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--- new_horizon_s_rest_cemetery [2025/08/29 07:05] – [Related Pages and Further Information] admin
+++ new_horizon_s_rest_cemetery [2025/12/06 14:14] (current) – [Beta Age (2625 – 2631)] admin
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 ====== NEW HORIZON’S REST CEMETERY ======
+{{:new_horizon_rest_cemetery_beginning_scenic_2d.png?direct&400|}}
   * **Type:** Site (cemetery)
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 ===== Overview =====
-On 9 May 2625 the [[settler_s_council|Settler’s Council]] voted to create a traditional, soil-based burial ground so that [[the_humans|ExoHumans]] — after generations in space — could finally “return their dead to the earth of their new home.” Clearing began within days, and New Horizon’s Rest Cemetery opened on 18 July 2625. Until its closure in 2631 the 1 500 m² plot served as the only sanctioned burial site for the settlement of New Kourou, ultimately receiving 147 graves. Dense [[tropical_forest|Tropical Forest]] has since reclaimed the grounds; by the [[the_gamma_age|Gamma Age]] overgrown tombstones protrude like quiet relics among vines and broad-leaf trees.
+On 9 May 2625 the [[settler_s_council|Settler’s Council]] voted to create a traditional, soil-based burial ground so that [[the_humans|ExoHumans]] — after generations in space — could finally “return their dead to the earth of their new home.” Clearing began within days, and New Horizon’s Rest Cemetery opened on 18 July 2625.
-A compact, wagon-wide trail linked the grounds to New Kourou’s eastern gate — officially named New Horizon Way but known to locals simply as “the Last Mile.” The path was closed and overgrown after the gate’s decommissioning in the Gamma Age.
+In its early months the grounds were modest, but as the needs of the settlement grew, the cemetery was extended iteratively, adding new rows and small clearings whenever another cluster of burials became necessary. Each expansion reflected a community still learning how to anchor itself in the soil of [[the_planet_voi_700_d|VOI 700 D]].
+A unique cultural tradition emerged: descendants wrote the names of their deceased family members or friends using the writing systems of their Earth ancestors — Kanji for those with Japanese heritage, Cyrillic for those with Russian roots, and dozens more. Because so many settlers carried mixed or uncertain cultural backgrounds, these choices were not always rational or genealogically strict; sometimes they simply followed emotion, memory, or the wish to belong to a lineage imagined rather than proven. As a result, the cemetery’s markers became a mosaic of scripts and identities, standing together in quiet testament to humanity’s fragmented past.
+Until its closure in 2631 the 1 500 m² plot served as the only sanctioned burial site for the settlement of New Kourou, ultimately receiving 147 graves. Dense [[tropical_forest|Tropical Forest]] has since reclaimed the grounds; by the [[the_gamma_age|Gamma Age]] overgrown tombstones protrude like quiet relics among vines and broad-leaf trees.
+A compact, wagon-wide trail linked the grounds to New Kourou’s eastern gate — officially named New Horizon Way but known to locals simply as “the Last Mile.” The path was closed and overgrown after the gate’s decommissioning in the Gamma Age.
 ===== Facts and Figures =====
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 ==== Beta Age (2625 – 2631) ====
-Fresh-cut posts bordered the neatly raked grounds, their pale wood contrasting with newly laid basalt headstones that caught the orange-violet twilight. A ring of towering Asari-forest trees enclosed the site like a living wall — broad trunks rising 25 meters, their canopies rustling in warm evening breezes. The air smelled of damp loam, Morningstar wood coffins, and faint incense drifting from funeral processions. Quiet murmurs, shovel strikes, and the creak of a [[hoos|Hoo]]-drawn hearse cart were the only sounds. Visitors felt solemn welcome: a place for final words beneath a sky of unfamiliar stars.
+Fresh-cut boundary posts framed the cemetery in a loose, uneven line — some still bleeding sap, others already darkened by the humid twilight. The soil was raked as neatly as the settler crews could manage, yet the rows of graves expanded in small, irregular bursts, each new cluster marking another hard week for the colony.
+The headstones themselves were frontier-hewn: edgy, matte-cut basalt slabs whose faces carried not only names and dates but an eclectic tapestry of Earthborn scripts. Kanji beside Cyrillic, Arabic beside Old English runes — choices guided as much by longing, memory, or family myth as by true ancestry. In the orange-violet light these characters caught faint reflections, giving the rows a quiet, shifting rhythm.
+A ring of towering [[asari|Asari]]-forest trees enclosed the grounds like a natural amphitheater, their trunks rising 25 meters before flaring into rustling canopies. The air held the smell of damp loam, freshly planed Morningstar-wood coffins, and thin trails of incense drifting from slow-moving funeral lines.
+Sound carried softly here: murmured prayers, the rhythmic strike of shovels, the harness creak of a Hoo-drawn hearse cart. Under the alien sky — unfamiliar stars wheeling overhead — mourners felt a solemn sense of arrival. For the first time since leaving Earth, the dead were returning to real soil, and the living gathered in a space that mixed loss with the fragile hope of belonging.
 ==== Gamma Age (post-2631) ====