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You don’t have to do this. Hohenheim nodded. They’d repeated this phrase time and again, once he’d told them what he was planning. But he was doing it anyway.
With a pang of guilt, he thought it might have taken too long as it was. The Dwarf might have gotten there first, thanks to Hohenheim’s cowardice. And the invisible chaos of horror and pain he’d spent over a hundred years calming. Now…
Hohenheim smiled. Now they were an ocean, wave upon wave of thought and feeling, capable of coordinating themselves in ways that would’ve been impossible, had Hohenheim not fought to make himself heard, so they could be heard.
The waves of their voices were gently rumbling in him now. Most were reluctant. Some were terrified of what they would see; Hohenheim had taken the shortest possible route in his escape, and had tried to see as little as possible. A few, the bravest, and the kindest, were with Hohenheim. But they knew what he had been through, the toll he had paid for surviving. It had been them who’d started the refrain.
You don’t have to do this. Hohenheim crested the rise. And saw, dunes and dunes, and dunes away, a pillar in the desert. What he was going to do suddenly struck him, more viscerally than he’d expected.
It had been a conversation he’d inadvertently overheard; couldn’t avoid overhearing. It was Tony who’d started it; he hadn’t known more than ten thousand of them then, and Tony had always been loud. His voice would’ve stuck out anyway, but the familiarity pulled at Hohenheim’s attention like a hook.
I miss home. Hohenheim had been about to bite into a chicken leg. He paused; the Xingese bar was quite full, and though he’d gotten a few looks when he walked in, there were just enough foreigners from the west passing through that no one questioned him, and by now he spoke the language well enough to keep from making any kind of scene. He was all but invisible.
Yeah, well… we all do. He didn’t know Marilla at that point, but she’d assured him later it was she who’d spoken.
But we can’t go back; there’s nothing there for us. Brock had always been one to leave the past in the past.
By now, the whole ocean had quieted, listening; there was just the slightest murmur, of hundreds of thousands who no longer breathed drawing breath.
Xerxes is likely a ruin by now. Leo; in life he’d looked like a sad lion, and spoke like a sad lamb. It’d just hurt to go back.
Besides, Brock said, would you really be okay with seeing everyone’s… I couldn’t bear to see what’s left.
The ocean went quiet. Though none of them had eyes, Hohenheim had the incredible feeling of thousands upon thousands of them watching him.
He raised the chicken leg to his mouth. The sudden quiet in his mind, compared to the usual din, was both wonderful and terrifying. “What?” And then he realized. And he understood.
No! Sarah had shouted into the quiet ocean; though she’d no body, Hohenheim could perfectly visualize her hands on her hips. We are not putting him through that!
And then the ocean was in chaos again for at least a month. No one ever brought it up again, but Hohenheim couldn’t forget. Dread knotted itself in his belly. He’d go back. He couldn’t avoid it forever.
Later on, as he learned every single name, and every single story, it would be compassion that would fuel the growth of his commitment to return. But in the first few years—Hohenheim couldn’t lie to himself—it had been mostly guilt. His bones were the only ones nobody needed to bury.
He started small, camping in a hollow outside one of the outlying villages. You don’t have to do this, they said, as they had said more times than Hohenheim could count.
“I know,” Hohenheim said, “but I want to.”
You do not want to go back, to open up the old wound, Sergis said.
“No,” Hohenheim said, “I don’t.” In the flummox that followed he continued, “But I do want to set you and the bodies of your loved ones to rest. Even moreso than I want never to go back. Besides,” He stirred the fire, pulling the blankets around him as the cold desert wind stirred through the rocks, “I’m not sure this old wound is healing properly.” He looked down at his hands. “I ran away. I don’t hate myself for it anymore, but I left your bodies here to rot. I ran away, trying to hide my naivete and my cowardice like a child hides the sheets after he wets the bed. So now, I’m going to dig out the infection, abscess by abscess.”
There was a pause in which the ripples of conversation ebbed and flowed. You do know, Hohenheim, Jeremiah said, that only half of the bodies will be ours. The rest are…
“With him.” Hohenheim spat the second word. “Yes, I know.” He looked off over the sand. He slowly turned his head—almost had to force it to turn—until he was looking over the barren remains of Xerxes. “I don’t know what I can do for them; I wish I could say more than that. But whatever I can do, I’ll do it.”
He split his time carefully. Hohenheim had to go looking during the day, finding them in the best light, so they could be identified by the souls within him. Of those who had been awake, memories of that night were burnt into their souls forever, and time had done nothing to wear them away. But those who had been asleep—a great many, mostly children; theirs had been the hardest voices for Hohenheim to hear, and the ones he knew he had to take the most care in listening to—were useful as well. They knew whose house was just by the road leading to the capital, where their parents and siblings had slept in the house.
They were too late for some. Vultures and jackals had smelled the rotting flesh, and there were a number of skeletons which were too damaged and too far removed from their homes for anyone to identify. Hohenheim tried his best, and gave every single soul a chance to examine every single body. Some had no idea which bodies were theirs; there had been too much chaos in those last moments for them to remember, or they had wanted too badly to forget. Others were sure a broken pile of bones was theirs, though it was nowhere near where they said they’d died. When asked, by Hohenheim or another soul, they said they just knew. Unless another soul said the body was also theirs, Hohenheim didn’t argue.
Hohenheim made a stone jar on the spot, and followed every detail of the burial rites as closely as he could, while he set the bones within. He wore the white cover over his mouth and nose, and wore the white gloves. He said the words, and set a copper coin over each eye; the hardest part of Hohenheim’s preparations had been moving bars upon bars of smelted copper out here so he could transmute them. Then he sealed the jar and carried it to the nearest settlement.
At night, he dug. It had been a century since human feet and the hooves of livestock had packed the earth, but it was still hard work. He used a shovel, and dug away from the settlements so the Dwarf wouldn’t find the remains.
Hohenheim? Marilla asked as he was eating. He was on to the tenth village, now, and had laid some thousand bodies to rest.
“Yes? What is it?”
Why don’t you use alchemy to dig our graves?
Hohenheim paused, the bite of crisp, roasted lizard resting on his tongue. He chewed, and swallowed. “Alchemy ripped your souls from your bodies. It doesn’t seem right to lay you to rest with it. And…”
And?
“You deserve my fullest effort.” He looked into the fire. “Every last one of you. And I mean to give it.”
The first body of someone Hohenheim knew was Andal’s. It wasn’t anywhere near the capital. He remembered, as his knees buckled, that no one but Andal wore a copper chain with a green stone in the shape of a scorpion around their neck, and had old fractures in the first two knuckles of their left hand from when he’d nearly slugged Hohenheim and hit the doorpost instead. The structure of the man’s face was a close match. Hohenheim remembered his master had sent Andal out here to deliver a message to his wife’s cousin regarding the birth of their third granddaughter.
Hohenheim did not sleep that night. Or any of the six nights after that. He redoubled his work. Forty thousand laid to rest. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. He finished all the furthest flung towns, villages, and farmsteads. Some, he realized, were the towns where the massacres had happened. The tears he cried at those villages were just as much of rage as sadness. And he cried many, many tears. He couldn’t help it, didn’t want to, when so many within him were wracked by grief at seeing the unburied bones of their stolen loved ones.
But as he worked his way further and further into the country of his birth, Hohenheim found something happening that he hadn’t expected, though he realized he should have. The souls within him… were comforting each other. Parents grieved with parents for their lost children, children for their lost parents, brothers for sisters, sisters for brothers, lovers for lovers, friends for friends. And the sadness they had all felt for so long started to ease. And, for some, even break.
Families were reunited, friendships rekindled as the souls that had known each other in life found each other, and Hohenheim sometimes felt that the ocean within him almost transformed into a starlit sky, and sometimes the tears he cried were happy tears.
But almost no one within him hadn’t lost somebody to the Dwarf in the Flask. And so Hohenheim’s work continued. And he felt them shift from wondering to encouraging. Those who knew how told him how best to dig, where the ground was best for it, which sites would be hardest to find.
And Hohenheim dug. Not graves, open to the elements and easy to recognize, but crypts, into the ground and sides of gorges and ditches that hadn’t seen rain or water in decades. He reinforced them with stone blocks, made to Sergis’s exacting specifications. And within each crypt, he buried a community, each jar in a niche with the remains of its closest family and friends.
One hundred thousand he’d laid to rest. Two hundred thousand. Three. Four. He started working in the densely populated centre of the country. The gap between Andal and the second person Hohenheim recognized was substantial, but it couldn’t last. The next body he recognized was that of Ilsa, his baker’s wife. She was far from home, but he’d heard she had family east of the capital, and Hohenheim doubted anyone else he knew from back then wore a baker’s apron with the exact same pattern of desert roses stitched into the leather. The gap between the second and the third, the royal courier who had a wooden foot, was much shorter than between the first and second.
Five hundred thousand. Six hundred. Seven.
The first time Hohenheim looked over the horizon and saw the silhouette of the royal palace on the horizon, just as the sun was setting, he dropped to his knees and vomited. By the time he got back up, the moon had risen, the starts were out, and the vomit had been washed away by the flood of grief that stole over him.
He’d begun recognizing landmarks some time ago; now Hohenheim was recognizing individual buildings, houses, streets, squares. And almost daily, he was recognizing bodies without the help of the souls within him. Though it was getting less surprising, he was no less horrified by the finding of each body, the recognizing of each life that was snatched away.
As he identified, and carried, and dug, and buried, Hohenheim could feel the wound in him starting to close, the guilt starting to lift. With every body he laid to rest, one soul’s grief and anger was assuaged, however slightly. He felt his determination to finish this thing deepen and harden within him.
He emptied the capital’s prison, the market district, the merchant’s quarter, the bazaar, the stables. He searched every basement, every rooftop, every bedroom, every warehouse, every granary. He saw the bodies of children who died sleeping, friends who died drinking, enemies who died brawling, lovers who died making love in each other’s arms; he saw a thousand thousand private moments, interrupted and frozen in time. He saw lives that should’ve been lived.
As those he had buried passed a million, Hohenheim moved into the environs about the palace, its ruined shape hanging over him as he worked. He almost told himself he wouldn’t go in until he’d checked every other district, and buried every other person, but stopped himself; he knew he wouldn’t go in because he was afraid.
And then the day came. It was as sunny as the rest. Hohenheim stood at the gate, for a very long time, staring into the palace grounds, dry and dead.
Hohenheim? He froze. They’d never all said the exact same thing at the same time before. Marilla continued, and all the others fell—somehow—perfectly silent. It’s okay. You have helped us do as we needed. You need to go and put your own demons to rest. We’re here for you. Because you are here for us.
Hohenheim didn’t try to halt the tears. “I know, Marilla.” He took a step forward. “Thank you.”
He scoured the entire palace from the bottom up. He left no room unexplored. Including his own. He heaved a sigh of relief when he found no one there.
After almost a week, he finally came to the throne room. There were nine bodies. Five for those who’d stood at the five corners of the innermost circle—Hohenheim remembered all of them. One for his master. Hohenheim wept for him, even as he collected his bones. One for the chief advisor. And the two other assistants, Mayo, and Willard.
Of the king, there was no sign, save for his rings and his diadem. They rested beside the brazier, where the final—and first—blood had been spilt. Hohenheim stared at them for some time.
“So much greed,” Hohenheim said, to no one in particular. The souls quieted as he spoke. “A million souls answered to you, and the wealth of a nation filled your coffers. No one ate so well as you, no one dressed half so finely, no one suffered so little. When others died at forty and counted it old, you feared death at sixty and seventy... It wasn’t enough for you.
“Why!” The roar ripped from Hohenheim’s lips before he knew he was shouting. “Why wasn’t it enough? Why did you want more? Why couldn’t you be satisfied with the riches of kingship? Why did you have to cling to what you couldn’t have? Why did you have to be such a thrice-damned fool? He swindled you out of the lives you had no right to trade! The only souls I blame more for this than mine are his and yours!”
Sweat dripped into Hohenheim’s eyes, and he realized he’d kicked the brazier over, scattered the rings across the room. He wiped the sweat away, and took a deep breath. “You’re inside him somewhere,” he said, collecting himself. “Good. I can’t imagine a better place for you. I know you can’t hear me. But I will do everything I can for the lives I’ve ruined by helping you. And he will suffer a fate of equal value to what he’s taken. I won’t imagine what that might be.” Hohenheim turned to the bones lying about the room, and moved to his master’s body.
“But your fate, King of Xerxes, will not be much better.”
The last crypt was sealed. The land of Xerxes had been cleansed of the bodies of its murdered people. As the sun set, Hohenheim looked back over his country.
You won’t be coming back, will you? Brock said.
“No,” Hohenheim said. “I think not.”
You’re going to try and find him, aren’t you?
Hohenheim nodded. “Yes.”
We’ll help. Marilla sounded more certain than the passage of time.
“I know.” Hohenheim turned west, and started walking. For some reason, as he passed the pillar marking the edge of his ancestral lands, the final lines of his people’s funeral rites came to mind. He had recited them many, many times. He couldn’t have told anyone why he said them one more time, but he did.
“All things were made from one.
And at the end, all things return to one.”