On returning

On returning

When a restless body takes a killing wound, the breath does not at once depart. Body and breath enter together the state the folk call the grace: the body silent, the breath loose around it, neither in nor away. If left untouched, the breath settles back into the flesh and the body rises by itself — late, hurt, fevered, but the same body and the same person. This is the second breath, and it is how most restless mortals survive what should have killed them. The recovery is slow and rough; the rougher the wound, the longer the lying-still, and the one who walks afterwards is not the one who fell. The body, in some accounting, has paid its price.

The newly-born of any country wear a first protection — a binding of the breath that no inscriptionist made and no guild collected coin on, which fades as the wearer matures. We do not understand the mechanism. We are confident the fading is real, having confirmed it with augurs in four kingdoms and once, unwillingly, with the careful death of a stubborn apprentice. Whether something of the same kind guards others — under what circumstances, and how often — is a question our correspondence has not been able to settle.

The grace may be denied. A body burned before it has risen cannot rise; a body buried during grace cannot rise; a body dismembered, dropped from a height into deep water, or marked with a grave-Stone properly inscribed cannot rise. These are the practical finishing rites, and any soldier who has been in the field for two seasons knows them.

They are also the bedrock of every funerary practice in every culture we have travelled in. Every kingdom has its rites. They are not optional ceremonies, however the priests dress them up; they are how a death is made to stick. The mariners drown their dead during the grace; the stone-folk inscribe grave-Stones in patterns that have not changed in twelve generations; the sun-tongued burn openly, with song, until the bone is char; the frost-marked expose the dead on platforms where the cold and the dead-marker-ravens finish the work over many days. The forms vary enormously. The function is the same. Cultures whose rites have lapsed, in famine or war or the carelessness of an unbelieving generation, sometimes find their graveyards walking in the spring. The folk-tales of revenants and the late-rising dead are not metaphor; they are what happens when a rite has been done wrong.

Artisans can offer a cleaner return than the second breath, for those who can afford one — inscribed tokens worn against the body that, at the moment of dying, draw the breath back into the flesh without the long lying-still. Their forms vary, their function is one: a faster, fuller return, chosen at the moment of the wearer’s death rather than left to the substrate’s slow re-anchoring. These are guilded crafts everywhere we have travelled, with stamps and assayers and the usual apparatus of any trade the kings find profitable to tax.

There is, separately, the wending: a rare and dangerous inscription, taught only in certain shrines and certain hidden masters’ workshops, by which a restless breath may be unwound from its body altogether and cast outward, taking up another body somewhere else. This is the only honest path by which a restless one leaves the flesh they have been living in. It is not done casually. The body left behind dies as empty matter and drops what it carried, and the breath, where it next wakes, is in another life in another place — among strangers, in a body that was someone else’s, with the inventory and station and friendships of one’s old life left behind on the corpse. We have spoken with two such wenders; their accounts are consistent, and both said the decision was the gravest they had ever made. In some kingdoms the rite is a sacrament; in others, the workshops are hunted, and a wender who is identified is held to be the abandoner of his prior obligations, and the law will sometimes follow him into his new face.

Some deaths neither the second breath nor any artisan’s craft can answer. Of these we will not write in detail. Some are caused by what lives below.