Interlude Two
The funeral was small, with barely ten people, but a more sombre affair was never seen. The giant God Tree swayed in the breeze, hung with prayers for the dead. The old shrine priest stared with dead eyes, his faith wearing thin, as he prepared to send his granddaughter's soul to the next world.
A boy stood apart from the crowd, staring at the empty urn that represented his older sister's body; the Sphere had given them nothing to mourn bar a grotesque, unrecognisable photograph. His eyes, too, were dead; filled with nothing, but his mind seethed with anger. Angry thoughts, angry plans, angry grudges.
The middle-aged woman cried torrents of grief, enough to fill an ocean and yet not nearly enough to ease the ache in her soul. Her child was simply gone, ripped from the world with a terrifying suddenness. She could not even say goodbye to her earthly body.
Slowly, the young friends began to drift away, their own shock and grief almost too much to deal with, along with their guilt. If they had not left her, if they had taken her with them when they ran…if they had not been so selfish, so cowardly, she might still be there.
The old man chanted, but in his heart he cursed the gods into whose very hands he was delivering his only granddaughter's soul.
The chant rose and fell with the breeze, the paper prayers tied on the trees rustled in accompaniment, and the sirens for curfew blared in the distance. Slavers and their charges began to walk the darkened streets, in search of dissidents. The searchlights clicked on, and still the family prayed.
But they did not believe.