rocks were timeless bulwarks for lives that had been lived and lost.

As the librarian—a studious woman from a romantic land—looked over the inhospitable beach, and she shivered for its wintry sorrow. The hopes and dreams of the dead crept into her heart like the chill crept into her toes. Surely, she thought, this place was as somber a repository for human sentiment as any of her people’s cemeteries.

She looked up from the misty water. Something was creeping in the blackness between the conifer trunks on the far side of the lake. “It’s them,” she mouthed to herself, clutching her bundle of books like an anchor on the ocean.

As she wandered and wobbled across the stony shore, she wondered, would her excitement be sealed in stone one day. If so, she hoped her soul would become an agate. Maybe a little girl or boy would find her lingering foothold in the material world, and carry it home, cherished, in a jacket pocket.

She imagined, as she continued to navigate the edge of the lake towards her friends on the far side, that maybe her eternal agate would be sat… in a little box of memories. What an honour, she thought, to be held precious alongside hopeless love letters and postcards from Italy or Spain.

“Gosh!” she exclaimed, as she twisted her ankle on an irregular cobble. “Am I really in such a rush to die?”