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The cemetery was wretched in the rain—filthy, sodden earth swallowing the weight of footsteps, drowning the dead in thick, blackened mud. The sky had been grey for days, hanging low over the city like a damp, unwashed rag, suffocating… dull. The world had gone quiet in its grief, or perhaps only he had.
Kugel stood before the grave as though he had been planted there, a sickly thing, all sharp edges and hollow spaces. He had not eaten. He had not slept. He could feel the damp creeping into his bones, gnawing at the spaces where warmth had once resided. It was fitting. It was right.
VEL.
Nothing more. No surname, no epitaph, not even a date to mark the breadth of a life. He had been reduced to three letters, carved into stone, indifferent and eternal. Kugel pressed a hand to the name, fingers dragging over the grooves as though they might still be warm, as though they might still give way beneath his touch.
“I love how miserable you make me feel.”
His voice was raw, something wretched, something spat from the throat of a man who had never learned how to grieve. His other hand trembled as he reached into his coat, pulling free a single, rain-damp edelweiss. The petals were white, stark against the filth, the color of something unspoiled, something fragile.
Something dead.
“I feel much man than I was before—numb.”
The words twisted in his mouth, a thing venomous, self-inflicted. His stomach was rotting from the inside, his ribs felt split open, his very blood was an irritation in his veins, crawling and burning like some writhing infection. He wanted to rip himself apart and scatter the pieces to the wind, to carve the hurt out of his very marrow and be rid of it.
He dropped the flower onto the grave and let out a low, bitter laugh.
“Do you hear me, Vel?” His voice shook, though whether from anger or exhaustion, even he could not say. “You feared them. You feared the law, the stares, the world itself. You feared that it would take everything from you—”
A breath. A pause, heavy, unspeakable.
”—but it was you who did it first.”
The wind howled through the empty spaces of the cemetery, a wail low and guttural, something that might have been mourning if it could be called anything at all. Kugel exhaled, slow, shaking, like something inside him had cracked, split straight through the middle.
He fell to his knees. He pressed his forehead to the name as though he might be able to push himself through the stone, to follow.
“It should have been me.”
…
Kugel’s voice; hoarse, scraped raw by the weight of words too heavy to bear. His fingers traced the damp stone now, slow, reverent, trembling. The rain had soaked through his coat, clung to his skin, but he did not shiver—he only burned. Blisters.
“No hands but those who you once called covenants carved the damned Earth that now holds you, in her arms.”
His breath hitched, barely perceptible,
“Warm it must be.”
As grief itself had taken him by the throat. His lips parted again, but no more words came—only silence, thick, suffocating, final.
The edelweiss remained where it had fallen, untouched, unmoving. The cold crept deeper into Kugel’s body, settling into the marrow of him, and he knew—it would never leave.