Funeral Pyre

This was written for the Snow Micro Challenge.

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They’d passed through this forest before. He sensed traces of her magic still—in the air, among the trees, in the snow that had thawed and reformed countless times over. The trail was faint, but it would have to do.

He built a fire, which was difficult from the lack of dry wood. Gathering the pieces took even longer, as he’d ceased relying on magic to compensate for his blindness. Magic was noise, and he needed silence to find her.

She wasn’t dead. That was his curse, to remember. That she was only hidden away, in some place he would never find or reach. It hadn’t stopped him from trying. He had searched the worlds for her once before, and he would do it again.

He withdrew a raven from his bag. His father would know—it was one of his, after all—but would not understand. Well, let them think he had gone mad. They already believed that, didn’t they?

How easy it would have been to squeeze the life out of the shivering creature. Instead, he let his magic flow out of his fingers, and with it, his pain and grief and loneliness. He was a dead man who could not rest, a ghost who could not find peace. If he could not cross the realms, then something else would have to, in his stead.

The raven’s weak cawing ceased as he froze its heart.

He laid it on the pyre and sang a hymn for its passing.

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Hi! I'm Marie, a Filipino fantasy author and book reviewer currently based in the UK. I’m the co-author of The Prophecies of Ragnarok, a Norse myth new adult urban fantasy trilogy, and I also have several short stories published in anthologies and literary journals.

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