WHAT DEATH CANNOT TOUCH || ONC 2023

xi. the last dawn

"No. I won't allow it," Abram stated, rising to his feet.

"So, you want Ilyusha to go instead?" Khaya asked. "He's seven."

She prepared herself to argue but her father fell silent, Ilya not so brave now seemed relieved to stay in the warmth of their house, and after searching for approval in the priest's face the soldier shrugged.

"Fine. Then, Khaya Abramovna, you may lead the way."

❆

The cemetery, veiled in mist and illuminated by the first pale sunrays, appeared peacefully and almost friendly when they arrived. No one would have suspected it to harbor undead creatures. Still, Khaya led Davor's mare over the graves, waiting for something to happen.

"You surprised me yesterday. I wouldn't have thought you so hard-hearted nor — You seem to know much about the undead," Kazminov said, walking right beside the horse. An honorable Bielogradian bogatyr ready to face Death and his children.

Khaya looked down at his halo of blond hair, he did not bother to cover with a hat today. The soldier seemed not to freeze, whereas she herself shivered underneath her coat in the frosty sun.

"My grandmother taught me."

"So, she was—"

"A passionate lover of tales. A trait I have inherited from her," Khaya interrupted him.

"Where is she now?" Davor asked without sparing her a glance.

"We are about to visit her," she replied.

"What happened?"

"Winter took her."

Khaya had thought about it all night: Voices demanding entrance, people claiming to have seen death, people vanishing—dying—and the dead rising ... the tale came to life but so much more wicked as if to mock their naivety. What would her grandma have thought of this?

"Beware the voices in the woods," she had once said. And—when Khaya had asked her, if the tales were true, if there were a house with chicken legs, a boy called Ivan Tsarevich who loved a girl called Marya Morevna, and a death god named Karachun—stroking her hair, "Some tales are true, some tales are just that. Stories. That, however, does not change the truth in their meaning. Never forget, in telling a tale you make it part of reality."

Yovanka had told her children to love the darkness for only the simple-minded thought the brightest path always the safest. And now the priest came and taught them how to fear it more than ever before.

They said to lay someone to rest beneath this earth is to give grief an altar. However, when Khaya stood in front of her grandmother's grave, she felt nothing. Wasn't that strange? This was the closest she could ever be to her grandmother again and her heart was empty. But only one look at her comb, her embroidery, her usual place at the oven and it tightened.

So, it had been until today. The fear of beholding not only soil and stones and the little wooden stakes that marked the grave but her body in undead form lay cold and heavy in her stomach like the stones marking the graves.

Nothing had happened, yet. The mare walked over grave by grave with the same, smooth movements and there was nothing but a silent cemetery. Maybe, in this case, the tales were wrong...

But then the wind rose with a faint murmuring, the horse shied and Khaya felt a shiver run down her spine. "Here."

Kazminov looked up at her. "Are you sure?"

"I am." Why, she did not know. Khaya slipped from the panting mare's back, stroking Zvyezda's head to calm her down, and then turned to the grave the soldier had yet begun to open.