In the pre-dawn light, Nesira dug a grave.

Behind the house where Nesira had lived with her family, there stood a small hill. Under this hill, hidden by grass and piled stones, were hundreds of sets of bones. Some recent, some old, some very old.

Nesira shoveled dry, black earth out of the deepening pit she stood in, panting from exertion and sweating despite the lingering night cold. It normally took two to dig a grave, but Nesira had no-one to help her. So she struggled and heaved, without complaint.

On the top of the hill stood a dozen cairns, small piles of rocks used in lieu of a proper gravestone, which was an expensive luxury for a bunch of deer-herders up in the mountains. Her father stood under one, her elder brother under another. Her uncle under a third. Her elder sister and younger brothers under a scattering more. Her paternal grandparents, who she had never met, did not have a cairn. Instead, their bodies shared the same marker, an enormous fir tree. It's roots reached deep, deeper, and deeper still entangling with the old bones of whoever had lived here before her family had arrived.

Nesira's mother's body sat propped up against the tree, it's glazed eyes staring accusingly at her. Condemning her for her weakness.

By the time the pit was deep enough, the sun had cleared the eastern mountains, and the tree cast a long, thin shadow, stretching across valley like a knife-wound.

"Well then, mother." Nesira said, rolling the nude body towards it's appointed hole. "Almost done." Laying her mother out flat beside the pit, she began the final rite. She had conducted it repeatedly before, so many times that she had set out all the materials in a row by the pit, in order of use.

"Nashona. Wife, mother, goatherd, weaver. Your transient tenancy in your body complete, we return your body to the womb of the earth." according to the note that mother had left, it she very specifically had to say we, even though she was alone.

Nesira manipulated her mother's stiff hands, warping them around wooden figurine, made for the occasion by a neighbor. She picked up the pile of flowers she had already picked- her mothers favorite, though Nesira did not know the name- and began stuffing them into the mortal wound on her mother's chest, until it could no longer be seen under the bloom of color. Nesira wiped her fingers dry on her clothes, already stained and bleached a dozen times.

"With your life at it's end, I bid your soul kind farewell," she said, opening her mothers mouth and sliding a chip of sulfur, no larger than a thumbnail, under her tongue. "Hasten. Hasten to the unknown world, beyond the sight of men or gods."

Leaving it's eyes open, per local custom, Nesira eased the body into the pit and began shoveling dirt on top of  it. By the time she was finished, it was nearly noon.

Nesira walked away without shedding a tear. She had already cried as much as she was going to. And, as her mother and father had both said, 'if you have time to cry, you are not sweating enough'. There was work to be done, always work to be done. Build, burn, hunt, eat, weave, fuck, sow, harvest. Day after day and season after season. We honor the dead by living.

***

Nesira's house was empty.

She and her family had always lived a frugal existence; a one, room house with two beds flanking a hearth. Stone walls, a thatched roof, and a dirt floor. The livestock had a more lavish home, father had often joked. It had once been loud, warm, and busy, but had gradually grown colder and quieter as the years passed and the family shrunk, one by one.

After her mother had died, most of the houses contents had been sold to neighbors. There was no way that Nesira could live in this house, maintain the grounds and herds, for long alone. And besides, per her mothers final wishes, she would be going on a long trip, and the house would be empty for so long that there would be little point to returning.

Everything that Nesira owned sat in a sack on the bed. Some clothes, some money, some bread and deer-jerky. And three things of particular importance. Nesira and her people were simple, practical people, not likely to form sentimental attachments to objects. These being the exceptions.

A knife from father. Old, rusted, but still somehow razor-sharp. A handle of simple wood wrapped in cloth. Her father had told her that it was magic, that it would always finds its way back to her if it was lost. Well, she still had it, so maybe that wasn't complete delusion.

A spool of thread and bone-needle from mother. The thread was thin, finely spun, but deceptively strong, and the needle had not broken or blunted in all these years.

A book of scrawled notes in both their handwriting.

She took a final look around the room. The only furniture left in the building was the two beds, the ash-filled hearth, and a cedar chest that was so large and had been full so long that it had begun to very gradually sink into the dirt floor, and could not be moved.

The blood from her mother's death had been swept away already.

With a long, heavy sigh, she turned around and walked away from the house where she had spent the whole eighteen years of her life. It had been standing empty, already built and abandoned, when her ancestors had found it; someone would make use of it sooner or later.

***

Nesira's house and family were one of a dozen or so scattered across a particular valley in the mountain. About two days walk along the banks of the river that ran down the center, she would come to a villiage. Her elder brother, the last of her siblings, lived there. He would give her some money and more clear instructions. Eventually, she was to make her way to her maternal grandmother, in a city called Sarkis. That was what her father's instructions read, in brief.

Her mother's instructions were not written in Talesrin, or any other language she could recognize. Just a chaotic mass of smudges and squiggles.

She set off walking in silence, following the river, with Ash, the one tamed deer she had not sold, following her, the spring sun shining down on them. Nesira was carrying most of the load herself, for the moment, but she would be buying more later in town. Like most Talesri people, her skin was an earthy ruddy-brown, speckled with light like inverted freckles. A lifetime of hard labor and a high-protein diet had left her with a compact, sturdy build, her face lean and angular, though only the most shameless of liars would call her 'pretty'. Hers was a body built to swing axes, carry goats, and wrestle angry deer.

"Hey, Nes!"

The speaker was Irix, walking out of the tree line. Irix was a year or two older than Nesira, the son of the woodcarver who had made mothers burial amulet, though he himself had taken more to hunting, as evidenced by the string of snared hares slung around his neck and dripping blood down his bare chest. Nesira felt, out of nowhere, a fleeting but potent urge to step towards him and begin licking the blood off of him.

She shrugged the though away, brushing it off like an annoying fly. "Hello, Irix." she said curtly.

Irix stepped towards her, smelling pleasantly of pine, damp earth, and fresh meat. "Sorry to hear about your mother. She was... she was a good neighbor."

Nesira's stomach clenched, a fist closing around her like a doll. "Don't be sorry," she said flatly, "It happens."

Irix looked her over. He looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind, then changed it again. "Are you hungry? I caught plenty today. How does rabbit soup sound for diner."

If you spend the night at his place, you will never leave again.

Do it. Take his offer. Throw that notebook in the fireplace, forget about all of this, and move on with your life.

Nesira glanced up at the sun. "I wish I could, but it's getting late. I have a brother down in Northfield and need to keep moving if I am going to get to him. He'll be worried if I take too long."

She kept walking past him, refusing to look him in the eye.

"Are you coming back? Someday?"

Don't look back. Don't look back.

"I haven't decided yet. We'll see." She kept walking, praying that he would let it go and walk away. Every step was harder than the last, as though she was sinking into mud, deeper and deeper with each stride. She had to do this, as painful as it was. She would never forgive herself for leaving, but knew she would never forgive herself for staying, either. Don't look back. Don't look back. Don't look back.

Fool. Loathsome fool. What do you owe the dead? Nothing. So why are you binding yourself to them?

She looked back. The dirt road stretched long and empty, until it disappeared in the falling night. Same behind as ahead.

Her throat tightened as though she was being strangled. She refused to cry, and so simply carried on in dead silence. Ash followed her by her side, similarly silent, chewing on grass and twigs as they caught it's attention.

After walking for several more hours in darkening silence, she decided it was time to settle down for the night.

Finding a nice spot- a flat topped outcroping of rock- she tied Ash loosely to a tree, with plenty of slack, and unrolled the blanked she had brought with, a thick blanket of tightly-wound fleece. She ate a few mouthfuls of bread, that she had baked the previous night, in the hearth of that empty house.

Standard practice was to keep a small amount of unused dough set aside from each batch, worked into the next. Day after day and year after year, this meant that each lineage, each household, had a very slightly different flavor of bread, despite being made of the same basic recipe.

Since she would not be returning, she had not bothered with leaving a starter, instead simply baking the whole thing, ending the line. It was a small thing, compared to the act of leaving home, but it was a very real thread of connection, stretching back god-knew how long, willfully and permanently severed.

She closed her eyes and chewed, very slowly, rolling it around on her tongue. It was denser and harder than when her mother had made it, but a trace of the house flavor remained, bitter and much saltier tasting than it should have been, despite her using barely any. She had hated it when she was young, but had slowly grown fond of it over the years. Or, perhaps, the starter-chain had subtly mutated at some point, adapting itself to her?

Once she had eaten her fill, she wrapped the blanket around herself, laid her head on her traveling sack as an improvised pillow, and nodded off to sleep, trusting in Ash or her own senses to wake her if need be.

Only after she was fully asleep did she begin to cry.