Night Watch

Every candle nobody bothered to relight — that's where it lives. El Olvido is the cold that creeps in when no one says your name anymore: a hooded violet nothing with two pale eyes and no particular opinion about your feelings.

Under the graveyard runs a colonnaded hall of sarcophagi, and at its far end waits a reliquary that grants a boon to anyone bold enough to claim it. The Guardian is the reason 'anyone' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

On the back fence, every night, sits an owl. It does not help. It does not hinder. It watches you work with enormous amber eyes, and every so often it blinks — slowly, deliberately, like a supervisor initialing a form.