Digging a grave by hand filled Kaifeng with a greater appreciation for the concept of cremation.
More than that, he felt a whole new sense of awe not only for the fact that humanity had managed for so long with only shovels and fire, but also for all the people who’d done the strenuous, thankless job of burying the dead who hadn’t wound up incinerated. Kaifeng worked out and kept fit, but the struggle here had quickly proven itself incredibly real. At the start, he’d unhooked his cape and let it fall from his shoulders, hoping to spare himself some potential encumbrance. If he really needed to feel weighed down—nothing specified about that in the Arcalian traditions as Lilitu had explained them to him, so it probably wasn’t necessary—then his hoop skirt should’ve sufficed and then some.
As he dug, and dug, and dug, though? Kaifeng had to wonder if removing the cape had actually helped him any.
Even given the enhanced strength and physical resilience that came with his Knighthood, the process took long enough that the songs he’d hummed to help himself keep track of time all bled together into a musical quagmire. No beginning or end as such, only bits and pieces that came and went, weaving into each other with little in the way of reason:
When I die, I don’t wanna rest in peace; I wanna dance in joy. I wanna dance in the graveyards… Butterflies turn into people, when my boy walks down the street. Maybe he should be illegal. He just makes life too complete.… All of this can be broken, all of this can be broken. Hold your devil by his spoke and spin him to the ground…. These ain’t my sins. I broke my chains. There’s more to do and I still want to live.… Don’t you just wanna wake up, dark as a lake, smellin’ like a bonfire, lost in a haze? If you’re drunk on life, babe, I think it’s great.… If I could begin to do something that does right by you, I would do about anything. I would even learn how to love.… He’s into new sensations, new kicks in the candlelight. He’s got new addictions, for every day and night.…
If I, if I’ve been unkind, I hope that you can just let it go by. And if I, if I’ve been untrue, I hope you know: it was never to you.… Humans are afraid, all of us, all the time. Mortality’s a blade, swinging with no reason, no rhyme.… All you have is your fire, and the place you need to reach. Don’t you ever tame your demons, but always keep ‘em on a leash.… I’m your carnal flower, I’m your bloody rose. Pick my petals off and make my heart explode.… Why did we cover up the colors stuck inside our head? Get up and let the jagged edges meet the light instead.… But when the sun breaks, to no more bullets in Battle Creek, then will you make a grave? For I will be home then.… Mind the map now and watch your step, or you’ll end up in an oubliette. One wrong move and it’s down, down, down. Pray the map isn’t upside down, or you’ll be stuck in the underground.…Admittedly, part of the problem for Kaifeng specifically
might have been the absolute
tedium of digging a grave, more so than the physical strain.
Not that the physical strain of it
helped, but giving his mind room to wander led to places like Kaifeng wondering to himself if all this labor had been worth it for Victor Frankenstein, because digging graves up to search for body parts did not strike Kaifeng of Saturn as an
easier endeavor than digging a whole new grave for someone’s use.
Still, Kaifeng did finish, which mattered more than any boredom or physical stress.
Dirt and soil splotched all over both his skin and uniform by the time he was done, feeling almost like a second skin. Sweat lingered on his forehead, caked up in his hair. Although he couldn’t
see the stain that had seeped into the white border of his uniform mandarin collar, Kaifeng
felt the moisture that had collected there. But when he’d given Mauritz these rites he was owed, Kaifeng could simply power down and back up again to get himself clean.
Blinking down at the hole he’d created, a bit off from Xingyi-ge’s old work shed with wine cellar that made him seem like an alcoholic serial killer to people encountering it for the first time, Kaifeng wondered if maybe he’d dug more deeply than necessary. He hadn’t unearthed anyone else’s remains—good call on location, good choice on his part—but he needed to enter the hole to safely deposit Mauritz’s urn. Easier said than done, with Kaifeng’s uniform taking up as much space as it did. At least bending the hoops beneath his skirt got them to
crack!, and from there, the fabric seemed content to wilt around him in a way that he could maneuver more easily.
Only once he’d gotten into the hole did Kaifeng reach into his subspace. Only then did he pull out the urn, and the other supplies he’d brought with him. A little plastic container of dried peaches from The Farmer’s Daughter felt uncommonly modern, relative to everything else that tended to exist at Kaifeng. A lighter—one of Liánlí’s own, a vintage Zippo
with intricately carved designs and
a case styled like a miniature Romantic painting. He’d found it at a pawn shop in college, for significantly less than it was worth, and Lilitu had approved it for use in these rites. Finally, something that had belonged to the deceased, the only thing of Mauritz’s that Lilitu had had to give.
“It belonged to his mother, and her mother before her, and so on, and so on, going back for thirteen generations,” Lilitu had explained, sliding the dagger across the table that he and Lex had found to furnish their place’s kitchen.
“Mauritz’s ancestor who first owned it? She earned it as a commendation for her commitment to public service. Usually, that was a polite euphemism for work in oppressing the people of Madriu, the sort of nasty work that nobody taught children about or spoke of publicly.“But Merla of House Ladnok was a healer by calling, studied in our people’s medicine. She spent her life going wherever people needed her help, especially the most underserved communities. She treated Madriuans as well as Arcalaians, and showed no preference to our people over the people of Madriu. After she married, she urged her wife to invest their families’ combined wealth in building temples to our people’s gods of healing, which always served a dual function similar to Earth’s hospitals. The dagger’s original purpose was never violence or murder. If it shed any blood, it was only meant to help treat an illness. To my knowledge, Merla honored that intent until she died.”Merla of House Ladnok had sounded like an amazing woman, Liánlí had agreed and still did.
The history behind the heirloom that had wound up in her several-times-great-grandson’s hands, though? That made what Mauritz had chosen to do with the dagger so much worse, in Kaifeng’s mind. Wearing it on his hip around the Arcalian senate seemed tacky enough on its own, both a reminder of the family legacy he had behind him rather than allowing his work to speak for itself, and a tacit threat that felt more than slightly unnecessary after Lilitu explained how
large his late lover had been. Someone taller and broader than Helene, probably closer to Corvina’s size if not bigger (Lilitu didn’t know Corvina, so he hadn’t been able to confirm)? They should’ve had no need to menace their colleagues like that. Then, of course, there was the worst thing Mauritz had ever done with his ancestor’s dagger.
“As I said, after the Chaos infecting our world had killed everyone else, Mauritz and I were the last ones left. After he passed, I was alone.” Lilitu’s hands had trembled as he’d told this part of his story. For want of something to do with them, he’d taken to peeling an orange out of the gifts that Liánlí had brought him and Lex. Several times in the telling, that orange slipped from his grasp to the table. “The way my world’s Chaos worked on people? It moved slowly. Even after gaining so much power and killing so many, it took its time. Like it was playing with its food. So many people probably missed detection in the early days because things we later knew as symptoms had seemed, to the people in their lives, like unrelated, isolated illnesses, or struggles unique to that one person rather than something that would come for all of us.
“It started with anxiety. Tension. A sense of unease or despair—nothing strange to feel while you’re enduring your whole planet’s slow demise. As it got worse, people started alienating themselves from each other. Hardly anyone was left for Mauritz to isolate himself from, and his version of isolation always included having me to himself, so…” Although Lilitu had shrugged as if trying to downplay the emotional gravity, he’d let his turmoil show in how nauseated he’d looked.
“Even if I’d noticed Mauritz’s symptoms earlier, I don’t know what, if anything, I could have done differently. Based on how things went on Dagon, and a thousand years of pointless fighting? It seems like one senshi might not be able to cleanse their world alone. And ultimately, death was kinder. Gave Mauritz a chance to reincarnate. If he has, then maybe he’s happier in this life. Maybe a life on earth was kinder to him. Regardless of what all he did, I’d like that.”(It spoke well of Lilitu, in Kaifeng’s mind, that he had suffered so much from his lover but still wished for his starseed to have found a better life in his next incarnation. Honoring Lilitu’s wish meant enough on its own. Was important enough without anything else gussying it up because he deserved this freedom, and because Kaifeng wanted to honor his Wonder and its purpose. But the kindness it took for Lilitu to wish so well for his bad romance lover, that made Kaifeng feel even more committed to doing right by his friend.)
It had taken a good minute for Lilitu to say what he was talking around more plainly, but so many things had clicked into place when he had:
“By the end of things, Mauritz begged me for death. He’d started hearing things that weren’t real. That was usually one of the last signs before our world’s Chaos drove someone entirely mad. Death soon followed. But Mauritz remained aware that the things he hears weren’t real, which meant we might’ve had more time……if not for all of his stubborn. pride.……”A heavy sigh had punctuated the story there, and when it ebbed, Lilitu said,
“He wanted to die as himself, before the Chaos could take all his wits from him. He begged me for it, for me to use his old dagger and make it quick. Even knowing that this blade had been created as a tool of healing, he begged me to use it for murder. No matter how merciful death proved for him, that’s still what he asked for. So much for how deeply he respected what this heirloom meant.”At least, Kaifeng figured as he reached into his subspace for the dagger, that sin on Mauritz’s part meant the dagger
was more intensely personal than it might’ve been otherwise. Even without that, it clearly satisfied the call for something personal of the deceased, to be buried with them. But it felt less like burying so much family history—so much of which sounded well worth the celebration Mauritz’s ancestors had received—knowing that this blade also carried such a deep betrayal of its purpose. That the last thing it had been used for was the exact thing it had been created to prevent.
Yet, as Kaifeng drank in the sight of Saturnian twilight gleaming off the blade and hilt of Mauritz’s old dagger, he couldn’t help but think that it would have fit right in around this Wonder. Plenty of rooms in the tower held objects like this. Most of the ones he’d found had no magic to speak of, like the little dolls Xingyi-ge’s cousins, handmade from taxidermied animals, so an equally non-magical dagger joining their ranks would’ve made sense. If not for the circumstances under which it had come to Kaifeng, it could have joined all the other treasures hidden inside the tower. Nobody who didn’t already know the dagger’s backstory would’ve been able to pick it out from any of the other antiques that Xingyi had tried to protect with all the puzzles and death-traps.
Although a certain dragon-man wasn’t the point at present, Kaifeng thought dimly of Almadel, and of his museum. Thought about whether or not the kosopods had troubled him any since he’d called for aid in getting the infestation of them cleaned up. Part of Kaifeng wanted to offer Almadel the chance to take some of the treasures inside the tower for his museum, a chance to give them a home somewhere else. Maybe he even knew people in the present day who had a right to own them.
But, on the other hand, if any of those treasures were kept here as part of an old culture’s burial rituals? Then, Kaifeng didn’t know for certain, and he couldn’t justify such a risk to himself. Even if the cultures in question were so many centuries, if not millennia, dead and gone, some of their people had once entrusted his Wonder with the protection of their dead and their traditions. Maybe not all traditions deserved to be respected or preserved—Kaifeng certainly knew that well enough, given how many tenets of filial piety he’d broken by choosing to carve his own path in life rather than letting his parents make all his decisions at the cost of his own soul and wellbeing—but it wasn’t Kaifeng’s place to judge whether or not that applied to any of the traditions he honored by keeping their dead.
His place, the one to which he’d been called by being entrusted with this Wonder, was protecting those whom others had longed so much to forget. Once, that had most often meant criminals, like Xingyi-ge’s paternal family, or the Nameless and their associates. Outcasts, like so-called street-rats who had attempted, for love of a highborn sweetheart, to rise from the stations into which they’d been born, and slowly ruined themselves in pursuit of advancement without realizing that they had always been enough, no matter what society felt about that. Or people like Xingyi-ge’s parents, who’d done nothing wrong (and even tried to break away from a criminal family, in his father’s case), but had been consigned to burial at Kaifeng in an act of petty spite from a Saturnian nobleman toward a wife who would always love Xingyi-ge’s late mother more than she did her lawful husband.
Tonight, the grounds of Kaifeng would instead hide away someone who had, time and time again, chosen to harm the person who’d loved him most.
The stained glass of Mauritz’s urn felt cool against Kaifeng’s palms as he lifted it off the dry grass. He hadn’t given himself a chance before to drink in the picture that the mosaic created. Looking at it better now, though, the image of a large, lop-eared rabbit asleep on green grass beneath a plum tree—recognizable by both some fruits that had fallen and the flowers that so closely resembled the design Arcalís’s brooch—both tugged Kaifeng’s heartstrings and left him with questions. Had Lilitu or Mauritz asked for such a design, or someone else entirely? Were those plum blossoms, so carefully crafted out of glass pieces that seemed to have been broken rather than specifically cut into their shapes, meant to evoke imagery of the senshi with whom Mauritz had entangled himself, or was that mere coincidence? How much had Mauritz himself considered any aspect of the urn?
Insofar as he
had been involved, how much had he made his choices in good faith, versus making them so they would hang forever over Lilitu’s head, never letting him move past this man he’d loved, even with their history?
Questions to which Kaifeng would never get full answers, he decided with a nod. Saturn’s twilight sky reflected back at him in some of the lighter-colored glass, all purples and reds. The sight of it reminded him of his purpose here. As he crouched to settle the urn near the edge of its new home (hole), Kaifeng resolved to ask Lilitu only about the stained glass traditions his people had had. Nothing about the image on this urn, only questions about his people’s art.
Helping exile Mauritz from Lilitu’s life couldn’t only be about burying him, after all.
Now, the hardest part. Kaifeng steadied himself with a deep breath. How many times had he reviewed Lilitu’s notes on what to do? Several many, with varying amounts of stress over wanting to do this properly clouding his mind. If nothing else, no one could reasonably or fairly say that Kaifeng hadn’t done his best to learn these traditions that were not his own, and which Lilitu had only partially explained, trying to prevent the high points from getting lost in the particular details. Allowing himself a sigh, Kaifeng dug his fingers into the soil, and pulled up a sizable handful.
“As the earth has given life to its children,” he intoned, closing his eyes to better focus on remembering the words, “so too must we return to the earth. For all in this universe must stand together in community, lest destruction tear us asunder with no hope of repair. From the smallest ant on the thinnest blade of grass, to the greatest king in the finest palace, the golden threads of life unite everyone the same. Let us feel the suffering of any as our own, and may we always preserve ourselves through helping others. One does not exist without the many, and the many does not exist without the one. This is the truth of the earth.”
Opening his eyes again, Kaifeng reached out. Slowly, carefully, he sprinkled the handful of dirt over Mauritz’s urn.
When he’d emptied his hand, he reached up for the container of dried peaches. The plastic made a crisp, popping as he eased the latch open. For a moment, he let himself savor the smell of them. Personally, he preferred his peaches fresh, but Lilitu had specifically said to use dried ones. The combination of desiccation and preservation methods, he’d explained, symbolically spoke to both the death of the individual and the perpetual endurance of the soul, the way that people could and would be reborn into a thousand thousand lives, as many times as Cosmos allowed their starseeds to pass through her cauldron.
“As a child is their family’s fruit, and these peaches are children of their parent trees, so too is all that lives a fruit of the earth.”
Scientifically, Kaifeng didn’t know if that metaphor entirely checked out? Fruit might have been more accurately analogous to some other aspect of the reproductive cycle than children. But he was a Knight of Saturn and a caretaker of the dead, not a biologist. As he carefully arranged the peach slices around Mauritz’s urn, he reminded himself that the symbolic intent and what it had once meant for the people of Arcalís—what it meant in the present day for
Lilitu, for his ability to have a life that wasn’t shackled to the memory of his late lover—mattered infinitely more right now than any sense of scientific accuracy. Lilitu hadn’t specified any particular way to arrange the peaches, so Kaifeng simply placed them out in an arrangement that looked nice.
“As we return a noble child of Arcalís to the earth,” Kaifeng said, solemn as he flicked his Zippo to life, “so too do we sacrifice these children of the trees.” He held the flame toward the first peach, feeling a sense of peace wash over him as it caught fire. Maybe Kaifeng didn’t know all of what these traditions had meant in their original context, back on Arcalís as it had been. But the symbolism and the weight of the words he intoned—or maybe the weight of what it meant for him to do all these rituals—nevertheless made the fine hairs on the back of his neck raise. “For as the fruits of the trees nourish our living, so must we give back and, in our deaths, nourish the earth that feeds the trees. This is the eternal cycle of life, handed down from ages past. Death is but another form of life, and in all things, always, life endlessly feeds life.”
Beautiful words, Kaifeng thought as he burned the rest of the dried peaches, every single one that he’d laid out.
Part of him wondered how much it had rankled for Lex and Lilitu, sitting through funerals for Arcalian politicians who’d most benefitted from the crimes the Arcalians perpetrated against the people of Madriu. One of them, mandated to be there by the social expectations attached to his position. The other, forced to attend because he was a glorified political prisoner, held apart from his own people—from his
family—and
not paying respects to his oppressors might have been used to justify more violence against them. Both, passionately devoted to freedom for the Madriuan people, but forced to bite their tongues while outwardly pretending that the deceased of those days had truly honored the idea of that life-death cycle, rather than using it to wrongly justify treating the Madriuans as non-sapient animals instead of people, too stupid and vicious to maintain their own sovereignty.
Hopefully, Kaifeng would give them something better with this burial.
Hopefully, liberating Lilitu by burying Mauritz would also ease some of Lex’s burdens, giving him the peace of knowing that the one he loved above all others was no longer chained to the memory of someone who’d treated Lilitu so abysmally.
As Kaifeng lit up the final peach, he felt something welling up within him. Couldn’t feel any words that he would’ve assigned to that something, but……well, he didn’t need to put words on whatever warmth flushed through him now, rushing down his arms and legs, even up to his forehead. Kaifeng only needed to let himself experience and finish out this service to both his friends and his Wonder. Sometimes, as with reading all of Huan-ge’s microexpressions and his poignant silences, the real power lay in what people didn’t say. Or in what they
couldn’t say.
Next, Kaifeng pulled himself up out of the hole and picked up the dagger. A deep breath to steady himself as he held it out over the open grave, staring down at the urn and the piles of ashes where the dried peach slices had been. Everything had gone well so far. Nothing stood out that he’d messed up. Kaifeng
would get through this remembrance and he
would give Lilitu the closure he wanted.
This next part of the rites, though, Lilitu had described as something more freeform and personal. Less scripted than all the old holy words, which had had centuries of history behind them long before Chaos had come to Arcalís the world. Focused on the deceased themself because everybody deserved to be remembered as they’d been. Community and the whole took precedence in Arcalian culture, he’d explained, but funerals also needed to acknowledge how the whole would never exist without the individuals who made it up. Honoring the loss of a single life helped reify the whole by affirming that every person mattered. Hence, all the discussion of who Lilitu’s late lover had been and what he’d done with his life.
“Mauritz Yurak,” he said, his voice clear and sober, “I now consign you to the earth. You were a dutiful son to your beloved mother, herself long deceased. When your people trusted you to represent them in the Arcalian senate, you eagerly rose to the task and fought tirelessly for their interests. Madriuans in your district could also rely on you to represent them equitably, and you joined in efforts to liberate the Madriuan people from Arcalian domination, even though several of your colleagues in the senate fought against you. When Chaos infected your planet, you did everything that you could to fight against it, to protect as many people as your could for as long as you could. No matter how things ended, those efforts
mattered. Even facing down odds stacked impossibly high against you, you gave everything you had in the hopes of saving your world and your people. None of the tragedy that befell Arcalís was your fault.”
Kaifeng pursed his lips and swallowed thickly. Only by sheer refusal to let his Wonder down and the grace of this overwhelming warmth in his chest did he push through his own personal distaste for this piece of Mauritz’s story to intone: “You are survived only by your lover, Lilitu Hi’skaryota, Sailor Arcalís, whom you never gave the courtesy of addressing properly when he changed his name. Despite all the times you undermined him, disrespected his wishes, and treated him as though he belonged to you, Lilitu still loves you enough that he wishes for your next incarnation to have a better life. To be a better man, the way he always believed that you could be yourself. I, Knight Kaifeng of Saturn, hope the same, for both your sakes as well as Lex Wysten’s, Sailor Madriu. Kindness enough to want better for someone whose love came with fangs? Deserves to be rewarded, no matter how much this universe may disagree.”
Another deep breath. Whatever had welled up in Kaifeng’s chest, he felt its heat spreading throughout him. It might have felt like catching fire if not for the gravestone chill that followed in its wake. Yet, none of this felt
bad. Something akin to a storm roiling through him, yes, but Kaifeng himself felt as though he’d settled in the eye of that storm, in the safety and quiet where the clashing winds couldn’t really harm him.
“Above all,” he said, voice tightening around his emotions but clear regardless, “I consign you to the earth here at Kaifeng, because your
sweet boy deserves to exile you from his life. For the past thousand years, he kept your remains safe, feeling like he couldn’t bury you. Maybe the scars you left on his heart will always remain, but he no longer needs to fear you or your ghost. Rest peacefully in this new home, Mauritz Yurak. May Lex Wysten live more freely, able to love Lilitu without you hanging over everything. May Lilitu Hi’skaryota live more authentically, not the same as he was but still dedicated to creating and protecting beauty, love, and justice wherever he can. May you, in your next life, learn to cherish a simple, beautiful dream instead of tearing at everyone who reached out for you. And may your remains nourish this place as life returns to Kaifeng, as your people knew that life, even in the shape of death, endlessly feeds more life.”
Kaifeng had never delivered a eulogy until this moment. Strictly speaking, he didn’t know if this counted, either.
While he was hoping for so many things already, he hoped that these words would satisfy the old Arcalian rites. And if there was any larger, superhuman force who might have concerned themself with the hopes of little mortal lives—the Code, Cosmos, bodhisattvas like Dizang-pusa and Guanyin Ma, whoever—then maybe they would pick up on the intensity behind Kaifeng’s hope as he let go of the dagger. Maybe that was what Kaifeng was feeling now, this
whatever it was coursing through him that felt (as many things did for him) so much like sweet music. Maybe that was some inexplicable
resonating with the frequency of the universe thing that only made so many of the stranger influencers out there sound like they could’ve been talking about magic, even though they were probably just grifting.
Or maybe, if Kaifeng had paid more attention to his hands as he picked up the shovel once more, he might have seen the answer.
As things went, he noticed absolutely nothing, not until he’d filled Mauritz’s grave back in and patted down the earth. Reaching up, fully intent on wiping some forehead sweat on his sleeve, Kaifeng paused and stared at the back of his right hand. Was…… Was he seeing things? Hard to tell with all the dirt he’d gotten messed up in. But he could’ve sworn that he saw something on his skin that hadn’t been there before. Violet and glowing, like the markings he’d seen for years on other Knights and senshi back in town.
Breathless, he powered down. Gave himself a few moments as Liánlí, just to breathe and feel less tumultuous.
When he powered up again, he saw clearly, exactly what he thought he’d seen: the glowing lines of transcendence, in the shapes of his own bones. Unbuttoning one of his sleeves, he found more of the same. A perfect anatomical rendering of the bone in his forearm, in the same glowing, Saturnian violet. A gift from his Wonder, a sign of deep trust and unity between them.
“Oh, I…… Wow, I……” Eyes misting up, Kaifeng turned his gaze toward the tower looming over him. Hoping his Code Piece would feel his intent even if it couldn’t hear him, he whispered, “Thank you. I’ll be worthy of this. Whatever it takes. I promise.”
Oh, he had some letters to send with his signet ring. Two for Lex and Lilitu, to let them know the job was done. And one for Huan-ge, because he needed to learn about this before anybody else.
