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She’d gone up to the observation platform after the battle was over, ascending twisted mats of vines and clambering over fern-choked hollows in the wroshyr tree. There the soldier’s body lay, limbs jumbled together on the scorched floor, armor dappled green like the endless Kashyyyk canopy above. His head had been severed from his neck, the flesh cauterized on both ends.The man’s green and white helmet lay beside his waist with the head still inside.
The forest around them was still and unnaturally quiet. She lifted him up and placed him in her sling. He was much lighter and smaller than her, but he’d attempted something great, and so she meant to thank him. He deserved it. Hopefully she still had time.
She carried him back to a sacred place at the roots of an ancient tree, a place she knew she wouldn’t be leaving again. Phosphorescent mushrooms glowed softly overhead as she worked, removing everything he had worn in life. She tugged off his black boots and carefully pulled apart the clasps and magnetic seals of his armor, stripping each piece from the black form-fitting skin he wore beneath. The skin had a white symbol stamped over the soldier’s chest, outlining a black eight-spoked wheel in the negative space at the center. She traced the shape with a clawed finger, wondering what it had meant to him. His clan symbol? The sign of a vow? Eight spokes for the eight suns of his homeworld, joined together as one? She thought it looked like a tree viewed from the top-down, with great roots radiating from the trunk- but he was an alien, and the planet he came from might not have had trees at all.
She peeled off the black skin and his undergarments–ah, so it was a he–before finally prying open the helmet to free the head, placing it where it belonged over his shoulders and surveying his true body. She’d known that humans weren’t covered in fur, but seeing the extent of their alienness gave her a twinge of uneasiness. She pushed past the feeling and looked him over more closely; caked-on blood, burnt skin heat-fused to shreds of armor, the bugs that nibbled at his flesh–all had to be washed away to prepare his body for the rite.
Carefully scooping him up, she took his body and traveled deeper into the maze of tree roots, seeking the hidden entrance to a cavern at the base of the massive trunk. There, the dirt and leaves gave way to fine-grained black stone. Carpets of soft mosses and lichen spilled over each other, dotted with tiny flowers of crimson and gold and creamy white. Rivulets of water trickled down the walls, etching twisting patterns into the wood and stone and meandering past slippery patches of algae. And, at the center of the cavern where she made her home, was the sacred spring. Kneeling down at the edge, she placed him just under the surface of the cool, shallow water.
She had seen him in a vision as she sheltered during the battle earlier that day, had felt a tug across the invisible Web that threaded through all things in the universe. It had passed through her body like a kick of nausea. He’d been standing on the platform when an arc of white hot plasma, shimmering green, whipped between his head and shoulders, killing him where he stood. The vision churned and swam as he slumped to the ground, as though the humid jungle air were pushing up against him with a sticky, oppressive insistence, striving in vain to keep him upright against the inevitable pull of gravity. Water had risen around his body, thick and dark like congealing blood. It seeped between the gaps of his armor and nudged at the fabric of his gloves and bodysuit, finally slipping beneath them like a lover’s fingers. As the water blanketed the soldier’s body, it had become clear like rainwater, then soaked into the ground and spread out in loamy patches across the entire planet.
From a pouch she took out some moss sponges, the same she’d had since she was an apprentice under Learned Shaman Arisyyyshk, and began to clean the body. The vision was still stuck in her mind. It mirrored one of the foundation histories she’d learned as a child, hundreds of years ago, from a time long before her people had become spacefarers. At the end of the Final Battle between two warring clans, Kashyyyk had been devastated. It had become a dim marble spinning mournfully about its star, strewn with desiccated life so brittle that branches snapped and leaves crumbled to powder in the wind. One warrior, descendant of both clans and thus never quite accepted by both, had gone to the greatest of the wroshyr trees, and now the only one left standing. He had severed his own head with his blade, and the blood that poured out from his body had seeped into the soil and not stopped flowing. It had fed the tree and sunk deep into the core of the planet. Then it had welled up through the earth, pooling in sacred springs like the one where she now bathed the soldier’s body, springs whose waters had nourished and reforested their world.
When the body and head were clean, she moved them to rest on a broad stone beside the water, the very same spot where the legendary warrior had sacrificed his life to save Kashyyyk. She twisted beads and shells into her fur and began to sing, invoking the cycle of death and rebirth; the movement of matter from one form to another until it diffused into nothing and became everything, a union between the living and cosmic force.
Despite her focus, doubts still came and went at the back of her mind. Why should this alien’s death have touched her mind over one of her own people's? Would the ritual even work on him? Not all questions had answers in her profession, or sometimes those answers were opaque or disquieting. Generations of her ancestors had faced similar struggles in trying to understand the great mysteries. Now, at the end of her life, she confronted them one last time.
In a mortar, she ground up carnivorous saava plants; four samples from individuals in each of the four stages of life, and four of those from each of the four mating types. Then she poured in spring water and a pinch of dirt, mixing it all together into a thick reddish paste. She took up the paste and her knife and set them beside the soldier’s body. She bent over him for a moment mentally walking through the work ahead, then grabbed the blade and slipped the tip through the cold skin of his chest and began to cut a pattern over his torso. Dark beads of gelling blood oozed along the trail of her knife. Once she’d completed the pattern, the shaman dipped a hand into the saava paste and spread a layer out across the wounds, massaging it into the cuts. She’d reproduced the pattern she’d seen on his black underskin in the same spot over his chest; she couldn’t take a chance on it not being significant to him.
She was getting tired and moved slowly, but could not rest. She had to do everything continuously, in just the same order that Learned Arisyyyshk had shown her when she’d passed down the ritual. You had to get all of the aspects right. The timing, the order, the feeling... Intent and emotion weren’t enough. One had to reflect on the balance that existed all around them, the chaos and order of the forest world. You had to let go of something to give something back, freely and without reservation, just as this soldier had done.
She was singing louder now, the sound of her song echoing throughout the cavern. She scattered the herbs and wrapped bundles of reeds. A sign came then, in the form of spiderlings. Their presence was auspicious. It was believed they carried away the souls of the departed, tucked in their silken parachutes.
She poured a salve from a jar and spread it across both stumps of the soldier’s neck before attaching his head to his torso, binding the neck up with rope twisted from water vine fiber and amulet cord. Stretching an arm over the body, she reached out to the Web suffusing the space around them. She tugged, pulling small threads with her mind and levitating the man until he floated, suspended over a patch of seed-strewn earth. She held him there gently in the Web, motes of dust and droplets of humidity trapped motionless in a sphere around him.
Then she sank onto a rock and completed the ritual with the last of her strength. Her song snaked out into the woods beyond the cavern, rippling through copses of trees and clusters of ferns, brushing over the surface of tender leaves so that they shuddered and dropped pearls of dew to the ground. Jewel-bright insects flitted about on gossamer wings as they sensed a change in the air, and the feathery tendrils of subterranean fungi coiled in expectation, anxious to feel the mind of a new being.
The song’s vibration continued to resonate in the branches long after the shaman had finished and fallen still. Her voice dropped beneath the range of human hearing, rumbling through the humid air. She posed her limbs in meditation for the last time, quiet, her pelt shuddering. The song's vibration continued to resonate through the world long after the shaman had fallen still.
With her last breath, she sent a speck of life into the soldier's body, a nucleation site as small as a pollen grain for the eternal Web.
The seeds in the earth beneath the soldier sprouted. Tender vine shoots curled around him, first just brushing his cold skin and then wrapping up the length of his body. Their roots connected with the spidery networks of fungi spreading over the entire surface of the planet, drawing in nutrients. Droplets of water from the sacred pool fed them too, and the tendrils of the universal Web hummed around them.
It would take years, perhaps even decades, but someday, the soldier would wake.