The men and women who tidied the festivities’ fragments spoke nothing more to the scribe or the catfolk, and neither did they make eye contact. If the travelers approached, they would quickly turn their back, a discarded decoration in the grass suddenly seizing their full attention, or the splintering edge of a chair leg.

“We’ve witnessed more than we should have, as outsiders,” Alexis noted to Rock. “We’ve seen their shared secret, and learned their source of shame. This is not our home, and we shouldn’t tarry.”

There was a small ringing sound as the scribe’s boot connected with a silver bowl in the dirt. Alexis bent down. He recognized this trinket: just recently, there had been an entire table filled with such vessels, each cradling tiny white flowers, toffee candy, and lit candles in their grasp. Now they were scattered across the road, flung aside in Alexis’s wild wrestles with the animated pumpkin. Yet he recalled how his assailant had shrieked and withered at the silver bowl’s touch.

“Ma’am?” he asked, approaching the same pumpkin farmer from earlier. “Can you tell me about these bowls? What are they for? What do they represent?”

The lady affixed her large brown eyes on him, water welling in their recesses. If she had not been weeping yet, she would be soon. “Those are gifts fer the dead, lad.”

“Indeed?” Alexis upturned the silver chalices into his palm. Gathering from the dust, he first lay a bed of chrysanthemums, stacked a portion of candies atop, and topped the arrangement with an unlit candle, as he had seen others do. “How are they used? How do you…offer them to the departed?”

The lady stood wordlessly for perhaps ten seconds, before she finally pointed off westward. “We bury our dead there, between the trees. Had you any family there, you could take this to them.” She shook her head and gave a deep, shuddering sigh. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Now, please. I have things to do.”

Alexis bowed in farewell, but the lady had already withdrawn. He beckoned Rock to him as he restored another offering, and he instructed her to do the same.

“Souvenirs?” the catfolk asked excitedly.

Alexis shook his head. “Insurance. I have an inkling these will find some use tonight.”

* * *

The cemetery of Bayn o’Boon was not difficult to find. Alexis had, at first, held his lit lantern out before them as they approached the tree line, but Rock had taken its cage from him and blown out the flame.

“Cat’s eyes,” she said, tapping her brows with two fingers. “I’ll see better without that confounded glare messing up my eyesight. Just follow me.” She started ahead. “Oh, and if you fall down a hole, just…I dunno, yell or something.”

Dousing their light proved advantageous; as the two pressed deeper into the darkness, swirls of wispy white effervescence winged their way between the tree trunks, ethereal strands that Alexis would not have seen otherwise. The swirls swam of their own accord, seemingly drawn together from different directions, enfolding together in an open space in the trees just ahead.

There were lit candles in the clearing here. And headstones.

Alexis took a knee in the cool grass. The grave markers were little more than polished granite stones, each roughly the size of a pillow. With no one in the village to read or write, there would be no engraved names here. Instead, series of symbols had been carved into the center of each. A dove, a tree, and what looked like a river. An elk, a hammer, and a series of hash marks. Perhaps these were symbols of what had been most important to the dearly departed—or whatever people thought of first when they were brought to mind.

And atop each of these markers was carefully set a tiny silver bowl, each of their contents a contribution to remembered souls. The layer of mist hovered like a cloud of burnt incense over this solemn cemetery, its phosphorous form the only interruption in the otherwise barren brush.

“Look,” said Rock, pointing to the rear of the clearing. “Over here.”

While the rest of the fog hung in a cool layer, suspended well above the rest of the dewed ground, here it pooled in a thick patch on the ground. Beneath this, a gravestone lay, barely visible in the lengthening weeds. Rainwater had potted its stained surface, and whatever symbols it might have held had been long worn away.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Do you think…this was the witch’s?” Rock asked.

“It’s a possibility; but were I to venture a guess, I would think not,” Alexis quietly conferred. “This rock is far older than the ten years that have elapsed. Plus, there was something said by the voice in the flames. Something that tells me they’d laid no stone to commemorate her.”

The chill of death gives but penury, when none doth keep thy memory.

Still, this was a neglected plot before them. Perhaps this individual’s family had simply not visited yet this evening. Perhaps, even, they had no more living descendants to honor them. Alexis placed one of the arrangements he carried upon the ancient headstone, using his flint and steel to light the candle at its center. Its glow illuminated the fog about it like a tiny sun breaching a cloudbank.

Then, something in the cloying condensation seemed to relax, and the hovering ground cloud gradually loosened.

If it’s one thing that Alexis had learned in his time in Cloisterkeep, it’s that the magic of the Realms did not always follow the same laws. The supernatural obeyed as much the laws of empirical reproduction as it did the devout faiths of local religions. And here, in this little corner of the world, the residents of Bayn o’Boon could still reach out to their loved ones after death, and help them pass on.

There was, of course, another more subtle and insidious implication to this arrangement. But Alexis would not voice it just yet.

“Rest, spirit, whoever you are,” he prayed, as the mist rose up to join its brethren between the trees.

* * *

“So you’re saying this burned up windmill—and the witch’s grave—are somewhere west of us?”

“Precisely,” nodded Alexis. The two had happened upon a thin forest trail running in generally the same direction. The scribe-turned-wanderer was thankful for its presence, as he had quickly become tired of tree branches snapped back into his face.

“Well I just came from this way, this afternoon! Wish I’d have known about the witch earlier. I’d have walked right into her little windmill and shook my fist in her face!’”

Alexis smiled and blinked a few times in the dark. “I’m not certain how well that would have worked out, if at all. But, regardless. If you came this way earlier, did you see any windmill?”

“Nah. Nothing interesting for miles. Just a bunch of old stones and rotted wood on top of one hill.”

“That may be exactly what we’re looking for. Remember, it burned down ten years ago. If you can recall its location, we can head directly there.”

The two shared a silence for several minutes, until Rock abruptly halted in her tracks. Her ears perked up to stand straight atop her head.

“What?” Alexis whispered as quietly as he could. “What is it?”

Rock slowly settled to the ground, like a silk handkerchief dropped into the air, or a snowman melting in the spring sunshine. Her tail twitched expectantly. Alexis had seen this behavior before: a tomcat, sighting a bird on a road, had once slunk into the nearby weeds in its hunt. He attempted Rock’s delicate crouching movement and nearly fell over from the effort.

“Do you hear that?” the catfolk whispered.

“I don’t,” Alexis admitted. “What do you—”

A pebble ricocheted off the back of his head. “Go on up!” a jeering voice called from the rear.

Alexis glanced behind them. Blocking their retreat were two luminous forms, no higher than his shoulder. Ghostly children. The edges of their blue outlines wavered like fires burning in a hearth. The dark voids of their eyes swallowed light hungrily, like the villainous eyes that had seized Alexis in a stare from the depths of the bonfire.

“Well? Go on up, then, old woman!” The sound had come from one of the figures, or perhaps both at once.

Rock stepped next to her new friend. “Want me to end them?” she hissed. Her talons flexed eagerly.

“Let’s not automatically resort to violence, if we can find another way,” Alexis answered. “Plus, I’m not so certain you could end them so easily. Look at them carefully. Do they not seem…familiar to you?”

“Why? Have I beaten up ghost children before?”

“No, not that.” Alexis nodded to the one on the right, the one slightly taller and stockier. “Look carefully at his face. The set of his jaw. The way he folds his arms. The way he holds himself up.”

Rock’s glassy eyes squinted. The two transparent forms wavered back and forth, shifting their weight from one foot to the other. The taller one bent down, picked up another pebbled, and sailed it past their ears. “Go on up!” it repeated.

“It’s…you?” Rock guessed. “Sorry, I have trouble telling all of you apart. You don’t have distinct fur patterns and smells, like catfolk.”

“It’s the man from earlier tonight. The one who took umbrage at the elder’s story. The one who walked off in a huff. This is what he must have looked like, ten years ago. And this is what it must have felt like, being Mad Maub, traveling through the forest trails each day. Alone.”

“Well? Go on up, then, old woman!” came the call again. The jeering boys rocked back and forth on their heels, their challenge obvious.

“These aren’t real people, and they aren’t even real ghosts,” Alexis continued, untensing and returning to his full height. “They’re memories. Memories empowered by the witch’s ire, made real this most special night of the year. And we’re just in the right place at the right time to experience them too, I guess. Ow!” Another stone had found its mark. “Let’s keep moving.”

The two travelers continued their journey along the forest path, arms held up to ward off errant missiles, as the memories of malice followed closely in their wake.