Chapter Text
Doru was a gravedigger. He did other things – kept the garden, cleaned the church, lit the candles – but everyone seemed pretty content to just call him the gravedigger. And that was... fine. He was fine. Busy, at least.
He didn’t mind the dead. They were fine company, a quiet sort that didn’t have Expectations. Like why he was nearly twenty and not yet married but hadn’t gone to be a man of the cloth like his father. Or why he was rarely seen with women but often with that blond musician. Or, well, lots of things.
Anyways, contrary to popular beliefs, the dead were fine company. The told tales with their clothes and hair and bones. And sometimes, they needed to be moved. It was a poor church, not by virtue of people not giving but because the village itself was poor, and small, and so sometimes the bones needed to be moved to the ossuary to open up space for fresh graves. It wasn’t Doru’s favorite part. He always felt a little odd separating the bones from their plots. But, well, they weren’t complaining. And he took comfort that their souls were separate from the flesh just as the flesh had returned to dust and these vestiges were just... left over. A mark they once had been.
It was fine except for when it had rained. Low valleys held a lot of standing water and mud was heavy after all. Or excepting that one time he dug the wrong plot and after hours of hard digging pulled up a very not skeletonized corpse. (He still shuddered at that one. The smell – he'd had to burn those clothes.)
So it was with a sinking gut that he stepped onto wet ground and looked at the dark sky, immediately after morning prayers with Father. A bad omen to pray without sunlight, he knew. And he was right, now he was digging wet ground. At least he was in the pauper’s plots – away from the great oak in the center of the graveyard and its meaty roots, and where there was less grass to have to pull up as well. He set his shovel.
He found a steady rhythm. An hour passed. Two. The sky started to drizzle. He considered what he would have for lunch, or if he should skip today, money was tight but he could always ask Nana or Escher for – thunk.
What.
He blinked and lifted the shovel, dropping it more lightly. Thunk.
The soil wasn’t usually quite this rocky when it had already been turned for a grave. Weird. He moves the shovel with a scrape, sets his foot, and hears an unmistakeable crack. The splintering of wood. He was a gravedigger and a damn good one and had been for years – he did not put coffins this high in the ground. So what was wood doing here? He scraped and scooped and scrambled to clear the hole and... that was definitely a coffin.
Had travelers buried over his people again? His father would be furious. He could hear him already “They paid no tithes and worshipped pagan monstrosities but still sought to use the Morning Lord’s ground?” Doru grit his teeth, uncomfortable. But... he still needed to open at least one plot today.
He grit his teeth and made the hole wider, wide enough to straddle the coffin. He clambered out of the hole and returned with a pick. He took a deep breath. Held it. And wedged the lid open.
It flung open with a great groan (where were all the nails? What was going on here?!) His leg stung with the impact of it. And below was not the bloated corpse he expected. Nor a skeleton. To all appearances, it was a half asleep woman. Perfectly alabaster skin – none of the mottling of the grave, not a smudge of dirt or single imperfection. Silky smooth hair the paleness of the moon. Long lashes on full cheeks, half closed as if dozing, the barest sliver of color underneath. Perfectly pink lips parted as if in a sigh.
He blinked.
She blinked back.