Chapter 11: 11 | Vicissitudes in innocence

Roses bloom, and then they wither; 

Cheeks are bright, then fade and die; 

Shapes of light are wafted hither, 

Then, like visions, hurry by.

—James Gates Percival

 

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I suppose it isn’t a conventional human custom to be burying bodies in the dirt with a person you have just met. But Rya insisted that we should not leave the two corpses as they were in the room, so I reluctantly agreed to help her carry the bodies to a location she had decided seemingly on impulse. 

“Do you know where we are going?” I finally asked after we had walked along the dark maze-like streets of the city for what felt like hours without stopping. 

She didn’t say a word back as she stopped in the middle of an intersection and surveyed the abandoned ruined buildings surrounding us. I caught up with her, and was about to repeat my question in a mildly annoyed tone when she suddenly pointed to our left. 

“We should go that way.” 

“…‘should’?” 

Rya drew her brows together in an unusual frown, appearing to be distraught over something. When she finally met my questioning gaze, she shook her head and merely said, “too many things have changed here since I last remembered this place.” 

“Do you know what happened here?” I asked as I quietly followed after her. 

“I suppose I can take a guess,” she murmured. “I died before it actually happened, but I saw the flash while I was kind of floating about between the minds of other people.” 

I raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. “Floating about?” 

“Mm-hmm, like a spirit or something. But it wasn’t like a possession thing where I could control the mind of the person I was in.” She shrugged. “Because of that, I could see bits and pieces of the world through their eyes.” 

Huh, that is a first. I have never heard of a spirit being able to tap into the senses of other living people without possessing their targets. And she couldn’t have possibly become a spirit in the first place—that would have meant that her thread of life was snapped, and there was practically no way she would be alive now if that were the case. 

But then again, all logic and common sense seemed to be thrown out of the window when it comes to Rya. I gave up on finding an answer after musing over her story for a while. 

“Mori, over here!” Her voice penetrated my thoughts. “What do you think of this spot?”

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Following the direction of her voice, I walked to the end of the street, which connected to a stone bridge spanning across what used to be a river. The riverbed, with a layer of ash and dead vegetation covering its cracked and dry surface, looked just as barren and desolate as the city. 

Rya was already making her way carefully down the steep river bank, gesturing at me to come down to the riverbed with her. 

“Let’s put them here for now, Mori.” 

“Oh…” 

I laid the corpses down on the ground, while she found a stick comfortable enough to hold and began scraping at the dirt. 

Confused, I pointed at the stick. “What do you plan to do with this?”

“I’m digging a hole in the ground to bury the bodies,” she said in earnest. 

I merely blinked and gave her a sidelong look, to which she huffed, “why don’t you help me instead of simply standing there?” 

“I could do the burying by myself,” I said absently. “It’d be much faster than what you’re doing now too.”

“How so?” She waved her stick in her hand like a wand. “Using magic?” 

“Something like that,” I replied honestly. “Though, ‘magic’ is the more general human way to describe it. See?”

I hummed a soft levenslied, feeling the familiar power coursing through my song and into the ground before us. At once the earth shook and slowly separated, creating a pit wide enough for the two corpses to be laid side by side. 

Rya shot me a confused look. “W…what was that? What did you just sing??” 

“You already said it yourself just now, didn’t you?” I flashed a small grin at her. “Magic.”

“I-I wasn’t expecting you to actually…” her voice trailed off before she shook her head and returned my smile. “Thanks for the help, Mori.”

We quickly set to work, laying the man and woman inside the pit before filling it with dirt. Rya positioned their hands such that they were clasped together, just like how they had held each other in their arms before their deaths. 

“I hope that they can rest in peace in this world,” she said softly while planting her stick into the freshly-laid dirt. 

I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to offer to her, so I simply nodded my head in silent acknowledgement. 

“Well then, looks like the sun is rising over the horizon.” She gazed up at the twilight sky and the burgeoning field of stars shining down on us. “I’m feeling a little hungry, why don’t we get some breakfast?”

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