Under the Trees

For 2022, I've been wanting to write more 'creature features' and generally improve my short story writing. My partner got me a Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual for my birthday so I came up with the idea of writing a story every week based on a different creature from that – All There in the (Monster) Manual. Hope you enjoy!

This Week's Inspiration: Giant Centipede

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Tree dwellers had several different methods for disposing of the dead. There was a sky burial, where the body was taken to the very top of their hometree and hung from the thinnest, slenderest branches. Birds and insects and other flying predators would make short work of the corpse. There was a ground burial where the body would be wrapped in a shroud and taken out on one of the bridge branches, and then consigned to the dark world below the canopy. There was more ceremony to it than that of course, same with the sky burial, but in the end it amounted to tossing them over the side of the branch and letting them fall into the blackness below. And then tree burial, which involved carving a niche in one of the branches big enough for a body. Hometrees healed quickly. The body was placed inside the niche, packed down, and a kind of plug placed over the top. Wood closed around the body as the tree healed and the body would be entombed then ground down by the encroaching tree. Flesh colonised. Bones pulverised and turned to dust. Eventually, the corpse disintegrated and became completely absorbed by the tree. All that would be left was a knot in the wood where family members could leave flowers or remembrances.

Damon watched his mother's body lowered into the wood, wrapped in an untreated and unpainted ceremonial shroud. The fresh cut glistened with sap. Her body was packed down with mulch, thick, coiling shavings of it, the woodsy smell hanging in the air. Material stiff and scratchy, the collar of his shirt itched. Although the graveyard was on a lower branch, above the industrial branches but below most of the living tiers, enough sunlight soaked into his dark suit to make him uncomfortably warm.

Keep it together, Damon told himself. No one else was shifting or fidgeting even though most of them were probably just as uncomfortable as him. Over fifty people gathered around the grave, heads bowed.

Damon felt for the lump of metal in his fist. Living in the trees, any piece of metal was a precious thing. The small, heart-shaped lump was a locket, his mother's locket. Rather than wear it around his neck, he'd wound the thin chain several times around his wrist so the locket would dangle into his fist whenever he wanted to grasp it.

"From nature we emerged, and to nature we return," the gothi with the long, white beard said at the head of the grave.

The plug was placed over the top of the grave, fitting so perfectly it sank seamlessly into place. Grave attendants sealed it with sap. Damon's father rested a heavy hand on his shoulder, for support and also, like Damon and his locket, for comfort. Damon's father was tall and thick through the shoulders, with dark hair and dark eyes. Damon looked a lot like him, just slimmer and with longer hair. Alongside him were Damon's friends, there in support as well.

"Take as long as you need," Damon's father said.

The other funeral guests filtered away. Damon hovered over the grave, aware his father and friends were watching or at least waiting for him. Aware of the itchy and damp heat of his suit. He wondered how long he should stand there to be respectfully mournful. To express the right level of grief. But the body was only a vessel, wasn't that what the gothi taught them? Not that Damon or many other people were particularly pious these days. The body was only meat and bone, on loan from nature and to nature returned when we were done with it. Swallowed, digested, pulverised. That spark of life, the soul, whatever you wanted to call it, moved on to wherever such energies moved on to. Damon squeezed the locket in his fist, fingernails cutting into his palm.