Tʜᴇ Pᴀᴛʜ Tᴏ Hɪɢʜɢᴀᴛᴇs

Sᴜʙʟɪᴍɪᴛʏ Oғ Lᴏss

Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 41

"Why exactly are we at a graveyard Reich?"

Asked you, your eyes strained to make out the plaque you had walked past before. Twice when you had been brought here, both with seemingly no reason to attend. Something you recognised now to be of similar mind.

"Becauze I don't vant to go home dizappointed," Reich explained, clambering out the car with a wobble, hitting the muddied ground with a squelch.

You turned to Soviet, a strange look between each other's eyes. "Plus graveyards are more likely to be haunted at night," Reich added as he began towards the great gates. His head tilted up to peer at the towering metal, curling and spiralling into the darkening sky.

You shook your head and stepped out of the car, shortly before Soviet did the same.

The gates were ever unchanging, the dark front façade of an entrance delved in abyss, heightened by the dying sun, which sunk somewhere beyond the horizon, just out of eyeshot. Yet was still prominent enough to keep the sky orange and bright before the darkness spread like a disease with no cure.

You walked through the gates, the uneven muddied ground squelched under you like a choking pig. The stench of filth and despair wafted over the clean evening breeze and made your head feel a little woozy.

Reich walked past the graves with sharp strides, like he already knew what he was looking for. But you chose not to follow him, you had seen those same few graves more than a few times now, and you had no desire to look again. They were the same then, they would be the same now. Never changing was death, whether the people below knew it or not, it would never become something new, it was doomed to repeat over and over, remain unchanged for as long as there was life to lose. What lay below was as aged as what marked it. They both worked in tandem, one destroyed by rain and wind, the other by its own helplessness. It was a beautiful symbiosis, whether the dead knew it or not, whether the living even noticed. But you had no time for it now, you didn't want to follow Reich, who seemed to get distracted by the large mausoleum tucked into the corner behind a large elm, you wanted to stay put. You weren't exactly sure what to even do anyway, perhaps if you were to sit down, Reich's ghost was to materialise in front of you, showing itself.

You chose to sit down at the bench you had sat at before, Prussia beside you. It was behind a few rows of gravestones, facing the ones against the outside wall, its metal body flanked by a pretty ornate lamp, though it wasn't on, it was too bright out still.

Perhaps you should have looked at the graves, it wouldn't have hurt to. But in the end, you didn't really want to, you had seen them enough, and you weren't in the right state of mind recently to be reminded of death as a concept. Maybe, if you had the power to go back to the first time you came here, you would have noticed familiar names. That way, you wouldn't have to sit here and wonder if you had missed something or not. You would already know.

"Hey."

You looked away from the line of graves, and met the face of Soviet standing over you, seeming rather bashful. "Mind if I sit vith you?"

You shuffled to the side a little, giving him the slightest bit more space for him to sit— which he did with a groan. He said nought as he sat, he didn't entertain you, or himself. The eerie silence of the waking world continued in monochromatic stillness, no birds sang here, the wind seemed afraid to pass over the corpse-ridden ground. It all felt so lonely, but alive all at once— like a funeral parlour.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" He asked suddenly, shattering the silence with his deep accented voice that always sounded like it came from his throat, rather than his tongue. "Not at all." You waved your hand dismissively.