As the days passed by, winter died before our eyes. The trees sprouted waxy new leaves and the soil softened, freeing itself from the shackles of frost.

The bare fields were now beginning to bustle with activity and horses were harnessed for ploughing.

Further down, men were already in the midst of work, laughing good-heartedly amongst each other, even though their foreheads were slick with sweat and their muscles aching from the relentless exercise. It was demanding work, but the people were glad to emerge from a dreary, cold winter into the busy liveliness of spring.

The Chaplain offered his support by blessing the fields with the blood sacrifices from the Feast. We walked along the edge of the fields, stopping every few metres to carefully measure out portions of blood from the bowl and dilute it with blessed water before pouring the solution into the field. As the kneeling Chaplain spun fervent prayers with every drop spilt, I stood behind him with the heavy water jug in my arms. I was beyond bored. I did not participate in his prayers, and instead chose to watch the people at work, which quickly proved to be just as dull.

Until I saw the unmistakable, golden-maned figure in a distant field. Clearly, Valdemar had been working, too, but now he was at rest. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his tunic, for all the world looking quite unnaturally exhausted. He leaned against the wooden plough, his head upturned to the sun, chest heaving, and I felt an odd twinge of apprehension. He should not have been that tired already, not so early into the day. But maybe, I told myself, a boy unused to farmwork simply does not possess the stamina for it.

A girl ran up to Valdemar. She said something to him, and pushed a handkerchief into his hand. He wiped his forehead with it and laughed. The girl did not go away and continued her chatter. I recognised her, of course, she was the one I saw at the Feast and many times before then, but I did not know her name and did not much care to know it. She seemed far too eager, running up to him like that.

“Help me up, boy.” said the Chaplain, and I wrenched my eyes away from the fields. The Chaplain rose to his feet with my support. “Damn these knees.” He grumbled.

—

We established a routine. Every evening, without fail, we would meet up at the tree that I came to think of as our own. He would always be there before me, always sitting or leaning against the trunk and carving a piece of wood. And every time, when he saw me, he’d smile.

That one little dance changed something between us, loosened a knot of wariness in me that I didn't even know existed. I could mostly relax, now, in front of his sunlit beauty, though I still could not claim to guess at his inner thoughts.

Today, when he saw me coming toward him, he stood up and waved. He held a bottle in his hand.

“Busy day, Gustav?” Valdemar greeted me with his customary smile.

“The Chaplain dragged me along with him to bless the fields.”

“Really? Whatever’s the point in that?”

I frowned. “So the soil would be healthy, and Asmara would help the crops grow.”

“Well! If She’ll do that, then there is no need for us to work the fields, then, is there? Should have told me earlier. I’d have slept in.”

I did not like him to speak so carelessly of the Goddess, though it was not unusual for him to make such remarks - it truly was no wonder that the Chaplain hated Valdemar with his whole, elderly heart. But I was not the Chaplain, and so reconciled his words with the simple fact that he had a loose, Woltairian upbringing that left him uneducated in the things that Aquirians considered to be foundational. Still, the mockery felt barbed.

“You just tire too quickly.” I said defensively.

“Do I?”

“Yes, I saw you in the fields this morning. You looked exhausted.”

The smile dropped from his face. “Anyone would be a bit tired after such work.”

“Not like that, no, not so quickly.”

“I was not tired, anyway. You saw it wrong.” He said with a dismissive flick of his wrist. Liquid sloshed in the bottle.

I shrugged and let the matter drop. It didn’t really matter, did it?

“What do you have here?” I asked instead, gesturing to the bottle.

“Starka.” He said, and the smile was already back on his face. “A little reward I got for my hard work today. I’ve never tried it, of course, we don’t have such a thing in Woltair - I thought you could join me, and show me how the locals handle their drink.”

I hesitated. Alcohol was, at its very core, created to temporarily distort the body and mind. People indulged in it until their very blood ran thin with it, until even the smallest of wounds began to bleed with unnatural rapidity.

Was it not ironic?

The Chaplain called me corrupted. My blood - miasma. But what about his blood, on the nights when he drank himself into a deluded stupor, those nights when he held my shoulders and complained of the High Priest? And what of the men who, on Asmara’s Feast, came to sacrifice their blood when their breath still reeked of vodka?

How did the Goddess allow this?

When I was younger and more impatient, I snuck a bottle of starka out of the cellar. I had a knife with me. I did it with the expectation that, somehow, the fiery liquid would wash the horrors out of my blood.

Instead I ended up in the old healer woman’s cottage, my wrists wrapped in yarrow. Still cursed. Incorrigible.

I hadn’t touched alcohol since then.

Valdemar was watching me with his head slightly tilted, like a bird. He noticed my uncertainty. “Won’t you join me?” He asked again. “It’s not fun to drink alone.”

What would he think if I told him of my inexperience? Something told me that he would be disappointed; I remembered the flash of coldness in his eyes when I tried to refuse the dance.

“I’ll drink.” I heard myself say.

He beamed at me - pretty, pretty smile, heartbreaking in its careless perfection. “Good! Come sit. I don’t think we need cups. I didn’t bring any, and it would be too much effort to go and get some now. Go on, Gustav, sit down.”

I obeyed, and crouched down on the grass beside him. He leaned back against the tree.

“Want to have some first?” Asked Valdemar.

“Uh, no, it’s yours. You first.”

He took a generous swig. Then, he gasped and burst into laughter. “Ah, on Jomun’s blood, it burns!”

I grimaced. “You were a bit too brave with that.”

“Hm. Pretty good though,” he said after a second of consideration. He pushed the bottle into my hands. “Your turn.”

“Thanks,” I said, staring rather blankly at the starka. It smelled sweet.

I closed my eyes and took a drink. Not enough to make me gasp, but enough for it to look like I was not afraid. The liquid burned as it went down my throat, and I coughed a little, and Valdemar laughed again. But the after-taste was of apples and herbs - and it didn’t seem as horrible as I remembered it.

Still, I thought, best not to overdo it. Just a couple of drinks and then I’ll find an excuse to leave the rest to him.

Two hours later, the bottle was more than half-empty and my head felt like a fluffy white cloud.

Valdemar lay on his back, giggling at something again. “Oh, this is not like absinthe at all! I hated it, Gustav, it tasted like medicine!”

“Oh, why’d you drink it, then?”

“Why not! He loved it - so I drank it.”

“Who did?” I asked, and I sat up to get a better look at him. The world swayed around me in a not unpleasant way.

“Oh, Cal…hm.” Valdemar paused, and scrunched up his nose. “No, it reminded me too much of my father’s bedside. All those herbal medicines the doctor prescribed him. And then those that he didn’t prescribe, but my mother bought from the bleeding old witch down the street. All the same. But this! This is nice!” and he held up the bottle triumphantly.

“I didn't know your father was ill,” I said, and even as the words left my mouth I remembered the gossip.

Poor little widow…

“Yes. Ill and…gone. You're Aquirian. I know what you want to say. He is gone to the earth, to the Earthen Mother's embrace. In Woltair they told us he dispersed into the wind and that his soul shall play on Lady Prentirose's lyre. And in Feryon - what would they say? What would they say?”

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“I don't know.”

“No, neither do I.” He sighed, and closed his eyes.

“And your mother..she's sick too?”

“Sick with heartbreak, more like.” He said bitterly. “She does nothing. She sleeps, and she cries, and she does nothing. Grandfather forces gruel into her mouth.”

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

Valdemar opened his eyes and looked at me. “Do you wonder what it would feel like to watch your other half die? It would kill me, too.”

“I hope you never have to experience that.”

“Someone always has to go first…” He trailed off again.

I gazed out to the fields. “My mother,” I started tentatively, “she cries a lot too, at the graves of my siblings. I've never even met them.”

“Mhm. That's what graves are for.”

“I don't think anyone would cry on mine.” I admitted, and the still-sharp corner of my mind instantly rebuked me for it.

Valdemar snorted. “Well, when someone cries on your siblings’ graves, some of their tears might still land on yours by accident.”

“Huh?” I looked at him with some puzzlement. Then I shook my head. “No. I don't want to be buried with the rest. I want to be buried with the oldest graves, up on the hill.”

“Hm. Why’s that?”

“I want to be at peace. If no living person goes near me, then maybe my body won’t be tempted to rise. Maybe I’ll just sleep.”

“Do you think that’s why they’re up there?”

“I think they’re up there because they’re the oldest. The cemetery spreads out from them, like petals from a flower.”

“Or they’re up there because they were thought to be vrykolakas.”

“...surely not.”

“When dawn comes, that place up there is the first to bask in it - isn’t that so? The monsters must run early back to their homes, lest they be burnt to cinder.” He said, and took another swig of the starka. He was awfully articulate for his presumably drunken state.

“Don’t say that. And anyway, they’d be restrained from getting up in the first place.” Assuming the restraints are strong enough, I thought.

“Like how?”

“Decapitation, or burying them face down so they bite into the soil. Or both, or some other method…”

“Ah, so there’s our solution.” Valdemar said. “All we need to do to know whether they’re just the oldest graves or vrykolakas’ graves is to dig them right up.”

I stared at him. “Dig them up?”

“Yes! That’s the only way to know for sure.”

In a way that I hated to admit, he’d read my heart. I had stood by those graves and lamented the lack of external signs of doom; no special words or symbols, no menacing aura or a lingering nightly creature to help discern where a monster might have slept beneath the earth.

Yet to undig a grave? It was like tearing someone out of Asmara’s embrace, stealing a mortal child from its true, eternal Mother. Would she rage? Would she cry? Would she even wish to get them back, after they have been taken from her once, and tainted by our hands?

Would she - would she -

“There’s no harm in it.” Valdemar said firmly. “Nobody will know. The soil is so damp that we’ll make quick work of it. By the time the sun rises, we’ll have it covered back up again, and will be all the wiser for it.”

“That’s a horrible idea. It’s heretical!”

He just shrugged. “I’ll go get the shovels.”

I watched him blankly as he started to make his way down toward the houses, a slight sway in his walk.

I glanced down at the starka he left beside me. I picked it up, turned it idly in my hand - it wasn’t completely empty, not yet - and, with a sigh, drank it down to the bottom.

I got to my feet and ran after him.

—

We dug the grave mutely, the shk shk of our shovels unnaturally loud in the still night.

I noticed how Valdemar struggled; how he swayed from his drunkenness, and how he cursed under his breath, hardly able to lift the soil.

The whole situation had an edge of unreality to it. As my hands worked with the shovel, my thoughts wandered idly somewhere in the back alleys of my mind, not once stopping to take note of what we were doing.

The birches rustled around us, the chill air bit my sweating skin, and an owl flew by somewhere overhead. The hole was slowly getting deeper.

When the first bit of white cloth emerged from the soil, my hands stilled for just a moment, I felt an ode to the Goddess slip from my lips. But then Valdemar saw it too and exclaimed in delight, and I shut my mouth in silence.

He dropped the shovel and started digging away with his hands, uncovering more and more of the burial shroud.

The last of the earth cleared away, Valdemar found the edge of the once-white fabric and pulled it open.

Moonlight fell over the bones. There was no odour to them. Only the earth, only the starka on my breath. A ring of metal gleamed silver, its ends embedded into the soil on either side of the skeleton’s neck.

Valdemar traced his finger along the metal’s edge with the same softness as when he touched my jaw. “What is this?” He asked.

“A sickle.” My voice was a choked whisper. “If it - if the corpse rose, it would have sliced its throat open on it.”

Another preventative measure. The skeleton we looked at now was buried like a vrykolakas, there was no doubt of that, and yet it had decayed to nothing but an arrangement of bones. It was just a body, falsely accused. Or it killed itself on the sickle.

I leaned forward to get a better look - if there was blood on it… but it was too dark, and Valdemar obscured my view, his hand still resting on the sickle.

Vrykolakas or not, this man or woman had been buried like one. The other graves here were more than likely of the same sort. I’d imagined them to be normal, forgotten people, the names on their gravestones eroded by the rain and the wind, their identities lost to time. I thought I’d find peace amongst them. Just as forgotten. Just as eroded. Without reason I was pulled back to my doom even when I thought to escape it.

Was this destiny, too? Or a meaningless coincidence? I had to know.

“Is there blood on–” I started, but Valdemar cut me off.

“Do you have superstitions around skeletons rising from the grave?”

His sudden question caught me off-guard. “No, we don’t, why–”

“Good. Neither do I.”

With a swift motion, he pulled out the sickle and threw it far into the trees. I gaped at him.

“Wonder if it’ll rise now?” He grinned, and then rose to stand beside me.

“You can’t just do that!”

“Why not? Nobody will miss a thing. And it’s funny.” His grin widened. “Look at it! Just bones! So much space…we’d fit right in.” Valdemar suddenly gripped my arm and stepped back, pulling me with him.

I stumbled forward and, realising his intentions, quickly circled my arm around his back and turned us around. He swayed and tripped backwards, sending us both tumbling. We rolled and I hissed as my back hit the grass.

Valdemar simply tilted his head and asked guilelessly, “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing?” I echoed, looking up at him with consternation. He’d caged me in between his legs, his hand pressing down on my chest, and were it not for my consciousness of the exposed skeleton lying in its hole - was it watching? Was the Goddess watching? - were it not for the disorientating buzzing in my head, I very well might have lost my mind.

Valdemar looked down at me, pondering, if he were indeed still capable of that in his present state. Then he laughed. “Gustav, have you never laid in soil? Heard the tiny life surrounding you and stared at the stars and imagined your body melting and wondered - what will become of my mortal coil?”

“Asmara will take us into her embrace.” I said.

He leaned over me, his long hair curtaining our faces as he muttered, “You have never imagined it.” I thought I saw a twinkle of derision in his dark eyes.

I grabbed Valdemar by the shoulders, and he put up no resistance when I flipped us over and pinned him down to the ground. He simply laughed again. I was getting tired of that laughter, that deeply pleasant sound I’d always coveted - but not like this, not when it was a clear consequence of his drifting, imbibed mind.

“You need to stop,” I said. “This is too much.”

“It’s not.”

“It is! Let us cover the - the grave again and go home.”

He stared quite blankly at me for a second, then shook his head. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m being silly?”

“It’s only a grave! And you said–”

“Not only.” I cut him off, and murmured some vague admonishments at him, quite lacking the energy to actually explain the sacrilege we were committing - had committed.

He listened to me quietly but when I finished speaking he, of course, laughed once more. I groaned in frustration.

My heart quivered when he suddenly reached out and brushed his fingertips along my throat. Valdemar’s eyes were locked to mine, and they were no longer mosaics as they were in the chapel, but fractured pieces of moonlight and bright reflections of his own mirth. Silver suited him just as much as gold, and it granted him an ethereal coldness that made me shiver as his hand drifted up to the back of my neck.

His grip tightened and I released a shaky breath. “Vald-”

Before I could even react, Valdemar hooked his leg over my waist and hauled us right into the grave.

I landed with a loud crack, old bones splintering beneath my weight. My heart skipped a sickening beat.“What the hell, Valdemar?!”

The man in question was still laughing, laying half on top of me with his chest pressed against my shoulder and leg thrown over me. There were bits of soil in his hair, and I knew that we would get back home looking like we’d…crawled out of a grave. Oh, literally. I could only sigh in frustration.

“Told you we’d fit.” He murmured softly.

“..No. We need to get out - what are you even thinking?”

“You said you want to be buried here.”

“Not now!” I snapped at him, raising myself on my elbows. I winced as I felt another piece of bone crunch under me. “Not literally right here.”

Valdemar blinked owlishly at me. Then he put his hand on my chest and firmly pressed me down. “What does it matter? Settle yourself. You move too much.” He said.

Resigned, I let him lay me back in the grave. He shifted and put his head on my shoulder, and gazed up at me with those lovely, gold-lashed eyes. When I looked at him, he smiled. I turned my head away. An earthworm wiggled obliviously in the wall of soil. Something was poking into my back. A rib?

This was not how I imagined it would happen - Valdemar, lying beside me. I dreamed of his arms around me at night, of his body pressed against me as we lay in my bed, or even on the grass by our familiar tree. I didn’t think that it would happen in a cold and musty grave, the dry-apple scent of starka hanging off of us, my nightly prayers to Asmara hopelessly stuck in the back of my throat.

But even though it was not as I had hoped, Valdemar was beside me, and I didn’t mind the cold - he was enough to keep me warm. His breathing grew deeper as he sank into sleep, his soft locks tickling my cheek. Slowly, I wrapped an arm around his waist, and turned my gaze up to the night sky. I listened to his slow and steady heartbeat, letting it lull me until the stars blurred in my eyes and I felt myself on the edge of a dream.

And for the first time in many years, I had forgotten to listen for the tell-tale beat of my own doomed heart.