ii.

Bearer Avida entered just as I took the thinnest of four obsidian blades from its sheath.

“I brought you her soul.” She handed me a small notebook, really just three pages wrapped in worn grey leather. It contained the bones’ story—before the Mortuary took me in, I myself had wandered the lands below with one just alike. Name, age, pronouns. Words on one’s family, their life, what they held dearest. Fayne, mine had read. Twenty-one at the time; they/them. The rest I’d filled with small memories and sketches of what I remembered from my childhood—so long ago now, those memories all faded to nonexistence.

This file, the bones’, the girl’s, was thinner than my own. The elders had gone through it the moment we picked her up, and then again as I prepared the bones, to know how to sing of her, to her. I would go through it to inspire my carvings and please her spirit watching from the raindrops. Aside from Bearer Avida, it would be my only companion until my work with her bones was done.

“Thank you,” I told Avida.

She nodded, solemnly, once. And then drew closer on those feet light as feathers, and took my face into warm, wrinkled hands.

“My Fayne,” she said, and in those words she was more than a Bearer. “You will never forget your first. May you give each other kindness.”

She left me with that, and I rested the obsidian blade on the table by the bones to flip through the notebook.

Enair, her name was. She’d been only nineteen. She left the family page empty. The last of her pages, the thickest of the three, was a herbarium. Dried plants—simple grass and clover, some bark of oak and birch, a snowbell she must’ve felt so lucky to find—all but crumbled to the touch, each with its species written on the side in a small, slanted handwriting. These were the things that learned to find ways into the inside-below, where the living spent their heartbeats before venturing out for us to pluck from the ground. Small, resilient greens, whose more extravagant cousins I knew from the stories of our harvesters.

Enair. I put the pages aside, my chest heavy, my throat tight. She would’ve loved those stories, and the Mortuary’s greenhouse, and my white ivy butterflies.

And then I knew—how I would make my masterpiece, but more importantly, how I would do her justice. I wouldn’t carve words or drawings like Bearer Avida always did. I wouldn’t carve symbols from old songs or a river of swirls without a story to tell—no. I would carve emotions. I would carve memories, the few I still had (even if half-dreamt) of footsteps in rain-woken dust and the taste of saltwater, and more yet, woven together from what I knew of the outside-below over the years, and what it was yet to be before all its denizens eventually, inevitably, came to lay upon our tables. I would carve life.