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The first funeral Adaine Abernant ever attended was in Fallinel when she was four years old.
The robes itched, the silver combs in her hair pinched her scalp, and her mother’s hand on her shoulder felt more restraining than comforting. All around her, the ancient spires of Fallinel glittered in the afternoon sun, white stone and gold-leaf banners gleaming with impossible perfection, all to show that someone important had died. Or someone technically important, which Adaine would later learn was essentially the same thing among High Elves.
“Adaine,” her mother hissed quietly, fingers tightening. “Stand still.”
Adaine stood still. Ahead of them, a crystal bier draped in moonflowers contrasted oddly around the dead elf’s waxy and ancient face, all sharp lines and translucent skin. He was some distant great-uncle or cousin that Adaine had met only once or twice. Everyone around her spoke in hushed, reverent voices about how tragic it was to lose someone after only eight hundred and twelve years.
Adaine did not understand.
The old elf had wanted to die, apparently. He had “grown weary.” Adults kept saying that phrase as if it explained everything. Someone behind her sniffled dramatically and in response, Aelwyn rolled her eyes so hard Adaine worried they might get stuck.
“He was mean,” Aelwyn whispered.
Adaine blinked. “Then why is everyone sad?”
“Because they’re supposed to be.”
Their mother shot both of them a lethal look.
The ceremony lasted forever. Priests sang in Elvish harmonies that echoed through the marble courtyard as wind chimes rang softly from the trees and people sobbed with exquisite dignity.
Adaine stared at the corpse and tried very hard to understand how someone could simply stop being there.
What she remembered most centuries later was not the body, but the noise afterward.
All those impossibly old elves filing out into the golden evening sunlight, carrying on conversations in soft voices, discussing politics and marriages as if death had merely interrupted their schedules.
Adaine would think about that later in life at every funeral she would ever attend.
The vision in the Forest of the Nightmare King had terrified her.
At sixteen, standing in that horrible silver light with her heart hammering in her chest, she had seen it: her own face, centuries older, dressed in mourning black. Not the dramatic grief of someone freshly devastated, but the settled, permanent kind. The garments of someone who had learned to wear loss the way other people wore clothes.
She had been alone.
That was the detail that stuck. Not the black robes or the unfamiliar lines of her own face, but the silence around her. There was none of the noise and warmth and infuriating, beloved chaos that had made the world feel survivable. Just Adaine. Moving through a world that had kept going without any of them.
In that moment she had understood, with the clarity that the Forest of the Nightmare King seemed designed to produce, what it actually meant to be an elf. Not the poetry about it. Not the golden spires and the gift of witnessing centuries of history. The real thing, underneath all of that.
She would still be here when they were gone.
She would learn their faces so well she could reconstruct them from memory in perfect detail, and then one day that would be all she had left.
The first of the Bad Kids to die was Riz.
It felt cosmically unfair. Not because any death among them would have been fair, but because Riz Gukgak had spent his entire life acting like a man desperately trying to outrun death through sheer organizational skill. It turned out heart attacks did not care about color-coded calendars.
There were too many people at the funeral.
Adaine stood beneath an overcast autumn sky and watched a generation of spies, detectives, thieves, cops, adventurers, and assorted weirdos crowd around the cemetery. Somewhere nearby, agents from Solace’s investigative bureau argued over which of them Riz had trusted most while his former students quietly cried into programs.
Riz would have hated how inefficient it was.
“He’d be furious we started late,” Fabian muttered beside her.
“He literally scheduled his own funeral playlist,” Kristen said.
“Three separate contingency folders,” Fig added weakly. “One labeled If I Die Heroically, one labeled If I Die Embarrassingly, and one labeled If I Die While We're Saving The World Again.”
“That one was the thickest folder,” Gorgug said quietly.
Adaine laughed, and then looked toward the casket and didn’t laugh anymore.
Riz looked old.
That startled her more than anything else.
Not ancient—goblins didn’t really get ancient—but old enough for silver to thread through his hair and wrinkles to settle permanently around his eyes. He had lived sixty eight years, a long life by goblin standards. He had spent decades teaching other rogues, solved thousands of cases, and had a city full of people who trusted him to find them when they were lost.
It was a complete life.
Adaine hated him for leaving anyway.
Sklonda and Jawbone had already been gone for years, which hurt almost as badly as the coffin itself. It meant there was nobody left who still saw them as children.
Oisin slipped quietly beside her during the service, his hand brushing hers.
“Eat something after this,” he murmured.
Adaine glanced at him tiredly. “You sound like Riz.”
“Knowing him that’s either flattering or deeply insulting.”
“Both.”
For one brief moment, she smiled.
Then the casket was lowered into the ground.
After the speeches, after the burial, and after most of the people slowly dispersed into the cold evening, Adaine and the other Bad Kids lingered by the grave for hours, like children refusing to go inside after sunset.
“We should probably head back,” Gorgug said eventually.
Nobody moved.
Finally Fabian exhaled sharply through his nose. “Well. This is atrocious.”
“Yeah,” Kristen whispered.
Adaine stared at the fresh earth.
She thought, briefly and against her will, of a girl in black standing alone on a cliff. She pushed the thought down before it could take shape.
Not yet, she told herself. Not yet.
The first funeral she had ever attended had belonged to someone ancient enough to make death seem abstract.
Riz had texted her three days ago to remind her to eat lunch.
Gorgug died next.
He went peacefully, which somehow made it worse.
Adaine attended his funeral nearly twenty years after Riz’s in a world that had changed a lot by then. Elmville had grown sprawling and strange and the Aguefort Adventuring Academy had been rebuilt twice, once after a dragon attack and once after something involving time travel nobody could coherently explain.
The service took place in the woods near Aguefort.
The clearing glowed with lanterns and soft druidic magic while enormous flowers bloomed around them in real time. Barbarians, musicians and artificers packed the forest shoulder-to-shoulder and students from decades of teaching lined pathways carrying handmade lights.
“Gorgug Thistlespring died in his sleep beside his wife Mary Ann after eighty one years of marriage,” The officiant said.
“Most metal thing he ever did,” Fig whispered tearfully.
Even in death, he looked gentle.
Old age had softened him further instead of hardening him, and he had become broad in the way ancient trees were broad: stable, patient, and impossible to imagine gone.
Mary Ann sat near the front with one of Gorgug’s old flannels wrapped around her shoulders. Their children and grandchildren surrounded her in a wall of enormous awkward people who all had Gorgug’s careful eyes.
The speeches went on until nightfall.
Students talked about how Professor Thistlespring had never once made them feel stupid, and Adaine, Fig, Kristen, and Fabain told stories about Gorgug that almost made it seem like he was still here.
Mary Ann went last.
“He still asked if I was mad at him every time we argued,” she said, her voice trembling with sadness. “After eighty years. Like I was ever gonna leave.”
A wet, broken sound escaped Fig.
Mary Ann smiled through tears. “And I always stayed.”
Adaine looked away.
Because suddenly she remembered being fifteen years old and watching Gorgug ask every person he met if they were his dad, remembered him argue with Telemaine about his name, remembered him quietly sitting beside her during panic attacks without asking questions, and remembered, horribly, that she had once thought that Gorgug’s funeral would be the easiest to survive. Because Gorgug had always understood endings.
But grief was not easier because someone died peacefully. Sometimes it was worse.
Afterward, Oisin found her sitting alone beside one of the glowing trees.
“You okay?” He asked softly.
“No.”
He sat beside her anyway.
That was one of the reasons she loved him. Oisin never treated grief like a problem to solve.
Standing in the clearing while the lanterns slowly fizzled out, Adaine thought of herself standing still inside a vision while all the noise of the world receded around her. She understood now, in a way sixteen year old Adaine hadn't fully been able to articulate, what had been so frightening about her future self.
She hadn't looked devastated, she had looked accustomed to it.
Oisin was warm against her as she leaned into him and didn't let herself think about anything else for a few moments.
A few years later, after Oisin's own funeral had come and gone in a blur Adaine could barely remember surviving, she would think about that moment constantly, the warmth of his skin on hers and the certainty that he had still been alive.
Kristen died loudly because of course she did.
There was an explosion and nobody was entirely sure whether the explosion caused her death or merely accompanied it. The official story involved a planar collapse, three gods, a resurrection ritual gone wrong, and Kristen herself saying, “No, it’s okay, I’m actually tired.”
Adaine never learned if that last part was true.
Kristen’s funeral became something closer to a religious event that thousands attended.
Clerics from half a dozen faiths packed Cassandra’s temple, candles lit every street in Elmville for miles, and shrines appeared overnight covered in letters, prayers, terrible drawings, and liquor bottles.
Kristen would have loved it.
Adaine hated it.
“She can’t actually be dead,” Fabian said for perhaps the hundredth time.
“She died three months ago Fabian,” Fig snapped exhaustedly. “We checked.”
“With which gods?”
“With all of them, Fabian.”
“Did we ask Cassandra specifically?”
“Yes.”
Fabian folded his arms stubbornly. “Well. Deities are historically unreliable.”
Adaine almost laughed. Almost.
“You’re dissociating,” Aelwyn informed her flatly during the reception.
“I’m grieving.”
“You’re alphabetizing the desserts.”
Adaine looked down and the pastries had in fact, been arranged by flavor profile.
“…Fair.”
Aelwyn squeezed her hand briefly.
Tiny gestures. That was how Aelwyn loved.
Kristen’s body rested beneath stained glass depicting stars and oceans in impossible colors. Her hair had gone fully white years before she died, though she’d stubbornly continued dressing like a teenager most of the time.
Tracker stood near the coffin surrounded by other followers of their pantheon and Cassandra herself appeared briefly near dusk. Not physically, but enough for the entire cathedral to fall silent in awe and terror.
The goddess wept but Adaine could not.
Not at first.
She sat rigid through eulogies and prayers while memories surfaced through her mind so fast she thought that she would pass out from how fast she was thinking.
Kristen in freshman year, grinning with blood on her face after surviving the corn cuties, Kristen holding her hand through nightmares, Kristen getting naked for no reason. Kristen. Kristen. Kristen.
After the ceremony, long after everyone else had filtered away, Adaine remained alone before the coffin.
“She was afraid,” Cassandra said quietly from somewhere behind her.
Adaine turned sharply. The goddess stood there only halfway visible, starlight bleeding through her form.
“Of dying?”
“No,” Cassandra said softly. “Of leaving you all.”
Adaine’s throat closed.
“She loved being mortal. She thought it made everything matter more.”
Adaine looked towards the coffin.
“And what does immortality make?” she whispered.
Cassandra didn’t answer.
She didn't need to. Adaine already knew. She had known since she was sixteen years old, standing alone on a cliff, watching herself become someone who had learned to survive the unsurvivable so many times that survival had simply become what she did.
She had thought, back then, that it was a vision of the worst thing that could happen to her.
Now she understood it was just a vision of her life.
Fig died on stage naturally.
By then Adaine had already outlived every expectation she’d once had for herself. She had become the elven oracle, fallen in love, traveled the universe, saved the world several times over, and learned all the divination magic the world had to offer.
She was also very, very tired.
The funeral was less like an event to mourn someone who had just died and more like a music festival Fig would have played in at the peak of her career.
Music blasted through the streets for three straight days as bards performed covers of old Fig and the Cig Figs songs while Ayda coordinated logistics with grim efficiency that only barely concealed her devastation.
“Fig Faeth died at one hundred and twelve years old in the middle of a reunion concert after collapsing directly into the drum kit.”
“The most Fig way possible,” Fabian said hoarsely.
Fabian was old now. His hair was a more fragile white than it had been when they were younger and lines cut deeply around his mouth and eyes. Despite that however, he still dressed impeccably and still looked at Mazey like she hung the stars in the sky.
Adaine thought seeing Fabian age might kill her before he died.
But grief had changed shape over the decades. When they were young, death had always felt impossible right up until the instant it happened. Now it came more slowly, gathering at the edges of people they loved long before it finally arrived. And for the first time, Adaine realized that she and Ayda would be the ones left standing at the end of it.
Ayda would live nearly as long as Adaine, and then start a new life after that.
That realization settled between them heavily.
“She made me promise not to resurrect her,” Ayda said quietly sometime after midnight.
Adaine blinked. “What?”
“She said if she came back she’d just die doing another stupid stunt eventually anyway.”
“That’s—”
“Very Fig?”
Adaine laughed despite herself and then immediately started crying.
Fig and Ayda’s adopted daughter gave the final speech.
“She taught me that love isn’t something you earn by behaving correctly,” she said, voice shaking. “She said people who love conditionally aren’t loving you at all. They’re loving a performance.”
Adaine shut her eyes. Because Fig had taught her that too.
Not intentionally, maybe. But relentlessly.
Fig had loved Adaine loudly and casually and without ever asking permission first, even when Adaine thought she had been difficult to love.
At sunrise the day after everything had wrapped up, Ayda stood outside Mordred Manor with her enormous phoenix wings unfurled behind her.
“She would hate watching me stay miserable,” Ayda said softly.
Adaine nodded silently.
“I think if I remain here,” Ayda continued, “I will spend the rest of eternity looking for her in places she no longer is.”
“Where will you go?” Adaine asked.
“Somewhere she would have loved.”
Then Ayda hugged her fiercely and flew away in a burst of fire.
Adaine never saw her again.
Fabian Aramais Seacaster survived everyone. Everyone except Adaine.
He lived to one hundred and fifty six years old out of sheer determination to remain the most legendary person in every room.
Mazey had died decades before him, and to the surprise of absolutely no one who had truly known Fabian, he never remarried. Never even seriously entertained the idea. He spoke about her constantly for the rest of his life, sometimes fondly, sometimes exasperatedly, but always in a way that made it clear just how much he had loved her. Their marriage had become legendary over the decades: absurdly loving, intensely competitive, and occasionally terrifying to witness.
The funeral overlooked the ocean.
Hundreds attended. Old adventurers, distant relatives, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. There were sword salutes, cannon fire, an orchestral arrangement so dramatic it bordered on parody, and at sunset, his coffin was carried onto a ship and sent burning into the sea.
Everyone watched silently as flames swallowed it whole and while they did, Adaine remembered a sixteen year old Fabian struggling to jump on top of a lunch table, remembered him teaching her to dance for her wedding, remembered every ridiculous, brave, selfish, and generous thing he had ever done.
As the ship disappeared beneath the horizon there was suddenly nobody else who remembered freshman year, nobody else who remembered the Nightmare King, and nobody else who remembered being a Bad Kid.
Seacaster Manor had become a historical landmark decades earlier, though Fabian still insisted on living in it despite the fact that half the staircases had become death traps and at least three rooms were actively cursed.
Adaine stood near the manor beside Aelwyn, both of them dressed in black and trying very hard not to look as old as they felt.
Aelwyn watched the waves crash below the manor and sighed.
“You know,” she said conversationally, “when we were eighteen, he once told me that if he died young, the tragedy would permanently alter the course of this world.”
Adaine snorted despite herself. “That sounds like Fabian.”
“He also specified there should be at least three statues.”
“There are six.”
Aelwyn looked genuinely impressed. “Good for him.”
Adaine laughed hard enough that tears immediately followed after, sudden and sharp.
Beside her, Aelwyn quietly offered a handkerchief without comment.
By then Oisin had already been gone for decades.
That grief had hollowed her in quieter ways.
This time however, there were no divine manifestations, no legendary spectacle, just Adaine and Aelwyn standing together in the dark afterward, neither knowing what to say.
Adaine stood by the water long after the burning ship was gone and Aelwyn had left. Adaine did not let herself think about the vision, something she had gotten very good at, but it pressed at the edges of her mind anyway. The image of herself alone in black she now understood with a certainty she had been refusing for decades had not been a warning, but a forecast.
Afterward, in the decades and centuries that followed Fabian’s funeral, the world kept moving the same way it always did.
Adaine and Aelwyn had been close in the way of two people who had survived the same things, which was to say imperfectly, with a great deal of unspoken understanding and occasional stretches where they didn’t speak at all, but they were the last ones now. The last people alive who remembered the Abernant household before it broke open, the last who carried those particular memories, and that fact changed something between them.
They lived in separate houses because they were who they were, but dinner on Saturday became a ritual neither of them ever cancelled. Adaine cooked badly and Aelwyn pretended not to notice while she brought tea that was always too expensive for the occasion and Adaine pretended she hadn’t noticed that either. They argued a lot and agreed on more than they let on but sometimes sat for an entire evening saying almost nothing at all, which was its own kind of conversation.
The world was very different by then.
Elmville had expanded past anything they would have recognized as teenagers, with Aguefort becoming a central hub for all things extraplanar in addition to a high school. Magic had changed as well, with new schools emerging, old ones being revised, and twice in the span of fifty years some ambitious young scholar declaring that divination was outdated while Adaine watched their careers fade away with a kind of detached amusement. There were new gods, or at least newly named ones, and conflicts she was consulted on, some she tried to prevent and several she watched from a distance with the particular exhaustion of someone who had already seen the shape of it before.
She taught for a while, and found she was good at it, in spite of herself.
Aelwyn did not stop teaching but rather than continue to teach in a school, she instead took on a series of apprentices, each of whom she terrified into competence. She had become, over the centuries, something the world called formidable and she called practical. She had her own work, her own reputation, her own life that existed in the hours and days between their weekly dinners.
They did not live inside each other’s pockets, that had never been how they worked, but there was a start of something, around four hundred to five hundred years after Fabian’s death, when Aelwyn started sleeping later. Then missing the occasional dinner. Then arriving at dinners already tired in a way that had nothing to do with the work she had done that day.
Adaine was a diviner and she had been for centuries. She knew what she was seeing, but she chose not to for a while, too afraid that acknowledging it would make it seem realer.
“You look terrible,” she told Aelwyn one Saturday, setting a plate in front of her.
“I look exactly how I intend to,” Aelwyn said, and picked up her fork with the same precision she’d had at twenty.
Adaine sat down across from her. “Aelwyn.”
“Adaine.”
A pause.
“I’m tired,” Aelwyn said, finally, without looking up from her plate. “Just that, nothing more.”
Adaine understood completely.
They didn’t talk about it again for another year. When they did, it was practical: who would manage Aelwyn’s correspondence, what was to be done with her library, which apprentice was most likely to carry on her work without setting anything on fire. Aelwyn was thorough. She approached the logistics of her own death the way she had approached everything else in her life: with complete control, minimal sentiment, and the occasional devastatingly dry remark.
“I want a small funeral,” she said.
“You will not get a small funeral.”
“I know. I’m registering my preference anyway.”
“Noted,” Adaine said. “Ignored.”
Aelwyn smiled.
The end was not dramatic, nor was it sudden. Adaine had dreaded a sudden death most of all as she had seen that kind, and had learned what it felt like to have no warning. Aelwyn gave her warning in the only way she knew how, by being who she was, which was someone who controlled whatever she could control, and who would not have left Adaine unprepared if she had any say in it.
She died in the early spring, on a morning when the light came through the window at exactly the angle it always had.
That was the thing she had been most afraid of, for a long time. She had written it out once, years ago, in the clinical language of a diviner cataloguing a possible future: to be present. To be the one remaining.
It turned out that being there was not the worst thing.
Aelwyn, near the very end, had opened her eyes and looked at Adaine with an expression that had no fear in it.
“Stop hovering,” she said, very faintly.
“I’m not hovering.”
“You’re absolutely hovering.”
Adaine took her hand. “Better?”
“Marginally.”
That was how it was between them. That was how it had been for a long time now.
Afterward, Adaine sat alone in the room for a long time. The light kept moving across the floor the way light did. Outside, she could hear the world going about its business with complete indifference to the fact that Aelwyn Abernant was gone, which Adaine found both predictable and outrageous.
She did not leave for a very long time.
When she finally did, she walked through the early spring streets, through the Elmville that was nothing like the one she had grown up in, and thought about the silence of her world now that her sister was gone. It was the same silence she had seen at four years old in Fallinel, the one that had followed all those ancient elves out into the golden afternoon.
She finally understood, after nearly seven hundred years, what that silence had always meant.
Adaine Abernant died at seven hundred and twelve years old.
Not in battle, not dramatically, she simply fell asleep beside the window of her bedroom while rain tapped softly against the glass.
On the table nearby sat photographs worn soft with age.
The Bad Kids during freshman year, Aelwyn glaring affectionately over tea, Oisin smiling at something just outside the frame.
When Adaine closed her eyes that final night, she expected darkness.
Instead she got very loud noise.
“OH THANK GOD!” Kristen screamed immediately.
Adaine startled so violently she nearly fell backward.
Riz was already talking at full speed. “Okay, so technically the afterlife organizational structure is a disaster, and that was before Kristen attempted to unionize a celestial plane—”
“I nearly succeeded,” Kristen said proudly.
“You absolutely did not,” Fig cackled.
Gorgug stood nearby looking openly emotional.
“Adaine,” he said softly, “you made it.”
And suddenly they were all there.
Kristen crushed her in a hug hard enough to hurt, Gorgug and Fig were openly bawling, Fabian looked deeply offended by his own tears, Riz awkwardly committed to the group hug after visible internal debate.
Then another figure stepped forward.
Oisin. And behind him stood Aelwyn with her arms crossed.
“You took forever,” she informed Adaine.
Adaine stared at all of them, every person she had loved and mourned, and the terrible lonely future she had seen in that forest dissolved like fog beneath sunlight.
Adaine began to laugh and for the first time since she was sixteen years old, she was no longer afraid of forever.