The phrase "Death is simply a part of life" is carved into the entryway arch of every Academy's main hall. This motto and the ever present prospect of your career being cut short abruptly are the only two things all five schools are accepted to have in common.

From the first day of the first year that a student attends classes, the genuine dangers of their profession are drilled into them. They are taught to appreciate every day they wake up to because they might not get another one. It is a hard lesson and a morbid lesson, but a necessary one. It is the reality they face, and the sooner they accept it, the better professionals they will be.

Another stark reality is that a proper funeral is very rarely possible. When a contracted agent falls in the line of duty, they almost always do well inside the perimeter of a place they had no "legitimate" right to be. While the world has learned to honor the presence of both jobs as a necessary evil, most individuals believe that their part of the bargain ends when that evil is found on their property. In your own backyard, all bets are off.

As a result, the bodies of the fallen are rarely ever returned to the Academies. Most people wouldn't know where to begin the journey home, even if they felt so inclined. Other people think they're not worth the trouble and simply chuck them onto the refuse piles or have their gardeners use them to nourish the tomatoes. Still others choose to string the unfortunate victims up on their gates or place their heads on pikes to serve as an example to any future intruders. However, such garish behavior tends to qualify the grisly perpetrator for special discounts on future contracts.

The Academies accept that failing to return a corpse is to be expected, but desecrating them in any particularly horrific manner activates an Open Contract clause in ancient Academy code. No official signee and no money changes hands. The underworld simply reaches the consensus that you need to be robbed blind and killed, and not necessarily in that order. It all goes back to the belief that murder and theft are not things you need to be uncivil about.

This lifestyle is carried out on the bleeding edge of oblivion, where even making friends is risky because you never know who might not come back the following day. It fosters a bond between those who exist within it. It's a bond akin to those found among soldiers, guards, and adventurers, where regardless of your personal feelings for the person standing next to you, you know that they at least dare to suit up each day and step willingly out into the unknown, right alongside you. And because of this, assassins and thieves are big on remembrance, like those more noble professions who share similar connections. The fallen are honored and respected for doing what they were trained to do right to the end because it could always be you the next night, and you would hope and expect the same regard be given to you, wherever you might lie.

As such, even in the all-too-common absence of a body, a ceremony is performed whenever a brother or sister doesn't come home at dawn, and news arrives that they never will. The tradition's origins are lost, dating back to when the Academies were still at war and record-keeping was not a high priority amid the violence. But somewhere along the line, someone discovered the Twilight Bloom.

Twilight Bloom is a swiftly growing flowering tree that thrives in nearly any climate. During the spring and summer, its leaves are of the darkest greens, its bark a mixture of grays that give it the appearance of being nestled in shadows even in the brightest of sunlight, and interspersed among the branches are numerous small flower pods. Every evening, as the sun begins to set, these pods open to reveal blossoms of the deepest purple, the smell of which permeates the air for a great distance in any direction, reminiscent of lilacs after the rain. When all the branches are bare in the winter, the bark turns midnight black and seems to absorb all the light the cold winter sun can give.

To the untrained eye, it seems a unique, if not wholly remarkable specimen. To an assassin or a thief, however, it is a living reminder of those whose names in the registries now have a red line drawn through them.

Whenever a death is confirmed, the leaders of the victim's alma mater will go to a specifically marked section of land near their academy and plant a Twilight Bloom sapling, cultivated within the Academy year-round, as the need is never far off. At the base of the sapling, given sufficient distance to avoid interfering with the plant's growth, a marble slab will be placed with the name, date of birth (approximate), date of death (also typically approximate), and professional insignia of the person the tree memorializes. Beneath the slab, all the personal effects that could be retrieved from their residence are buried out of principle.

The trees are always planted in neat rows, much like the headstones of a cemetery would be, and no one is ever allowed to uproot or damage any of them. When the allotted land is full, its perimeter is simply expanded as needed. No one's tree is ever, EVER, willfully uprooted or destroyed, and to do so warrants a burial without the benefit of such trappings.

These symbolic final resting places have come to be known as the Shadowgroves. There is nary an Academy graduate who reaches any kind of wizened age, who can help but get misty-eyed whenever they smell the flowers, their thoughts drifting back to the words spoken at every planting ceremony into the very mists of time.

"We plant this tree in our comrade's memory, so that its flowers may awaken to all the sunsets they cannot."

Albanos found himself standing at the edge of the Kelsai Shadowgrove. He frantically searched his person one more time in case he had stashed an emergency cigarette somewhere, muttering curses when this proved once again not to be the case. His nerves would have to make do. They were wholly uncertain of this plan.

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Out here on the edge, the trees were still young and small, but as you looked further down the carefully spaced aisles, the trunks became broader, and the light dimmer. The Kelsai grove had been done in an outwardly spiraling rectangular pattern, with the oldest trees occupying the center and new additions wrapping slowly around them over the years. Four centuries is a long time in this business. The grove was now a forest in its own right.

This centralized take on funerary horticulture gave the canopy a vague pyramid shape when viewed from a sufficient distance; the oldest, tallest trees looming up in the middle, everything tapering down from there. Twilight Bloom could get quite large given enough time, but the trees had no trouble existing near one another, as some plants do. No poison-releasing roots, aggressive hoarding of groundwater, or canopy shyness. Just peaceful, well-ordered silence, stretching on, row after row. It was a stark, likely welcome contrast to the kinds of lives led by the people they stood vigil over.

Albanos paced along the edge of the wood, torn between curiosity and things he did not want to face yet. Sure, he'd been honest with Billicks and Elwhite; he did have people in there, but that didn't bother him. Thirty years ago, he graduated in a class of 110 assassins and was now, according to the meticulously kept books, one of 18 surviving members. Class reunions fell out of fashion rapidly.

People broke, people died, people went away. You came to terms with that early on in your career, or you joined them by your own hand. The people he knew there didn't bother him. It was the person, the one tree over on the western edge, fifty-three rows up from the southern border the last time he'd been here, that had him stalling as long as he could.

The logical, rational parts of his mind told him he could just avoid it. He knew where it was and could steer clear. However, the irrational and often more accurate parts reminded him that it was in the nature of a forest to turn people around and take them to all the places they didn't want to be.

Another, much quieter part that he'd spent years learning to ignore suggested it might even be a betrayal to be in the grove after all this time and not even say hello. Now that he’d been given the chance he had assumed he would never have.

He turned to leave, only to find his curiosity yammering away again, holding him in place. There was a girl in there somewhere, still very much alive, that he needed to get some answers out of. This might be his only chance to do that before the responsibilities of running a school took over his life. She didn't seem like the kind of person who would respond to being called to his office for a chat, nor would he dare approach her room. Gods only knew what kinds of nasty, sharp, spring-loaded objects would be waiting there. It was either here now or here later. Either way, “here” was figuring heavily into the equation.

"I'm a grown man arguing with trees," he muttered to no one. "It would not speak highly of my qualifications if the trees managed to win."

With a final, resigned sigh, he turned and plunged into the gap between two saplings. They were as close to the center of this side of the grove as he could estimate, and the center was where he was sure he needed to be.

The going was easy, as a dedicated group of retirees and adjacent Kelsai townsfolk who understood the significance kept the pathways clear of wild undergrowth. They cleared off all the brush and carefully uprooted and transplanted any wild saplings they found to the village nursery, where they would be kept and looked after until they were needed for another somber ceremony. A dim first-year student could move silently on the soft grass beneath the trees. Albanos was a mote of dust on the breeze.

Featureless minutes passed as the trunks thickened, the canopy grew loftier, and the early afternoon sunlight faded to the gray, leaf-filtered ambiance the groves had become known for. Albanos stopped periodically to check and see that the trees were still growing in size along his path, to be sure he had caught the middle and begun moving out the other side again. It was depressing how large this place had gotten. After a few twists and turns to correct his position among the rows, he found what he was looking for.

The four trees that formed the middle of the spiral had been placed deliberately farther apart than the rest of their successors. This formed a small clearing in the middle of the Shadowgrove, into which streaks of natural sunlight could filter, even through the expansive branches of the largest Twilight Blooms.

The first recognized casualties of the Kelsai Academy were marked here. A small shrine was in the center, bathed in dappled afternoon sun. A worn stone monument of a wolf defiantly bayed at the moon, erected by the first graduating class to commemorate all those who would eventually follow their friends into the afterlife. At the base of the shrine knelt a black-cloaked figure, its back to him, head bowed.

He was sure he was still moving as quiet as death, but the moment he broke the plane of the trees leading into the clearing, the hood of the cloak raised a bit.

"I told you all not to disturb me here," said a rather cold-sounding female voice. "I suggest going back the way you came."

Albanos smiled despite himself.

"That would be rather silly. I made several wrong turns on my way here. I'd much rather go back using a more direct route."

The figure began to stand with deliberate, calculated menace, which was fine. He figured he'd dealt with far worse in his life.

Well, probably.