i.

The bones beamed their white-bright smiles, shadows-tickled where my candles jumped with the breeze. Cleaned, polished, assembled; prepared with trained perfection. Bearer Avida would praise me in a moment, but pride of the expected faded before the excitement of the new: my first solo dressing, and what is a first if not a chance to make masterpiece?

Oh, and I would make it one. I would coat this one in flowers and paint, carve the thinnest of swirls down her jaw, around her eyes, even across the fragile ribs where the art required the most careful touches. Leaves of white ivy I’d pick her, and the leaves would be butterflies, pale as snow against the ivory bones, breaking free from between the joints—and I would wait until we travelled south again, arrange blue cherry blooms under the carved swirls beneath her eyeholes, and fill her ribcage with wildflowers. With a dip of my fingers into the bowl of stardust water waiting just outside, I would preserve as she would be, for years and centuries to come, protected against the winds and snows of the heights the Mortuary travelled. A beauty all mine, all eternal, the first of endless and for as much, remembered forever.

I had seen the girl when they brought her in. Weakened by the outside-below like all the others when we pulled them up, breathing her last breaths on the Bearer’s altar as Avida and the others chanted their wishes to ease her spirit’s passing, but so lovely in the way her eyelashes blinked—just once—over eyes of an indigo evening, fever-blushed lips trembling with one final breath. Bearer Avida had waited with her head down until that breath joined the clouds, carefully brushed away a strand of night-black hair from those lips as the other Bearers dispersed, and then looked straight at me.

“The spirits yearn to stay with us, Fayne,” she said. “When you look at them so earnestly, so directly, you only tease their longing.”

I’d been rude—worse, I’d been unkind—but I would make up for it. I would make her spirit proud to see her among the other bones, hanging off the side of the Mortuary in comfort and guidance to the still-dying. I would make her bones eternal, to be with us where her spirit couldn’t—but first, the carvings.