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The grave is the third from the eastern side of the lighthouse.
Flins knows this without looking. He has tended this plot of ground for longer than two decades now, has memorized every stone and frost-heaved root in it, every name retained clean because he takes great care of all of it. He could walk it blind.
He has been walking it blind, these days. It is easier than seeing.
Today he walks it in flesh and bone as usual, which is its own kind of effort. He had pulled himself back into this vessel an hour ago. Wrists first, then hands, then the slow reassembly of a face he is not particularly interested in wearing lately. It took longer than it should have. It has been taking longer every day.
The stone he arrives in front of is a gray granite. Same as every other headstone here. Same hopes, same regrets, same fate.
Here lies Captain Illuga
We thank him for his courage in the face of crisis
May he shine bright for eternity
An eternity. That's how long he will be here, and how long he won't, as well. Flins stares at the words for a moment the way he has every time for the past month, waiting for them to rearrange into something that makes sense, but they don't. They won't, even if he burns a hole through the stone. What was once his is now the ground's alone.
The wind comes off the sea and moves through the grass around the stone. The other graves are silent. They always are; that is the nature of graves. He has stood among the quiet dead for a long time and never minded it.
He minds it now.
"I ran out of supplies a week ago," he informs the stone.
It comes out rough; he has not spoken much this week. There has been no particular reason to.
"HQ sent a runner with a very polite letter about it two days ago." He crouches down, pulling a stem of dead grass from the base of the stone with three fingers. "I've acquired them eventually. I can cook for the visitors again. Nothing else of note."
He sets the dead grass aside and sits to its left, facing the sea.
"Nikita came by yesterday. He stayed barely an hour," he sighs. "He looked tired. I didn't ask about it. I should have asked about it."
He really should have. Instead, he had stood in the doorway and accepted the bread and the scarf Illuga left in the laundry basket and said thank you and watched him walk back down the path and board th boat. He has not called him back, because calling him back would have required having something to say, and he hasn't had anything to say to anyone in a while.
He leans sideways and rests his cheek against the top of the stone.
The granite is cold. It is always cold; this is Nod Krai, and cold is the baseline condition of all things. He was created cold and didn't notice it around him before. He notices it now the way he notices the undisturbed linen on the bed, and the empty chair at his table and the second cup he still puts out in the mornings before he remembers.
After the seventh time of that mistake, he had spent that particular part of the morning in his lantern. He doesn't have hands in there, so there's nothing to do with them.
He closes his eyes and thinks about Illuga's hands. The callouses at the base of his fingers from the polearm grip. The way he would tap his thumb against his own knee when he was thinking. The scar across his left palm he'd had since before Flins knew him, origin unknown, never explained.
Flins had meant to ask about that scar.
"No one comes up the path anymore," he says. "You used to come up the path."
He recalls the times Illuga had come up the path with his complaints about the wind and his extra porridge and his absolute refusal to leave when asked, and now no one does. The path is just a path again. From Piramida to the sea it leads to the lighthouse and then it stops and there is nothing at the end of it worth mentioning.
Flins opens his eyes. The stone is still cold against his cheek. There's no warmth in his flesh to share with it.
A gull crosses overhead, indifferent.
Thirty-one days. He has been counting because he's painfully aware of every second spent in this plane of existence. Thirty-one mornings of pulling himself into his human shape because the alternative is staying in the lantern indefinitely, and he is not willing to do that yet because Nikita checks on him and Nikita's face does a thing Flins cannot stand to cause. So he assembles himself each morning. Hands, legs, face.
He tends to the graves, the light, and lies down on the small bed inside until dawn. On the first day, he had buried his face in the pillows and inhaled the scent until his throat burned. Illuga had woken up there that morning, and that was the last of it. The scent had faded after the third day, as all things do.
"You would tell me to stop sulking," he says with a humorless smile. "You would have been here three times this week already. You would have brought something heavy and complained about it being heavy and then refused any help carrying it."
The whole sequence reconstructs itself in full detail: the coat tossed over the chair, his red earring catching the lamplight and the specific look on his face when he was pretending not to worry about something.
He can only predict these scenarios because Illuga is still so fully present in every room of his memory. For a moment sometimes, he forgets, and then he remembers, and it is like losing him again in miniature.
Twenty-six is such a ridiculous age to die. There's not a single age where death makes sense to the living, even if one has lived for centuries.
The glass above the lighthouse catches the morning light and throws it back.
He is so tired. In the way that it is not a deficit of rest but a surplus of weight, where everything is slightly heavier than its actual mass. The cold heavier, the path longer, the effort it takes to simply be a person and not a sack of weight with a hole in its chest.
His eyes find the morning sun breaking through the dawn, and feels bitter that it gets to rise and his own doesn't.
He assembles himself wrong on the thirty-fourth morning and doesn't notice for hours.
The hands are fine. He always does the hands first by habit, and habit is the only thing still running on schedule. Wrists, palms, fingers. Then the legs, which take longer than they should, because he keeps losing the thread of it halfway through and has to start again. Then the face.
The face is where it goes wrong— he doesn't realize that he looks wrong until he reaches for the kettle and catches his reflection in the dark of the window and stops to look.
His left eye is too high. A few centimeters, sitting wrong in the socket, and the ear on the same side is slightly too far back, which pulls the whole left half of his face into a shape that isn't human. He stands there looking at it.
Then he looks away and pours the kettle.
It takes another hour before he does anything about it, and only because he has to go outside to check the lights and someone might see him.
He stands at the mirror and fixes it with two fingers, pressing the eye back into place. It's only out of compulsion to fix; there's nothing here worth landing his gaze on anymore. It takes four tries. His concentration keeps sliding off the task like water off cold stone, and twice he has to start over because he's made it worse.
He gets it right eventually and goes outside.
On the forty-fifth day, he tries to cook because he still can't break the habit.
This is ambitious, in retrospect.
He gets as far as the onions before he realizes he has been holding the knife over the board for an indeterminate amount of time doing nothing. The onion is uncut, and nothing will bring him back. He looks at the knife and then at the board and then at the window, which shows him the same grey evening sky it has been showing him for more than a month without variation or apology.
He puts the knife down. Picks it back up.
He cuts the onion badly and unevenly, in pieces that are all different sizes and will cook at different rates, which he knows, and he does not fix that, either. The things he needed to fix are gone. He sweeps them into the pan.
The onions sit in the warming pan and he watches them without thinking about onions at all. Then the oil gets too hot too fast, the pan spits at him and he jerks back and knocks a cup off the edge of the counter.
Illuga's favourite cup. It lands on its side and rolls under the table and stops against the far leg, intact. Flins had picked it because it was sturdy; Illuga broke things.
Flins stares at it under the table until the pan starts smoking. Which was a bad idea because after that he curses and takes it off the heat. Crouches down and picks the cup up with both hands —four fingers, he didn't notice this morning— and sets it back on the counter.
Stands there with his hands around it.
"Quit it," he says, to himself, to the cup, to the general situation. His voice comes out flat and without direction. "Stop."
His limbs can't seem to take his own advice—he takes the cup and puts it in the back of the cabinet where he cannot see it and then stands in front of the closed cabinet for a moment.
This was the right decision. Out of sight, out of mind. What will it take to get him out of his heart, too? He was too large for it, too alive, too bright. Why was he not given more time?
He opens the cabinet and puts the cup back on the counter.
It's not a decision that means anything. It's just a cup. He is an ancient creature of considerable power and dignity and the pan is ruined. His left hand has four normal fingers and one that is slightly too long, and his ears are wrong under his collar, and no one is coming up the path today.
No one is coming up the path.
He is aware of this. He has been aware of it every morning for forty-five mornings and awareness has not made it smaller, which he had privately hoped it might. He is old enough to know better. He had known better, and knowing better had not required this much effort before.
He looks at the ruined pan, and opens the window to clear the smoke, and stands in the cold air that comes in off the sea, and waits until his face does what he tells it to.
It takes longer than it used to.
The grave is the third from the eastern side, and he is tired of existing in all the wrong shapes.
He has tended this grave for fifty-one days. The ground is even, the stone is clean, the dead grass pulled before it can take root. He kneels at the base of the stone and starts to dig.
The hands that molded him into humanity proper now lie motionless beneath this very soil.
It is slow work without tools. He uses his hands, which are wrong again today and he hasn't corrected it because there is no one to see and it no longer seems to matter. The earth comes up in cold, dark slabs. Frost in the upper layer, then softer beneath, then the deep soil that hasn't seen light since they buried him. He digs steadily and without hurry. There is nowhere else to be.
He thinks about the last time he did this.
A stone altar, centuries ago, away from home. He had gone in as Kyryll the Azure Flame and come out as this — the lightkeeper, the human shape he has been assembling and disassembling ever since. He had slept for a long time. He had not minded sleeping. He had not had anything he minded leaving.
He will rest next to his home this time.
His crooked hands stop when they touch wood. He sits back on his heels with fingers in the cold dirt and looks at the rectangle of dark he has opened in the earth.
There's nothing he wants to see here. He knows better than that. He is old enough to know exactly what is in this box and what condition it is in at fifty-one days and he will not look at it because that is not what this is. That is not what he is here for.
He looks at the faded surface of the wood and carefully places his lantern on it.
When the wood rots through and the earth moves in and the worms find their way to Illuga's bones, they will find a blue flame inside his ribs.
When there is nothing left of either of us but what the ground kept, I will still be there. He will not be alone in it. This is the only thing I have left to give him and I am going to give it.
He lets the human form go, and lowers himself into the earth. A flame with nothing to contain it has nowhere to go but out.
The cold receives him the same way it did his other half. In hindsight, he has not been alive for some time. The dark closes over the top of him, and the dirt settles back in slow increments with the last of his power, filling the space he made, until the ground above is flat and even and shows nothing. The stone stands where it stood. The graveyard is quiet.
Inside the dark, he is aware of the wood and the cold and the specific density of fifty-one days of winter earth. Underneath that, the faint presence of what is in this box and what he will not look at and what he will never abandon.
Above him, the lighthouse turns and turns and turns its light out over the black water, keeping itself, needing no one. He used to be like that.
The flame goes still under the soil.
See, he thinks, with what remains of his fading consciousness, we made the landfall together. I'm sorry for being late.