Doom: Beyond the Veil of Shadows

9

HEADSTONES

Dark crimson tulips hang from my hands as I arrive at the burial grounds beyond the Cyrican. A common cobbled wall encircles the area, its stonemasonry moss-grown and weathered, dusted with snow. The gates part wide this afternoon, but the effect is far from welcoming. No. It feels like walking between bones.

A familiar chill sweeps my spine as I tread beyond the looming house of Amel.

When the Heofonweard first established the church here decades ago—and the cemetery of their followers adjacent—the other townsfolk, the faithless, had no choice but to erect new headstones for their loved ones here. That included my father. Despite my mother's vehement protests—imagine, her husband forced to lie beside godless heathens for eternity—it didn't change the fact that the man was neither shrived nor blood bound to the Cyrican.

"What might your father think? The desecration of his own body?" I recall my mother asking in my youth, and me, far too young to understand such significancies, let alone questioned, replied uncertain.

"He isn't really here," I say, "He's gone sailing."

The dead—who unlike my father—are under the ground, poor and damned and otherwise. And that gets me to thinking of him moreover, whom I do not think of often, and whom we find no time in our days to honour. Whom I have made the exception of today, under the guise of familial duty. The reality far more damning.

I'm here to meet Dossa.

"Almost there," I tell myself. Even if I'm seen, I am simply laying flowers. Nothing untoward is bound to happen.

Near the back of the cemetery, rows upon rows of headstones rise from the earth like fingers. When I finally reach my father's grave, I crouch beside it and lay my tulips, feeling senseless. Like I'm bad, and it is bad. It has been too long. Moss has swallowed the arched edges, dirt blanketing the front. Meeting the damp stone, I use my hand to peel away the overgrowth covering the embossed title: Rowan Branton Whitmaw, beloved husband and father. The crimson red of my blood ring glows in the dusk-light. "Why am I here?" I whisper, imagining him asking. A face forgotten. A stranger. "I needed some fresh air." I lie, which is indicative of how nerved up I am.

Would things have been better if he were still here, still alive? Probably not. He was a scoundrel and a drunk, as far as I remember, and rumour suggests. We would still be poor—and perhaps poorer still, yes. But man, wife and child—father, mother and daughter—as a situation, it is inarguably better than your only father figure being the Heofonweard. A holy messenger. He knows the women who writhe within this soil. Knows their names, their bones that moulder in unmarked graves, or float as ash. Knows their methods, too. Which, I think, is rather a lot to live up to.

I suppose I should say, I miss you or something sentimental, but I don't.

That chill creeps down my spine again.

Like I'm being watched.

"Listen to ye whine. Ain't that nice." Dossa remarks from behind me, "dying to meet the neighbours, are we?"

I pitch forward, stunned, before pivoting to give her a look. For a moment, I think myself unscathed before eying the front of my smock, sodden, flattening my freshly laid tulips. My shoulders slump, of course, I think, Amel forbid me to do something nice. Which coincidently, isn't a nice thought.

"Ms. Mythine, a pleasure." I swallow hard.

"On account of my pretty smile?" She shows her ghastly teeth, grinning brazenly, as I stumble to my feet. She is larger than our last meeting, more ghostly in the late hours. She is draped in a motley assortment of coats and shawls, layered haphazardly upon each other. The outermost layer is a voluminous, tattered fur coat that resembles the pelt of a great wolf, complete with a ragged hood that frames her face like a scucca.