Chapel Hill

Archivist's Excerpt from: Alone in the Cold: The Story of Orphan Towne, its Strange History, & its Stranger Occupants, CVI 42.4

Seated just beside St. Matthew's, Chapel Hill is the site of the old cemetery in Orphan Heights, the last lingering tangible landmark of the older spiritual heritage of the people amid their very secularized world governed by a very "Scientism" mentality. Burial being rarer with each passing year (given the scarcity of ground space in Orphan Heights), most of the ... residents of Chapel Hill stem from Orphan's earliest decades.

The plaque outside the main walkway claims that Chapel Hill was once a genuine hill in the settlement, eventually sealed beneath the dome with the rest of town, and this might be believable, were it not for the fact that Chapel Hill, and even St. Matthew's, were on Orphan's top tier outer ring, and one can technically walk beneath them into the lower levels where the Corps. of Agromatics produces its yields in various hydroponics conservatories. In other words, nobody's buying it, but then, nobody really ever asks about Orphan's early years, and most of the children in school are too far to the point of shooting spitballs or hoping the cute girl across the room doesn't know the boy shooting the spitball thinks she's cute to care about history overmuch.

By the time of the , few visited Chapel Hill, including the churchgoers of St. Matthew's. Almost ironically, this location would fare far better than almost any other in the events that followed. Dirt, turns out, is more stable than intricate architecture laden with filigree. Who knew?