Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Aelia cried until she felt like she didn’t have a drop of moisture left in her body. Her grief consumed her.
She wasn’t sure what was harder to bear: that Otis and Mirra were dead, or that Fenrir was in a cage headed gods only knew where.
The night played over and over in her mind, images of Otis’s last moments suffocating in his own blood, and of Mirra clawing at the arm that choked her to death seeming to be burned into her retinas, playing on repeat.
Her only distraction was the pain. When she found the strength to compose herself, she lifted her top and nearly choked when she saw the extensive array of colours decorating her skin.
She frowned, her stiff neck complaining as she tried to look closer at the yellows and greens and purples that surrounded the assorted cuts and gashes.
Everything looked old, the bruises already yellowing and the cuts scabbed over nicely.
The man whose name she still didn’t know had said he’d been sorry for last night, meaning she hadn’t been out for that long, but the bruises looked days old. Days and days.
Finding it hard to find the will to care, she dropped her shirt and got back on her feet.
She couldn’t stay in here a moment longer, not when reminders of Otis’s life lay everywhere she looked.
His pipe sat on the table, his jumper slung over the back of the sofa, his favourite liquor sitting on the side table in its decanter.
She definitely needed to get out.
The stairs took her some time as she half dragged herself up by the handrail, her legs shaking with the pain, but she finally made it up to the shower.
The water rushed out of the shower head, the pressure hitting into her like hot needles, and she groaned as her muscles relaxed under the torrent.
It seemed like the water pressure had returned to normal; perhaps they’d had heavy rain whilst she was unconscious.
Again, she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Aelia was hardly aware of drying herself, slinging on whatever clean clothes were closest before leaving the treehouse as quickly as her aching limbs could carry her.
The village centre was a mess.
Aelia picked her way through the collapsed decorations, the charred lanterns that had been knocked to the ground, the patches of blood soaking into the dirt. Others milled around her, already starting to clear up the debris that littered the floor.
She hadn’t seen a single human since she’d left her house.
“Hey, Moira.” Aelia stopped beside a woman she knew from work.
Although she was older, with more grey in her hair than colour, she was a force to be reckoned with if you got on her bad side.
Her second form was that of a Boar, making her stronger than most of the other prey artemians who earned their keep logging the forests.
Aside from Aelia, she was the strongest in their team by a long shot.
“Aelia. Glad to see you survived. I was worried when I didn’t see you last night, thought they might have taken you too.” Moira stopped filling a bag with rubbish and straightened, putting her hands on her hips and stretching backwards. She looked exhausted.
“How many did we lose?” Aelia fought the prickling behind her eyes. She would not cry in public. She would not.
Moira’s eyes flicked to Aelia’s, before dropping to the floor.
“All the humans are gone, either taken or burned,” Moira said.
Aelia pressed her lips together, not trusting herself not to vomit as she looked over to where several people were shovelling the smouldering remains of the fire into wheelbarrows.
“They didn’t burn the artemians they killed, leaving us fifty-three of our own to bury, with several more Peregrinians on top of that. ”
Fifty-three. And every single human was either dead or missing. Aelia felt numb, her shattered heart unable to take any more.
“Do we know where they’re taking them?”
Moira shook her head. “No, they filled the cages to bursting and left. It wasn’t just humans they took either, if they could restrain the artemians who resisted, they took them too. If not, they killed them.”
Pain lanced through the deadened numbness Aelia was clinging to.
“They took Fenrir,” was all she could manage to say.
“Oh child,” Moira reached over and placed a hand on Aelia’s arm, squeezing gently. “I’m so sorry.”
“Where are they taking them?” Aelia asked, almost rhetorically, but Moira answered anyway.
“Everyone’s asking the same thing, but no one knows the answer.” She smiled, sympathetically, rubbing up and down Aelia’s arm a few times before dropping her hand.
Aelia nodded, not trusting herself to speak, blinking furiously at the tears that she refused to let spill.
“Do you want me to take you to Otis?”
It was like ice water had been thrown over her. No, no the last thing she wanted was to see him. She didn’t want her last memory to be of him lying there, white and rigid, his skin waxen, eyes already turning opaque. Moira seemed to sense her panic.
“He’s been wrapped in the burial shroud already,” she added. “And you don’t have to see him, there is no right and wrong here. It’s whatever you need.”
Aelia lost her battle with her tears, and they trickled down her cheeks. She wiped at them furiously.
“When are we burying them?” Aelia squeezed the words through her constricted throat.
“Later today, as soon as the last grave is dug.”
“Where?”
“In section fourteen, the one we cleared last week.”
Aelia nodded. “Thank you, I’ll head straight there then.”
“You don’t have to, Aelia, we have people on it.” Moira was only trying to be kind, but Aelia shook her head.
“No, I want to be the one to dig it for him.” If she couldn’t stand to visit him one last time, she would make sure she gave him that.
“Alright. Come find me if you need anything, won’t you?” Moira pressed her lips into a hard smile and Aelia nodded, thanking her as she turned to leave.
It was a relief to have something to do, and her broken mind clung to the task like it was the last lifeline to her sanity.
If she thought about how alone she was for a moment longer, she felt like her grief might swallow her whole, forcing her into a ball on the floor to suffocate on her loneliness.
Keeping busy was the alternative, and she grabbed onto it with both hands.
She walked through her pain, her breath wheezing slightly as she limped away from the forest and towards section fourteen.
Sweat trickled down Aelia’s back, her clothes already soaked and sticking to her with the exertion of digging the grave.
Her entire body screamed at her, some parts burning with a bone-deep ache, other areas treating her to a sharp, stabbing pain with every swing of her shovel.
It was the end of summer and the ground was baked hard, the roots of the trees they’d recently felled slowing her progress.
She’d borrowed tools from the other families nearby, turning down their offers of help but exceptionally grateful for the saw she was using to tackle the roots she couldn’t break with her shovel.
Aelia dug until she was throwing the soil up and over her head to hit the pile she’d created next to the grave, and then she dug some more. She hadn’t even noticed the failing light until a tentative cough from over her head made her look up.
“Aelia, we were wondering when you might be ready to start the ceremony.”
Aelia tilted her head up, squinting. It was one of the council members’ sons, his eldest, though he was only just old enough to shave. If she had any room left for any other emotion, she might have felt surprised to see the fading light of dusk settling over the forest above her.
“Yes, sorry,” she mumbled, wondering how she was going to get out of the pit she’d dug herself in. How had she gone so deep without realising? “I’m ready.”
“Hand me the end of your shovel,” the boy said, offering his hand.
He hauled her out of the grave, Aelia reverse abseiling her way up the dirt walls.
Mortified, she noticed most of the village was in attendance, everyone waiting for her. How long had they all been there?
Turning a brighter shade of red, she scooped her tools out of the way and moved to stand in her place by Otis’s grave.
Fifty-three graves had been dug in the coppiced clearing, in no particular order, merely where the family of the deceased found room between the severed trunks for a new sapling to be planted. The families stood by their graves, the rest of the village standing at a respectful distance.
Only then did Aelia notice the stretchers that had been carried from the village, each one with a figure perfectly wrapped in a white shroud. She didn’t even know which one was Otis.
The village had no priestess, they were too small to warrant a temple, but one of the councilwomen stepped forward to perform the rites.
The words were lost on Aelia. She’d heard them countless times before, yet they gave her no comfort.
The councilwoman spoke of how they were returning to the soil, to nourish the land they had sought nourishment from, to become one with the forest they had called home.
All such lovely sentiments, all such bullshit.
Otis was gone, his life taken by a monster. There was no meaning to his death beyond that, and no pious sermons about Mother Nature’s circle of life would make her think any differently.
Dusk was a vibrant time in the forest, and nature didn’t pause for burials.
Aelia drowned out the monotonous voice of the councilwoman, tuned out the chorus of sobs and sniffs from the grieving loved ones, instead closing her eyes to focus on the life surrounding her.
The shriek of an owl, the curdling call of a vixen, the fluttering of a bat’s wings.
They gave her peace that she could never have found from the words of the ceremony. Her life had changed beyond recognition, leaving her alone and bereft, but the forest hadn’t changed. It would never change.
All too soon it came to the time to bury Otis. They lowered him into the grave, and everyone grabbed a shovel. The peace Aelia had found was short-lived, caving in on itself as she had to accept help turning the soil back over onto Otis.
It was tradition, she couldn’t stop it, but she wanted to whack her shovel over the heads of the artemians who stepped forward to help her. Otis was her family, not by blood, but in every way that mattered; it should be her burying him, and her alone.
They planted a sapling over his grave, marking it with a placard with his name on, and Aelia felt something inside of her rip open all over again at the sight of it.
His name shouldn’t be on a placard, he shouldn’t be buried beneath his tree, not yet.
It all felt so wrong, like a nightmare she’d wake up from, cold and sweating.
Yet here it was. In undeniable letters.
Otis was dead. Mirra was dead. And Fenrir had been taken.
The villagers started ambling back to Callodosis, arms slung over shoulders and handkerchiefs clasped to faces. Aelia stepped onto the broken earth and pressed her forehead to the sapling, letting the tears come, feeling them drop from her chin and onto the soil at her feet.
“Goodbye,” she whispered, eyes closed as she pictured her guardian.
Mirra didn’t have a grave, the Astraea had stolen her right to become one with the forest when they’d burned her body, but Aelia knew Otis wouldn’t mind sharing his space with her memory.
So, Aelia pictured them both, mourned them both, said goodbye to them both.
Aelia didn’t return to Callodosis with the rest of the village for the wake, there was no one there she could grieve with. Instead, she stumbled home, unsure what hurt more, her body or her heart.