The sunset dazzle fades behind the clouds, leaving the sky awash in a rosy glow. Sailor's delight. At last Ed sees his surroundings clearly: the cemetery, its once carefully tended greensward parched, eroded, and blotched with freshly dug -- no, freshly disturbed graves. His heart begins to pound again; he discards his hypothesis of a dry-weather ergotic plague in favor of resurrectionism run amok. Riesenbuhl wouldn't be the first town tempted to disaster by an unscrupulous alchemist with visions of its beloved dead revived.
Once he finds Al and saves Winry, Ed promises himself, he'll see that ghoul buried alive.
oOo
They come lumbering into the cemetery from every direction, one sphacelate figure barely distinguishable from another in the twilight. Ed keeps his head down, his left arm twisted behind him, exploring his bonds. They loop him from collarbone to waist, pinioning him to one of the few headstones still upright, but the knots are clumsy. He picks at them as forcefully as he dares, while his enemies shuffle past to crowd around a nearby plot. Sluggishly they drop to their knees and begin digging in the dry soil, keening like laboring women.
Ed swallows and tugs harder at the rope.
oOo
A digger topples, opening a gap, and Ed glimpses the name on the memorial.
"No!"
He rips himself free, frantically improvising a circle to seal the ground, but his hand trembles and the wind effaces what he scrawls. The revenants pounce, fouling his limbs with theirs, yanking his head back by the hair. He sees a familiar silhouette straighten against the bloody sky, shrugging the grave-mold from its shoulders. His breath catches.
Its head lolls toward him; then it shrugs again.
Ed claws the earth as his captors drag him away toward the charred shell of his childhood home.
oOo
They toss him backward into the pit beneath the elm tree, a maw broader than his arms' width -- his straining fingers just brush a fuzzy nap of grass-roots and dirt before his body crashes wetly into the half-formed thing that lies at the bottom. He hopes, believes, prays he's crushed it -- then he feels the heart pulsing against his spine, the entrails wriggling under his buttocks like a nest of snakes. The ribs bend inward to embrace him; the lungs flutter and inflate so the mouth can breathe Edward into his nape as it gnaws through his skull ...