Epilogue

Many years later, children gather around a chair by a window. The trees outside are black and withered, the grounds ashen and dead, but inside by the very edges of walls grow resilient plantlings, and the children clutch their notebooks filled with drawings of most recent ones. There are snowbells this year, more than they’ve seen before.

The Mortuary descends in a swirl of wind, a touch of hanging bones to the barren treetops, and the children hold their breaths. The closest ones to the chair grip its armrests, its back, and a few others give a tentative wave to the window. The spirits climb out of the Mortuary one by one, and pass through the glass as a group. Parents and grandparents, neighbours and—oh, Mx Baker finally ready to reveal the secrets of their recipes!—but the one the children are waiting for is as small as themselves, a friend who walked outside to be picked up by the Mortuary not seven days ago.

Questions spill before she even takes the designated chair. “How is it?” someone asks. “Is there sunlight,” asks another, even though they’ve asked a hundred times already. “Is there rain?” “Tell us” a third one chimes in, voice trembling with anticipation. “Tell us about the guardians.”

The little spirit grins. “Deep within the Mortuary, there stands the Door.” She shuffles on the chair until her legs are crossed, waits until the other children can no longer bear the silence—and then speaks. “Carved every day by the Mortuary’s own, it remains cracked open to let us through, just enough for the stories to weave together. And the Mortuary’s guardian is not alone. On the other side there waits a spirit like me, patient and kind.” (“You are neither of those,” someone intercepts, and the group chuckles and the little spirit pouts with all the entitlement of the only one in the know.) “She tells the guardian stories of the dead; the guardian responds in stories of the living. You will meet them too, so don’t forget the tales you want to tell them.”

As she finishes her story, the children’s eyes are wide, their faces stretched with grins. They share retellings a thousand times over until next time they meet their friend, every night before they fall asleep and every morning they join back together, with every sketchbook page and every freshly-baked pastry.

The Mortuary’s own, Fayne sits in the room no longer empty, the room full of drawings of flowers and small trinkets brought by mortals who visit to tell them of the Below, the room still windowless and round but no longer white-walled, for the walls are now painted a forest and a sky and a field of cherry blooms giving shelter to paper-folded butterflies, and when Fayne closes their eyes they can hear the flap of the wings against the petals.

They lean back into the side of the doorway, eyes closed and a smile on their lips. On the other side, Enair chuckles to an anecdote they’d shared.

And the door that is a passage between the worlds, that has seen many guardians and once upon a time lost hope of ever opening, knows it would never be forgotten shut again.

END