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saintsofwarding · 11 months

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WE SHALL BE MONSTERS

Header by @keltii-tea

Chapter 6: A Funeral Rite

Her mother's burial took place on a frozen winter day, the ground so hard it took hours for the gravediggers to hack out a hole in the icy soil. By the time they were finished, the snow had begun to fall again, filling in the grave with a fine dusting of white.

Her father's sobs filled the air. Miranda stood at the front of the silent crowd, her head bent, listening as he howled and railed, a mad thing clawing at the dirt even as the priests read, in their flat, pious affect, the words of the Black God, the last words spoken to the dead.

Miranda was white-faced, her hands folded down her front, her eyes hollow, but dry. She'd done her crying where no one else could see.

For her mother was dead. She'd died anyway, despite the gift given by the Black God, despite the priest's assurances and her father's faith. Hours they'd sat by the table, until the candles burned down, until the night was spent, until the thing pulsing inside her mother's stomach went still, and Miranda knew that it had all been for nothing.

"Was she not devout enough?" her father had said. "She worshipped every Sabbath...prayed every night to all her saints...she schooled me in the ways of the Black God, she couldn't have been unworthy-"

Her father had scrambled after the priest, despite the other man's mutterings and head-shaking. "Tell me, damn you! Tell me!"

Miranda had stood and watched at the window as her father went after the priest with fists flying, until the passersby had to pull him away from the blinking, bleeding holy man sprawled in the snow. She had felt the corpse behind her like a weight on her mind, but did not turn to look at the still body of her mother, already dressed in her coffin clothes, a dress embroidered with flowers that Miranda and her mother had worked on together.

"May she walk through the endless dark..."

The coffin lay in the grave, now, a simple six-winged symbol carved into its lid. Had her father been of a mind to make it, it would have been beautiful, a work of art. This one was little more than a box.

"May her feet trace the path of the saints before her, the dead before her, the dead who will follow her, for all the years to come..."

Someone sidled up alongside Miranda. She glanced over. The fisherman's little boy- his eldest- stood alongside her, staring with bright, mournful eyes into the grave.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to her.

"Why are you sorry, Sal? You didn't do it." Miranda's hands curled inside her mittens. "It was the baby did it. The baby poisoned her."

"Papa says it happens. Sometimes." Salvatore shook his head slowly from side to side. "I've been reading lots of books Dr. Nicolescu's been giving me. I want to be good at that stuff. I want to..." He gulped and scrubbed his sleeve over his eyes. "I wish I could have helped."

"You couldn't have." The words came out sharp as a whip-crack. "You're too stupid."

"Am not." But he was crying now in earnest, big tears that dripped and melted the dust of snow at his feet. Miranda's lash of cruelty cooled; guilt crept in. Not enough to cover the hollow, the great ragged thing that filled her up now.

Not grief- that didn't cover it. Hope, maybe. That her mother would survive. That her father would not be reduced to this, this catatonic wreck.

That everything would be all right.

"May the warding saints guide her...may she never lose her way...may she be taken into the Black God's embrace, where she will be remembered forever..."

Her father's wails reached a fever pitch as the priest finished his blessings and stepped back, lowering the holy book, allowing the gravediggers to proceed. The first shovelful of dirt hit the coffin. Miranda made herself watch as more and more followed, as the grave filled up, burying her mother's body like it had never been there at all.

***

Salvatore followed her after the funeral. Miranda had recently turned twelve, but Sal was barely nine, a skinny, homely little boy with curly black hair and a puppylike demeanor, almost stumbling in his efforts to keep up after her.

"Miranda!"

She kept walking, shoulders hunched inside her coat.

"M-Miranda! Wait up!"

"What do you want?" She didn't look at him even as he skidded to a halt by her side, breathing hard, his hat askew.

He reached up to fix it back into place, trying in vain to fit it over his protruding ears. "Where are you going?" he panted. "Your house is that way!" He flung out an arm back toward the village.

"Yes. I know."

"Then why are you going...up there? Your father was crying at the funeral. Shouldn't you be at home with him?"

Miranda shook her head.

"He was so sad." Salvatore went quiet for a while, trudging through the snow next to her as the trees thickened around them and the path sloped, steadily, upward. They were climbing a path away from town, houses and fences and goat-pens rapidly falling away. Soon, all Miranda could see of the village were the turrets and towers of the great, empty castle that shadowed the entire valley, turned blue and misty at this distance.

It had been shut up for years, run by a skeleton crew of caretakers that were still loyal to the long-dead last of House Dimitrescu, the ancestral aristocracy that had once lorded over this land. Miranda had often wondered what lay inside, what secrets, what stories, but she'd never dared to sneak past the gate with its terrifying murals of demons and warrior maidens.

Now, she couldn't care less. She just wanted to be away from the whole place.

"I don't like this place," Salvatore said, glancing at the trees around them. "My pa says there are evil spirits in these woods."

"Your pa has weird ideas."

"I think it's true. I hear howling from up here sometimes."

"Those are things called wolves, Sal." She gave a little annoyed huff. "I hear them too."

"Are you ever scared they'll...jump in through your window and get you?"

"No."

"I am."

"You would be."

"Oh!" He stopped in his tracks. "What's that?"

The clearing rose before them, snowy and lit blue by the fading daylight. A stone dais in its center was ringed with pillars, carved all over with interconnected knotwork, while a vast stone chalice stood in its center, locked into place by some unknown mechanism.

The Giant's Chalice. At high noon, during midsummer, it made for a merry sight, all strung with ribbons and bells and colored lanterns. Miranda went every year with her parents, her mother and father taking her hands to swing her round in circles as musicians played a dancing tune. Now, during the dead of winter, the shadows reached long, snowflakes dancing like wraiths on the chill breeze.

"It's just the chalice," Miranda said.

"It looks different in the dark." Salvatore shivered.

Miranda headed into the clearing, the little boy at her heels. She made a slow circuit around the Giant's Chalice, watching the way the light gleamed off its lichen-scabbed stone. Another thing that like the castle had been here a long, long time, though if the holy books and her father's tall tales were to be believed, it had been here and been old since before the first of the castle's foundations were even an architect's dream.

Further on, through ruins painted with sacred imagery, up a long, long flight of steps, there was more, but maybe Salvatore's nerves were catching. She stopped to look at the path leading to the other ruins and shivered at the darkness.

"You weren't crying, though," Salvatore said. He'd hopped up onto the dais, his nerves seemingly forgotten, and began walking its edge like a tightrope. "Why weren't you crying?"

"I..." Miranda looked away from the path. "I...I don't know."

"Weren't you sad?"

"Yes." Her voice quivered. She stared at her boots. She'd forgotten to shine them for the funeral, and they were scuffed and dirty.

Footsteps approached her. There was a hesitation, then Salvatore put his arms around her. He hugged her round the waist for a long time- that was all he could reach. Miranda stiffened, but after a moment she let it happen.

Eventually he let her go and stood back, balancing on the edge of the dais again, like this was all some kind of big game.

"My pa says your pa went and got the priest when she died and the priest had a box." He paused. "My pa kissed his saint's medal when he saw that box."

"He was right to."

"Why?"

Annoyance spiked. Wouldn't he shut up? Miranda thought about turning on him, maybe picking up a rock and throwing it at him to shoo him off like a stray dog. He stared up at her with his eyes big and round. And if she did? He'd run off crying to his mommy, would probably never bother her to play again. Usually- before- she'd be all right with that.

Now?

Now, she didn't want to be alone.

"He..." She let out her breath. "He had this...thing. A baby in the box. But not a baby. It was a piece of the Black God. A gift. I think. He...he put the baby inside her. He had to cut her open." Her mouth trembled. "He said it would make her come back."

Salvatore didn't move a muscle.

"But she didn't come back." Miranda kicked at the snow. "She just died. And now she's gone."

"Not necessarily," Salvatore said.

"What are you talking about?"

"It's...it's in one of the books Dr. Nicolescu gave me. One of his old ones that he didn't want anymore. It has these, um, amazing pictures...I wish I could show you..."

The last thing Miranda wanted was to look at Salvatore Moreau's book collection. "You can just describe them, I have a pretty good imagination."

"Okay, they were woodcuts, and in one of them the ancient priest-saints of the crystal city, they stand over one of their holy dead, and they put the gift in them-" He lifted his hands, eyes shining, shaping the pictures as he spoke. "-And then the person, they don't rise, but they get sealed up. In a vault. Like a monk who's been bad. And then the next night...they rise again. And they become one of the warding saints. The guardians of the city."

He lowered his hands. "It doesn't just happen, Miranda. It takes a little while."

Miranda's heart thudded against her breastbone. Her mouth was dry. She licked her lips. "My mother," she said. "It's been...it's been a day since, since the gift..."

"Oh, no," Salvatore breathed.

"We have to get back down to the graveyard." She pushed past Salvatore, already running. "Come on!"

She pelted back down the path, her blood fire, her heart pounding. The freezing air tore at her throat and lungs, ripping her hair free from its braids. What if she wasn't fast enough? She heard Salvatore running after her, but she didn't slow, didn't stop even when a tree branch whipped past her face, slicing a line of blood over her cheek.

She burst back through the gate and into the village, the last of the daylight leaving the sky, just a trace of orange sunset lingering between two mountain peaks.

The church rose from the village's heart, its steeple cut sharp against the low snow clouds. Miranda slowed as she passed the lych-gate, her boots crunching on gravel. Already the snowfall had covered the mourners' tracks and filled in the wheelruts of the wagon that had borne her mother's coffin to its grave.

This was an ancient graveyard, centuries of the village's dead buried in its ground. Her mother had not been interred near the church, where the very oldest of the graves had stood for untold years, their dates worn away, lost to time. Her grave was in the far reaches, far from the comforting amber light shining in the church's windows.

Miranda hurried toward it. Salvatore finally caught up. He'd lost his hat running down from the Giant's Chalice, and the tips of his ears were red with cold.

"Miranda," he whispered.

"Hush," she hissed.

"Miranda, it's just pictures-"

"It's history, Sal."

"It might just be a story!"

"Stories are history," Miranda spat at him. "And if you don't believe that then you're just as stupid as you look."

She pressed on. The snowfall had grown thicker, denser. Chewing her lip, she doubled back and unhooked a lantern from by the church door.

"That's stealing!" Salvatore gasped.

"I'll give the priests some lei for it in the morning." Miranda stepped into the snowfall. "Are you coming or not?"

She approached the far reaches of the graveyard. Out here, the shadows were deep, the nearest house further away than a shout could travel. The castle loomed overhead, its shape indistinct through the snow. It seemed to lean in, as if curious about what she was doing.

Miranda glared up at it. What business did it, grand dead thing as it was, have with the affairs of the living?

Her mother's grave was almost hidden under a blanket of white. The lanternlight fell across it in a hazy gold pool, glittering on the fresh, undisturbed snow.

Little puffs of white trailed from Salvatore's mouth as he stood alongside Miranda.

"She didn't come out," he said quietly.

"Not yet." Miranda blinked, then set the lantern on a nearby gravestone. "Come...come on, maybe she needs...some help..."

Shovels leaned against the wall. The gravediggers', she guessed. She grabbed one and stabbed it down into the dirt. The blade made a chuff sound as it bounced off the frozen soil.

"Come on!" she told Salvatore. "Help me."

He hung back, fiddling with his mittens.

"Help me!" Miranda ordered.

If she got her mother out, if she came back alive- maybe everything could go back to normal. She imagined bringing her home, her mother's pretty face aglow with newfound life, as beautiful as one of the gilded saints on the painted ruins out by the Chalice. Her father would rise from his aggrieved slump, and though his eyes were red with crying, they would widen with relief as he lay eyes once again upon his wife.

It worked, Mother would say. You saved me.

You came home, her father would gasp. And you...Miranda...our darling...all thanks to you! She imagined their embrace, the smell of her mother, the smell of baking and drying herbs, her warm, safe home returned to her again.

She just had to get her out. She just had to dig deep enough. Her hands ached on the shovel handle; she felt skin tearing under her mittens as she hacked, feverishly, at the ironbound earth. Salvatore joined in, barely able to get the shovel into position- he was far too small- but trying valiantly nevertheless.

He'd begun to cry again. Miranda ignored him. What was there to cry about when hope was within her grasp? Her shovel hit something hard- a rock, maybe- and jounced from her hands, sending her tottering back. She stumbled and fell hard on her rear in the snow. "Ah-"

"Miranda!" Salvatore dropped his own shovel and hurried to her side. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, don't..." She pushed him away, heart pounding. "We need to-"

"Miranda," Salvatore cut in.

"What?"

"Do you hear that?"

For a moment she thought he meant wolves. They were howling again, far away, their voices so distant they were almost lost in the hish and creak of the wind in the trees.

Then Miranda heard it, and a chill struck her, coiling down to her marrow.

Scratching.

It echoed from below, muffled through earth. It was coming from the grave. At once, Miranda was frozen. Salvatore shrank back, tucking his chin into his scarf.

"Is that..." he whispered.

"Be quiet," Miranda snapped.

She got to her hands and knees, staring at the grave. The scratching went on, one moment long and languid, the next manic, a storm of sound against-

What? The coffin? The dirt? She couldn't tell. Was her mother trapped down there, trapped in smothering darkness?

Terror gripped her, sudden as a blow, but this time all she could think of was the corpse on the table, the pulse of the gift within her belly. The red line carved in her waxy skin.

The scratching stopped.

Silence flooded the graveyard. The only sound now was the wind, Salvatore's soft weeping, Miranda's own too-harsh breathing. She tasted something bitter in her mouth.

"Is it over?" Salvatore whispered.

The soil over the grave erupted in a shower of snow and frozen dirt. A hand, Miranda realized; it burst from the grave and clawed at the air. Miranda and Salvatore pitched backward, screaming. A shape tore its way free, snarling, snapping, the clack of teeth, the air scythed and sliced by hooked, dirt-clotted talons.

Salvatore was yelling something, but all Miranda could focus on as she lay sprawled and rigid was the filthy hair hanging in mats over the thing's face, the hunched shoulders as it shook loose, the flare of green off its eyes as the lanternlight struck them.

The familiar dress, embroidered with flowers. Miranda had done some of those flowers herself. They'd worked on them together.

"Mama?" she whispered.

The thing whirled on them with a growl. The lamplight fell over its face. Miranda's breath caught in her teeth.

Her mother's face. Her lips were drawn back from fangs; they'd forced their way from the gums, warping her jaw out of shape.

But the rest of her- the rest of her was...if she squinted, if she dreamed- maybe she could still be the same-

"Mama," Miranda said. She held out a trembling hand.

"No," Salvatore moaned.

"It's me," Miranda pressed. "It's okay. It worked. You're alive now. It worked."

Her mother blinked. She made a series of little yelping noises, like a hurt dog. Her lips slid down over her teeth, hiding them. She stepped forward, using the knuckles of one hand to swing herself along.

Her belly swung, too, split-open like a log riven with an axe, entrails dragging along the snow after her. They left a streak of blood behind them.

Miranda smelled the gore. The rot.

Tentacles unfurled from the stomach wound. They curled, writhed, reaching for Miranda from deep within her mother's body.

Her lips drew back from her teeth again, and the growl that rippled from her was anything but human.

She gathered herself to lunge-

Silver flashed in the lamplight. The lycan screeched; gore sprayed. The creature swayed there for an instant-

Then fell apart. Her head toppled one way, her body the other. They hit the ground with a wet splack.

Behind them, the old priest lowered the sword: heavy and made for cleaving, its cutting edge bright with the moonlight shine of silver.

A trace of black blood glistened on the blade.

Miranda gasped for breath. Salvatore curled beside her, his head in his hands as he rocked back and forth, sobbing.

"Children," the priest said. He sounded weary as a miller's donkey. "Come. We must make you both a tisane of herbs in case any of the wolf-sick blood touched you."

Miranda blinked. She mumbled.

"What was that, child?"

"You...said...she would live again..."

The old man lowered his eyes. "The will of the Black God cannot be known by mortals," he said. "We can only do as it asks, and hope our prayers will be answered in turn."

He turned and began away toward the church. Salvatore picked himself up and scurried after, still crying, but Miranda lingered. Her mother's body had already begun to crystallize, veins of milky white stone spreading over her remains. Within seconds she crumbled, becoming nothing more than dust on the snow.

She came back wrong.

She was supposed to be alive again-

And she came back wrong.

But all Miranda could think as she hurried after Sal and the priest, as she drank the bitter tea the old man brewed, as she felt it work through her body and drive away the Black God's holy madness, was that it was a miracle her mother had come back at all.

And maybe-

Maybe-

Miracles could happen twice.

#re8 #saints of warding #re8 fanfiction #re8 fic #resident evil village #resident evil #rosemary winters #karl heisenberg #mother miranda #Donna Beneviento #Chris Redfield #chapter 6 #salvatore moreau

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