They wouldn’t bury him.
It was her only thought as the soldiers limped into town. Their eyes were wild, mouths full of tales of inhuman ferocity of the advancing horde. They swore up and down that they were the only survivors of the battle.
Not battle, they insisted. Massacre. Carnage. Slaughter.
They were frenzied, grabbing what they could of their homes. They spoke of the inhuman barbarism they had seen with their very eyes. The numberless army was on its way, right now, to this very village, almost too small to have a name.
Panic filled the dozen or so houses as the people ran. As a final mercy, those too sick or too old to flee were quietly smothered or stabbed. There was no time for proper rites.
Within hours, the village was hollow, its only inhabitants corpses leaking their pollution into the soil. Even if the approaching horde vanished or passed it over without pillage, it would remain cold and lifeless and deserted.
But all she knew was that they wouldn’t bury him.
She knew that they wouldn’t let him feel the flutter of petals against his skin, or the purifying splash of water against his eyelids. That they would not allow him the embrace of the cold, cloddish dirt that would swallow him whole and welcome him back like a loving mother.
She knew that if he was dead, as he surely was, his body would be desecrated by the beasts of the night, fought over by growling dogs and rattling crows. Her mind filled with an image of his corpse, dug through by worms and beetles as his body baked beneath the unblinking sun.
If they did not bury him, his soul would find no rest. He would wander from place to place, his only possessions the pain and terror that were his last few moments, playing over and over for all eternity.
They wouldn’t bury him, so she would.
The village was a dead thing as she gathered up her things for the journey. A shovel, a knife, dried flowers, a leather pouch filled with water, another with a handful of nuts and a few morsels of mostly-stale bread.
One of the families that had fled forgot to take their donkey. She clambered atop the animal. Clicking her tongue, she steered the donkey towards the horizon from which the soldiers had fled.
She would bury him, wherever he was.
The land along the road was barren, yellow with dying grass and gnarled trees. Only the gentle roll of the hills marked any change in the landscape. The journey was silent except for the clopping of the donkey’s hooves against the rocks on the path and the beast’s occasional chuffs. The blue sky was cloudless and bare. After several hours, she stopped along a stream that flowed towards her and let the donkey drink. There was no green grass along its edges, just jagged and uninviting stones.
The white sun of the deserted land bit into her. Still, she kept on, urging the donkey forward.
Night came and she stopped. The donkey rested, tethered to a bare tree cratered with the burrows of long-dead insects. She leaned against a rock and ate a handful of nuts. After finishing, she propped herself against the tree and fell asleep. She did not dream.
She awoke before dawn, the donkey attempting to chew her hair. She cursed the beast and shooed it away. The sky was the color of an old bruise. That day, there were no sounds besides the clopping of the donkey’s hooves against the increasingly stony path.
As she traveled along the stream, the sun peeked above the horizon, pale and feeble. It never seemed to rise much from behind the bleached hills.
She would bury him, even in this anemic land.
It was what might have been midmorning when she noticed that the stream had dried up, leaving a bed of smooth, desiccated rocks. She weighed whether or not to go back, to fill up her water skin one last time. Ultimately, she chose against it.
The land was nothing she recognized. The farthest she had ever ventured from the village almost too small to have a name had been an afternoon’s journey, and even then the terrain had been the same steady hills thick with rustling grasses.
Rolling landscapes split by deep and jagged furrows gouged so recently that the soil still held traces of dampness. In the distance, mountains were shorn into clean cliff faces, solid stone blotted suddenly by the colorless sky behind.
Dirt melted into the dry grass that bristled with every breeze, their colors indistinguishable. The path was now more rocks than earth. The few ragged and dying trees that still dotted the landscape were buried up to their trunks, their branches, until the powdery and dead earth finally swallowed them entirely.
As the sickly sun moved along the horizon, she drank from the water skin. Soon, it was nearly empty, save for the half mouthful she would need to anoint him. A few hours more, and the nuts were gone too. She threw aside the pouch, keeping on-hand only the few items she would need for the burial and to settle his soul.
Here, a day and a half’s journey out, the land warred with itself.
She came across a field trampled flat just off the road. Dismounting the donkey, she led the creature by the halter. There were axes there, clubs and spears, too. Thrown-off armor speckled the field. Blood soaked the ground and trampled grass, standing out among the wan landscape. There were all of the signs of a fight, but not a single body. She searched for nearly an hour, but found no sign of anything. A battle without death.
After a time, the sun seemed to roll backwards on the horizon, never rising, never setting. She continued on the donkey until the sun was halfway back to its position when she had awoken.
She slept fitfully and awoke more tired than when she had first rested. When she resumed riding, it took all of her strength to keep from collapsing on the donkey’s back.
She would bury him, if she could ever find him.
She didn’t know when she first saw the bones littered along the landscape. At first, they just appeared as rocks sticking out from the brittle grass, almost indistinguishable from the ground.
Suddenly, the donkey’s step gave a splintering sound, rather than the expected clop. She looked down, fearing that her mount had broken a leg. Receding behind them was a shattered dome of what looked like eggshell. It took her a moment to realize that it was the remains of a skull she was looking at.
It was then that she saw the bones in their hundreds. Then thousands. Then so many that she didn’t have words for their number. They seemed to flood the landscape as she glanced around.
Some bones were too large to be human, marking where a tree might once have sat. Others, almost too fine to see, bristled in the stale wind. In the distance, she could see bones malformed and misshapen curl along the jagged lips of gulches like frogs at the edge of a pond.
The world began to spin. She squeezed her eyes shut and laid down, gripping tight to the donkey’s back. The creature brayed as it made its way along the bone-strewn road. Her eyes remained shut. She did not dream.
When she awoke, she forgot for a moment where she was. Everything was perfectly dark and still. She thought she might still be in her bed in the village almost too small to have a name. Then, she wondered why the bed felt so dry.
Opening her eyes, she started. She was on the road, alone. Looking around for the donkey, she couldn’t see it anywhere. For several minutes, oaths at the faithless creature rang through the ossified landscape.
Finally, she began to sit up. As she pushed herself up, a lone tooth at the wrong angle bit into the flesh of her hand. She yelped, then grabbed it, wound and tooth. With a shudder, she held it tight to her body. Somehow, she knew that if a single drop of her blood came into contact with the road, she would never leave this place.
Awkwardly, she clambered to her feet without her hands. Making her way down the road, she felt every ridge and bulge of the stream of bones beneath her. Above the horizon, the sky stretched out, endless and unblemished black.
She would bury him, even in this land that was death.
Onward, she traveled. Every so often, she checked her hand to see if the bleeding had ceased. Jagged pieces of bone had begun to poke out from the wound, little nestlings of the accursed tooth. With each step, her hand began to throb a little more.
As she passed along the road, the bones began to combine into larger shapes. Soon, each one stood at least as tall as her.
As she progressed, they began to grow more recognizably human, but always with some mistake - no eyes, six sets of arms, lower halves facing backwards. But she knew, always, that they watched her. Each one whispered to her, something indistinct, yet uniform.
She smiled, knowing that whatever the journey, whatever the pain that streaked through her hand, she was at last approaching something.
She would bury him, even here at the end of all things.
The path wound and curved around the barren landscape. The sentinels still lined the road, growing ever larger and intricate until their tops vanished like pointed teeth tearing at the inky sky. Their whispers were still unintelligible.
She heard a soft rustling behind her, one that grew in intensity with each step. The sound of the sentinels, filling in the path behind her. In her bones, she knew that to look back upon them would mean destruction. The edges of her vision began to blur. She could feel the sweat prick at her forehead. Her hand thrummed now, stiff with a pain that made her fearful to look at it.
In the distance, she saw the path lead to a mountain of bones. As she approached, the mountain grew and grew in size until she had to crane her neck to see the top.
The sentinels on the side of the road likewise grew, crowding out the black sky until they formed a vast vaulted ceiling above her. Their speaking nipped at the edges of her consciousness, still something less defined than words. Visions of her corpse devoured by unclean beasts, of the village almost too small to have a name reduced to less than dust by the passage of time.
At the base of the mountain, the path stopped. The mass of bones leaned down, its vast bulk clattering as it reconfigured itself. The infinity of bones winnowed and winnowed, until it was nothing but a man’s body she did not recognize. It was naked, its flesh pincushioned with thousands of holes lined with caked black blood. White maggots writhed blindly in the wounds.
“What,” the body asked, “are you doing here, living thing?”
Its words were painfully clear, sharp as a knife as they resounded silently through the barren landscape. She could hear the gnashing of its teeth as the body moved its mouth.
“I am here to collect his body,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice from wavering.
She could sense the realm moving, gently probing. Teeth blindly groping the ground about her feet.
“Why should you have it?” the body scoffed.
“To bury him,” she said, kicking away the insect-like bones from her feet.
The body clumsily threw back its head. The landscape was keen with mirthless howls as the body vomited laughter. She tensed.
“Your king,” the body said, bowing low, “he thought himself a god. One able to conquer anything. He approached our lands, seeking to kill death. He brought with him an army of transgressors. The one you seek was among them.”
“They could not conquer death,” the body continued, grinning without joy. She saw its eyes for the first time. Alive, watery with pain and fear. Pleading.
“Many died. Most fled. Your king did not die. The one you seek is dead, and therefore is mine,” the body said.
“I will not ask again. Give me his body.”
The realm laughed. It was a sickly laugh that felt the way curdled milk tasted. “Why,” it said, “do your threats have purchase here? More than a god made flesh? More than armies? What can you possibly do?”
The body gave a whimper as it was swallowed back into the hill. The mass of bones reared up to its full height, vanishing into a pinprick in the sky.
Above the deafening roar of bones, she could hear its fury. “This place is the end of all things. The destination of mortals, of kings, of even the gods. How dare you presume to make such a threat!”
The vast hall of bones collapsed around her, remaking itself into an army of skeletal warriors, mustering to the horizon. Without looking, she knew that they were the remains of the army with which he had once marched, flensed clean of flesh and skin.
“Answer,” the realm roared, “why should I return what is mine by right?”
She couldn’t speak. Her mouth was dry. All she could do was think.
“This is the realm of the dead. Of things already decayed and gone, already free from life,” she thought. From her satchel, she fetched the knife, taking it in shaking hands. She held it high.
“This realm has never tasted death. Its acrid, rotten scent. The pollution it renders, hateful to man and god alike.”
She took the dagger and held it to her neck. “I will die in this realm, and my death will pollute it. It will be a death without rites, a rottenness spreading everywhere. An eternal stain that will never be made clean. Neither god nor man will ever attend this place after their death. The graves will starve, and you will die.”
“All afterwards would be shades, then,” the realm cried, “wandering the earth. Without hope or end. You would doom the world for this?”
She held the knife to her neck, the hot blood thrumming in her veins. Her other hand ached, chock full of infectious bone. “Yes,” she said from between parched lips.
The realm roared, a cry of rage and power that she felt flow through her body. The mountain shifted, furious, into a billion warring arms intent on her destruction.
The challenge to its power, its finality, was insolent and hateful to it. She knew that it would tear her apart. The bones in her wounded hand bit at her from inside.
She did not run, she did not quaver. She simply pressed the knife against her vein, until its sharp edge almost bit into the flesh.
The realm screamed its fury, the hollow envy of the dead towards the living. The sea of bones became a tempest of destruction directed solely at her. It did so for an endless time. Still, she did not move.
Finally, the world stopped. The realm paused. The million misshapen skeletal warriors stood entirely still.
Finally, the mountain retreated, slowly, silently. In its place, was his body, held aloft on a bier of bone.
He looked so peaceful, so quiet.
She took his body, marveling at how light it felt. She walked back along the path she had taken, ossified landscape skittering away from her with each step she took. Eventually, she found the donkey at the side of the path. Silently, she prayed to the gods to bless the creature as she placed him on its back.
She walked and walked, until the sky no longer shone black, and the ground no longer gleamed a slickly yellow-white. Glancing at her hand, she no longer saw the bone slivers.
Once the earth was again brown and the sky was again blue, she stopped and took his body from the donkey’s back.
She said the prayers to the gods and tossed the dried flower petals over him. She said the words that laid him to rest and anointed his eyes with water.
And there, by the side of the road, she buried him.
As the last clod of dark earth settled over his grave, she finally allowed herself to weep for him.