by J. Scott King
Today, in the quiet darkness of the deep Halls, I buried the last of my people. There is no one left to put in the cold ground. The question of my own grave will fall to the kindness of others, Gods willing, though I doubt I will see another soul in the time I have left. My body will rest where it falls, and my spirit will wander the dusty, forgotten works of my people, denied passage to the Deepholds for want of a Gravedigger of my Order.
The irony of it seems a fated thing, further evidence that the Gods are more than amaranthine doctrine made manifest, more than the revered stories that gave rise to a noble Dwarven people and presided over a thriving Kingdom for countless generations, more than soft words spoken in the light of a thousand ghost lanterns as the plague took us.
My faith is whole, unbroken even by the unending death that has, with dark inevitability, found its end at last. The Gods are quickened and glorious and unknowable. They are laughter in the dark and tears in graveyard light.
And they are cruel to leave me standing.
With a sigh, I heft a chiseled stone plinth and set it atop the grave cairn of my final charge, a noblewoman who had once served as emissary to the lands beyond these grand Halls. I brush dust from it with a calloused, meditative hand. I had abandoned the practice of shaping a formal ghost lantern plinth some months ago. There was no time in the face of so much loss, and I reasoned any flat stone would do, so long as it held the lantern steady as I opened the Way for the soul within. But in the empty silence of the end, I had unwrapped my shaper’s tools to honor the Emissary.
I am weary with the last of my work. My robe hangs from my diminished frame like a tattered shroud, and my beard is the knotted moss of an untended grave. I draw a deep breath and sigh. The air holds nothing of my people. The warm, earthen redolence of molten stone, the acrid scent of new steel, gone now as the forges far below grow cold. The whispered scents of mid-winter stout and the meat-smoke of cookfires drifting down in the drafts from above is memory alone. The fragrance of mourning – incense and perfume and sobbing grief – has gone to rest.
Easy to become lost in my own grief. I can sense it just there, waiting like an admonished child eager to have its say, to hold my attention at last. It will have all of me soon enough. There is but one thing left to do.
The Emissary. The last of our people.
A soft ember glow spills from her ghost lantern, bathing the grave dirt in the soothing light of her soul. I bend stiffly and pick it up. It is a simple thing, pounded copper and a lanyard of woven, ochre-red silk, not at all befitting her station among our people. But the Emissary chose it on her name day, as do we all, and she will rest for a time within it before her journey to the Deepholds.
I set the Emissary’s lantern on her plinth. Her radiance warms the stones of her grave cairn in watchfire light. There is hope in the play of light and shadow, a mirthful dance that softens for a moment the ponderous sorrow that has taken hold in me. Tears blur my vision for the first time in innumerable days.
I turn from the Emissary’s grave, wipe the tears away with the dirty, threadbare sleeve of my robe, and gaze out on what I have wrought. The cavern necropolis that I and the curates of my Order – all dead now – have labored on these many long months extends far beyond the torches I have set. Countless graves marked by the darkened ghost lanterns of the dead. All who walked the grand mountain Halls, but a short season ago, are gone, their bodies buried in the rock of this vast crypt, their spirits flown to the promise of the Deepholds.
The light of the Emissary is a beacon calling me to task. It would burn there unending were I to allow it. In this moment, there is something left to me – a kindness to bestow. But what will come when her light fades? To what purpose will I set myself in the decaying silence that follows?
I have pondered this for some time now. I have no answer. There is only the moment before and the moment after.
I kneel before the Emissary’s grave and open my mind to her light. I close my eyes, a final prayer on my cracked lips.
Gravedigger.
The word lights in my mind like the wisp of a remembered dream.
I draw a sharp breath as my body tenses. I open my eyes, bow my head low, and whisper, “Emissary.”
In all my years tending the dead, I have never addressed a charge directly, and knew of no other member of my Order that had done so.
What is your name, Gravedigger?
I flush at the intimacy of her question. No one living, and no spirit in my charge, has ever asked me to share my name. Nor have I offered it. I am called Gravedigger, even among the brothers and sisters of my Order. We are shunned by the living, feared by the dying. Only the dead know the solace of our silent company.
I raise my head slightly, address her light directly. “I… I am Duendonen, Emissary.”
Duendonen… An old name. The stone beneath the fire.
“That is so, Emissary.”
Emissary… Spoken true. In life, I was an envoy representing our interests in the greater world – Aujinnor and Nirevis, Aragoíne, even the Blacktalons once. But… let us dispense with formalities.
I am Raegel.
I nod in formal greeting, immediately feel the fool.
“Raegel, this is… You are the last. Our people – all of them – await you in the Deepholds, in the radiant, living memory of the Gods. A simple prayer in the growing darkness of this fallen place will make our people whole again. I beg your leave to open the Way.”
I prostrate myself before the Emissary’s light, my forehead touching cold earth, my heart a war drum in my ears.
But I am not the last of our people, Duendonen. You are.
I gaze at the light of her radiant soul for a long moment, my breath held fast in my chest. A shudder roils through me, and my eyes fill again with tears.
I will not allow you to endure this burden alone.
Sorrow takes me then. A moment passes, an hour, a day, perhaps – there is no way to know. Grief, the long-admonished child, has no sense of time. It invites itself in, stays as it will, fades with a whispered promise to return.
As I regain my composure, I am warmed to see the glimmer of Raegel’s light. I place a hand on her ghost lantern.
“I am sorry, Raegel. Your kindness overwhelms me. But you are right. I am the last, a fate I thought to carry alone. And yet, you imply a shared burden. I… do not understand.”
It is simple, Duendonen. Hold your prayer. Take up my lantern, and I will show you the world beyond these Halls. There is nothing for you here.
An intangible thing I cannot name falls from me, like armor shed in the aftermath of a battle lost. My exhalation as the burden recedes is the sigh of a thousand final breaths. The moment I have feared for so long is forgotten as another presents itself.
I stand slowly, with some difficulty, and lift the ghost lantern from Raegel’s grave.
“We are deep, Emissary… Raegel. It is a week’s climb to the Gates.”
Then breathe deep, Duendonen. I will light the way.
J. Scott King makes his home just north of Seattle. His first published short story, a novelette called ‘The Ethics of Elemental Servitude’, appeared in The Worlds Within in March of 2023, and recently sold to a small press for a print anthology coming out later this year. His short fiction has also appeared in Suburban Witchcraft Arts & Literature Magazine, Dark Horses Magazine, and 365tomorrows. When not telling stories, Scott studies Aikido and explores the mountains and coastlines of the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Susie, and his dog, Jack. At the end of January, Scott is retiring after a long career in technology, the last 14 years with Starbucks, to focus exclusively on writing.