Death and Remembrance

I have been a guest at funerals on every coast of the known world. The dead are everywhere treated as travelers starting a new journey: washed, dressed, provisioned, and pointed with great confidence in some direction. We differ only on the destination.
— Historian Marev Ilyasin, The Courtesies of Grief

On a Universal Custom

Among all the customs of the known world, in all their variety and their contradiction, there is exactly one that admits no exception: no people anywhere simply leaves its dead. The body may be burned, sunk, raised toward the sky or sealed in stone; it may be mourned for an afternoon or for a generation; but it is always, everywhere, attended to. Scholars have proposed many explanations for this agreement, while the dead themselves have declined to comment.

The reader in search of certainties is warned that this entry contains none. What the living do is something the Compendium can record; where the dead go is not, and the Compendium will not pretend otherwise.

What Is Done with the Body

In the Samsharan Empire, the dead are given to the sun. The body is carried at dawn to open biers on the walls or the high rocks beyond them, where Sharan may look upon it fully, and the desert is left to finish the matter in its own time. Those who fall gloriously in the arena are carried out to the loudest mourning the empire permits itself, which is not a lot; grief beyond a certain measure is thought to suggest doubt in the judgment of the light, and is violently politely discouraged.

In the Tsardom of Sinyara, the dead sail. The body is sewn into a weighted shroud and given to the sea beyond the harbor, and the shroud's shade of blue is regulated as strictly as the attire of the living. The Sinyat alone do not sail, and are instead buried in dynastic vaults facing the harbor, positioned, it is said, so that the horizon is the first thing the dead would see.

In the Kingdom of Vashkarad the dead go into the mountain, sealed in cut niches and cairns above the villages, and they do not entirely leave. An ancestor's known opinion still counts as authority in a Vashkari dispute; the author has attended a boundary hearing where the deciding testimony had been dead for four generations, and no one present found it remarkable.

In Mirazh, predictably, a funeral is a performance, and a well-attended one is counted as a life's final success. The departed is celebrated with staging, costume, and applause, and the word used is never died but exited. The tribes of the island's interior do otherwise: their rites are quiet, held at the water's edge, and closed to outsiders, and the Mirazhi of the city, who fear very little, do not intrude on them.

The Principality of Rubedo, youngest of the great states, buries or burns according to preference and records according to policy. Every death in the Principality enters the registers with its cause examined and initialed, and the colleges of Cinnavar hold, as a result, the finest death records in the known world. What conclusions they draw from them, they publish; what conclusions they decline to draw is a shorter and more interesting list.

The customs of the lands not yet named here are pending. The entries of this volume have a way of making themselves available in their own time, and the author has long since learned not to hurry them. The reader is asked to do the same.
— Compiler's Note

The custom of funerals is an old one. Varied sources affirm that the pyres of ancient Thalaeryn were fed with cedar oil, at a cost the imperial accountants recorded each year with visible pain. The practice was defended in every generation on the same grounds: the dead deserved to travel well.

And deserve it they did. The smell carried for miles, and it was a good smell, which is more than can be said for most of what an empire does at scale.
— Compiler's Note

Where the Dead Are Said to Go

And here, the world's agreement ends completely.

The Samsharan dead go to the light: a country of it, past the sky, where Sharan's judgment has already sorted the strong of soul from the idle. In the southernmost desert cities it is further held that those who die on the Shahrazād must wait at the threshold; the day belongs to no year, and therefore, it is reasoned, to no destination. Mourners keep an eleven-year vigil accordingly, and are thought neither mad nor even unusual for doing so.

The Sinyaran dead sail past the horizon, which in Sinyaran thought is not an ending but the whole point; the sea-burial gives the soul its vessel, and the horizon, as ever, is a promise. The Vashkari dead join the mountain and the long continuity it stands for, present, patient, and consulted. The Mirazhi dead have exited, and are spoken of the way one speaks of a performer who has moved to a distant and better-paying stage. Of the island tribes' beliefs, little is known beyond this: that the dead are returned to the water, and that the water is not to be disturbed.

Beyond the great states, the smaller peoples keep answers of their own. The herders of the Qamar-Sahar hold that the dead make camp in the night sky, and that every star is a cook-fire tended by someone who is waiting; a family in mourning will, in time, point out which fire is theirs, and it is considered the height of rudeness to argue. In Eisenwacht the dead are said to stand one final watch over their households before departing, and doors are left unbarred for a night so as not to insult the sentry. Among the fisherfolk of the smaller coves the dead are simply said to be out, as boats are out, with all the patience and weather the word carries.

Beneath all of these, in humbler forms than any creed, runs an older belief: that the dead are not spent but come back changed; that a grandmother's laugh returns in a grandchild, or a drowned son's patience surfaces two villages away in a stranger's daughter. Scholars file the belief under consolation, note that no two households describe it alike, and move on. It has been written down as a theory exactly once, some decades ago, by the Rubedan scholar Corvin Alder; the monograph cost him his college seat and, in the opinion of his colleagues, rather more than that. He withdrew the work himself, in the end.

The author has read the withdrawn monograph, if only out of curiosity for a man's folly. It is the author's opinion that, while researcher Alder was a brilliant mind, he must not have been an entirely sound one.
— Compiler's Note

Mourning and Memory

How long grief should last is a matter on which the known world will never agree. Samsharan mourning is brief and upright. Sinyaran state mourning is graded by rank, published by the court, and concluded punctually. Vashkari mourning has no fixed end, and is not expected to have one. In Mirazh, mourning traditionally lasts until the next opening night, on the theory that the departed would be insulted by an empty house.

The elves, most records of whom come from the Shinsei-Koku Archipelago, mourn on their own calendar. An elf may grieve a human friend for longer than that friend was alive, and elven custom regards this as neither excessive nor sad, but simply as the correct arithmetic of affection: the grief, they say, should be sized to the companionship rather than the life. Humans who have witnessed the later years of such mourning describe it as gentle, unhurried, and very hard to watch.

It should be noted that while the Compendium cites the South-Western Archipelago as the source of most records of elven culture, this should not be taken to mean that more than a small share of the island's people are of such origin. Furthermore, the author will admit to never having seen mourning as passionate as that of an elf who had fallen in love with a human.
— Compiler's Note

The Beliefs of the Road

Travelers keep their own rites, older than any border. On the caravan routes a traveler settles debts before a deep-desert crossing; the custom is old, practical, and does not ask whether one intends to die. Roadside graves are tended by strangers as a matter of course, watered like gardens by people who never knew the name on the stone, trusting that someone, somewhere, is doing the same for theirs.

At the high passes of the Dragon's Spine, every traveler adds a stone to the cairns on the way through: one for the crossing made, and one more for whoever did not make it that season. By custom no names are spoken over the second stone. The cairn, the guides say, knows who it is for.

A stranger found dead on the road leaves the living with two problems, both older than any of the great faiths: one cannot properly mourn the nameless, and whatever left them nameless may still be close by. The answers, nearly everywhere, are the same. The dead stranger is burned, most often by whoever found them, and a small stone is set by the nearest traveled road, as close as can be managed to where the body was found. If the dead could be identified, the stone carries their name. If not, it carries the wayfarers' mark, a single straight groove cut short by a second stroke across its end: a road that stops. Those still searching for someone lost may find their answer there, and the nameless, it is hoped, find the same peace as anyone.

The sailors of many eastern coasts hold that the Dancing Sisters light the way home, and that a soul lost at sea rides Mirae's tide to shore, arriving with the eighteenth day. On the Sinyaran coast the widows still walk down to meet that tide, and no one who has watched them do it has ever published an argument against the practice.

The living are, everywhere, better at farewells than they believe themselves to be. It is among the more reassuring things this work has taught its author.
— Compiler's Note