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SUCH BELOW IS AN AUTHENTIC SLICE OF FANFICTION.
ANY DUPLICATE DISPLAYED NOT HERE WILL BE FOUND TO BE PIRATED.
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"ARASHU'S DEPARTED"
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Funerary Rites Atop The Pellagic
Installment 1
A sharp rasp of a door's corroded sill over uneven momboo boards and buckled tiles jolted the stillness. Admitted soggy air swept an invisible sea of dust nebulae to the songahr's discolored beryl recesses. An outline of a man dominated the threshold. His arm jut forth into the dingy interior, fingers pistoled. "Kolyat," gloved fingers flicked, "….tali'ahonea (come here)."
A pied face of teal and black lifted an ink-eyed stare. "Abboe (Father)," a second child with polychromatic skin stood, "…madiea ahoieana (what about me)?"
"Au (No)," his father replied, "…ijulan (sit down), Amryat, ipaye honea (stay here), alfinitia (lad)." As the pied child came alongside him, he seized the youngster's head and rotated this to examine the face's mottling, "…Aya, safo tameh louas (Eh, it will do)."
Additional bodies gathered outside in the misty air of the fens, engaged in subdued talk amongst one another, gruff voices amalgamated with hushful tones from women. A funereal silence fell over the whole of the group when the child appeared on the baustradeh.
In the shade of the day's last hours, the train of forms moved into the aligned exequy skiffs.
Poles dipped, propelled, raised and cycled again, the chain of skiffs afloat in a towpath through the boggy fens. Sporadic splashes and whoops of avifauna from the farther fringe of bush could be heard as a sprinkling of the cortège held private discussions during this segment of the service.
Kolyat sat in torpid dejection, optic tints with mirror images of a red and yellow horizon through the stratus of a far off boundary beyond the fens' coastal extremity.
In passage from stern to prow, one rider created an impromptu sway to the skiff.
A hand grazed his shoulder, the touch an offer of reassurance and sympathy.
A quarter-turn granted him sight of the youth's stained profile against the hoary winding sheet in the bed of the skiff, "…Kolyat," the other purred, "…sahau trakeni muhaneau alanit, (she will be in a holy place now), ialadu (my boy)."
Daubed on his innocent face were teardrop marks to identify him to the Dead—a vernacular of celestial beings and spirits under Kalahira's direction upon the distant shores of the Encompassing—so that bygone souls may remember those who came to visit the veil of eternal rest, who came to shed tears on the plane of the ocean. Into an ear flowed the conclusion of that which his grandfather sought to dispense to him, "…Scara m'huka tranidal nojes canda (I will teach you our ways)."
Faced forward to the prow once more, the child recommenced the rite of observance over the filled shroud at his feet.
Perturbed his shoe toes might by chance upset the undefiled web, that enclosed the head of the obscure conformation in repose among the forward half of the craft, Kolyat repeatedly stuffed both heels backward, underneath the timber plank on which he sat. Lusterless cobble, every one the bulk of a grown man's hand, had been set down from one end of the shroud to the other.
On the other side of obsidian menisci, his vision glided upward from the hoary pall's head to the rangy physique of a fellow passenger at the prow—a slab of blackness in the radiance of skyline burn with his wide shoulders to the youth, and the protected silhouette at the bottom of gainful umbra…A personage he narrowly understood but cherished as a little one does his father.
At no time since the demise of Kolyat's biological mother had this individual glanced at their son and heir.
Whether to come into contact with his face by organ of sight or palm would be to affront whatever consciousness prohibited a creator to console his progeny, stationed in survey of the departed's blanket. Sunbeams slitted into and out of the clouds, and reversed Kolyat's study of his father…The skiffs' protracted cortège had encountered the saltwater delta, and they emerged from the reedy coagulation of the endured fenland.
On the far side of the skiff's nose, breakers sent back rays into sable optics and heated his face with final streaks so aureate, Sere Krios mused of her and her pedigreed family among the boats. "Najas ahiloma (We're here)," such a one sang out above the others from the skiff's back. "Yah m'rie thrun r'kinowli nan (They should be arriving soon)," he appended as he detained the crew in position with a stake of considerable length—by a lone hold of blond digits, the extremity of stick was to a great depth enclosed by the unlit subaqueous floor, and he looked to the fore of the vessel, "…Hana grut k'noia lajon Krantomuu (This is the Krantomie Lagoon), rehn dea tanea h'runopki (site of the deceased)."
This mortal existence, Thane Krios, fixed his gaze on the tail of the craft, upon the steersman who led the others for that place in the breakers of the lagoon, and gave a wide berth to his descendant's study of him at the nose of the skiff—but he was incapable to occlude the border observation of winding sheet, supine in the skiff's base. Hostile emerald optics were uncovered by twilight fingers of sun cracked through the clouds. There was a disagreeable frown in the lower lip of his late wife's brother. Atop his shoulders was placed the srapia of his and his skin and blister's blood relations, gold and snow white cloth that the remainder of their kin donned for the water observance—to be held by the hanar—for Irikah Krios-Soterios. On his tow-colored face, markings akin to those decorated on every one of the balance of the pack—though to some degree divergent from one another's to designate who one and all were to the expired.
Uncanny air was perceived to move up from the sea under the skiffs' keels, and as one revolved his stare back to the pitch black water, its ceaseless undulation of evening mirror, cerise and ablaze between the stratus, the light, radiant dorsal fins of Hanar Ch'iasanam Dofatal interrupted the shiny veneer of rollers—initially a deceit of glare and wavy movement, then only to approach farther up and be detectably something other than water. Everybody who had the particular optics—shades on top of eyes that allowed a small number in the company of the balance of them to see the hanar technique of communion by illumination altered and conveyed from within the confines of their exterior sheaths—was free to comprehend what it was all of the Ch'iasanam Dofatal intoned as they floated toward the first skiff. What the indicated flickers and tremulous voices proclaimed to Thane and any others: it was time to gather the deceased. Coils of protuberances below the water progressed the hanar for the principal skiff as Casnar, Kolyat, and Thane, his grandfather raised the cobbles next to the pall-enveloped conformation of Irikah Krios-Soterios herself, and conveyed those all to the side of the skiff for passing into the deep.
Kolyat registered what all of them were preparing to carry out—this gesture was conclusive, and his mother would vanish perpetually with the hanar to the floor of the Encompassing.
The other side of his tints Kolyat was allowed to discern the hanar proceeding toward their skiff, their anatomy and feelers glistening in the manner of overlaid-with-silver, coruscating twine and frame under the breakers that lurched toward the interior of the marshland.
Extending from far down under, little beacons started to puncture through the dark fathoms.
He lifted his stare to his old man's—Thane Krios perceived in his own boy's much the same vesper he long ago glimpsed shining back from the center of each the youngster's materfamilias's globes. "L'ah ariutou basa doon idu baneta, Abboe, (I do not wish for her to go down, Father)," Kolyat's input was uneven over the continuous plunge of rollers, the quavering air of the hanar recognized to almost stop.
Each of the attenders to the service focused their faces from the shape of the swathed Irikah to her boy. Kolyat rocked his head measuredly at his father at the start, subsequently with an opinion filled of hate, he uttered in fury for the first time, "…Hada otha kapathatur (This is your fault)!" He voiced it at the top of his lungs—for every one of them to overhear—superior to the rush of ripples hostile to the skiffs, the breeze and strain of the hanar. "Kanda mio saunuu naghaka sient (You were supposed to protect us)—Kanda mio saunuu naghaka Umo (You were supposed to protect Mother)!"
Accompanied by a very loud boom in contact with the base of the boat, his rock had dropped and made a landing.
All of his begetter's tallness dominated in all parts of Kolyat's personal parts—small-scale and ridiculous while he called out within a high-pitched voice at his old man, pulling each of his muscles and junctions to construct his character precisely a step or pair higher below their gapes…He undertook not either to remove his eyeballs from his biological father's, erected imperturbably at the bow gazing downward on him, or to say sorry for his scorn of the drell.
"Limem telka louk timkyt (Why weren't you there)!" He wheeled, directing toward his uncle's stained face, "…Limem hellau unaka (Why wasn't he there)!" He revolved, facing his progenitor, "…Limem telya wok fila teklum (Why weren't you there to stop it)!"
The rollers struck the planks of the skiffs.
No remarks were caught to satisfy his request.
He rotated and gazed at all of them—the look of a distressed young one, wading in anguish—and eventually he stared downward at the winding sheet. "Limem deheya maya da'tamu (Why is she dead)!" He fixed his gaze onto his maker, mouth unfastening to uncover his denticulation, "…Kul sayan (Say something)!"
A group of fowl, whirling overhead, spread hastily in every direction at his scream.
Kolyat balled his fists just as a chance mantle of stratonimbus discharged drifting raindrops above them, blemishing the grayish white linen on top of his birth mother.
Thane possessed no locutions up to this time, his jaw meeting his breast.
In the vicinity of the skiff's port rail, the hanar sang out to Thane and flickered, "…Sere Krios…It is time to free her to the Encompassing's embrace."
Thane stretched out his arm compliantly for Kolyat's relinquished cobble—Kolyat snatched his father's wrist to stop him from gathering the rock to his burden, "…Au (No)!"
Casnar aligned himself with the pole as if hit all of a sudden, seizing a secure grip about his stone and the expired in the sheet, the disruption of Kolyat's scuffle with his old man trembling the vessel—Casnar shouted to the nearest-at-hand skiff with kin changing positions to assist, "…Chasan na'jayat Kolyat daa (Someone please take Kolyat)—haka'lami mesui ti'ana imeno se (so we may finish this)," he uttered, voice fracturing its calmness with agony, his look taut and flowing with smudged stain and rain riddling the makeup from his crests to his neck pleats.
At the same time that his kinsman spoke that audibly and one more boat knocked against their own, Kolyat spun and gaped at Casnar, losing his grip on his father's wrist.
"Tali'ahonea, Kolyat (Come here, Kolyat)," Tor Vitale—in the time it required as concerned more in the company of his inherent relatives to aid in keeping the skiffs steady under the heels of their feet—extended into the head boat and gathered the youngster to himself, coming back to his place within the current skiff alongside him, "…Da muhi ome bat ya ke'momit na (Let them deliver your mother to the sea now)."
Kolyat glared with an air of pain found in his consideration of Casnar, that one in question by the side of his grandad, Reule Krios, the two gazing cheerlessly at him from the facing boat at present. Casnar shook his head, pronouncing within his quietness through the agency of his organs of sight such that Kolyat sort himself to calm, and making a point about the aforementioned in the company of broadening rare green beryls—his existed in the absence of surgeries else were in possession of—and a manner of bearing charged by set-on engrossment at the same time he willed the youth to prevail being extra-deferential, considering their whereabouts together within the moment.
He curved his highness to the pall about his sibling at that point, putting in order the stones guided by his unrestricted mitt whilst additional support laid hold of what attachments Kolyat had abandoned, and with the aid from amid the meeting skiffs, the stones along with Kolyat's shrouded mother were conveyed above the rail of the craft—in the middle of Kolyat's skiff, also the past one he occupied a short time before the present, Irikah Krios-Soterios was situated upon a laced mass of seaweeds along with carapaces of glittering features, merged in the company of timber braces, bolstered by means of air buoys such that could be detached soon following the placing of her amid those…
Along with her guard of Ch'iasanam Dofatal, she would fall to a great depth in the company of her rocks and flo'kit.
While the lowest part about her cover came into contact with the rollers, soaking up the ocean along with "blackening" the "white" linen—such came of Kolyat's troubled belief attributed to that event, when he could discern the covering lighten therefore showing the hue belonging to his parent's blond arm past the protective cloth, he broke out of possession by his uncle-in-law to shriek toward his father, "….Akra kaera oika (I hate you)!"
Some soul began to speak rites while the hanar curled long tentacles about handles at the edges of the flo'kit—to guide its somber contents below the waves—and over sobs, threats made by a screaming, outraged child for the removal of his mother against his wish…The buoys were released and these floated to bob above the surface, rising with the waves foamy and twilight-tinged over where her shroud had finally faded from his sight.
Tor gave Kolyat into the waiting shawl of his wife, Iulia Vitale-Krios, "…Am sika byhe, Iuls (Hold him, Iuls)," he whispered to her, beneath the spoken rites, the child screaming still and attempting to break-free from the shawl that balmed him against her belly as she faced the water with her husband and her son, seeing off their sister-in-law to the Encompassing.
abboe: one's father in Kahjic Drell language.
alfinitia: a young drell child, often used in formal address of males.
au: applied to give a negative.
aya: a sound used in speech to address a multitude of situations: to obtain greater explanation, exclaim in surprise or emotion, repeat something for clarity, or elicit an agreement.
baustradeh: a roofed platform along the outside of a dwelling, level with the first floor plan.
canda: rituals and customs of a culture.
Ch'iasanam Dofatal: "Ministers of the Quietus" — Hanar clerics charged with the release of the dead into the Encompassing on Kahje.
flo'kit: a Kahjic woven rug made of kelps and crustaceous ornamentation, used to transport the deceased to an undersea ceremonial resting bed.
h'runopki: the departed, or nonliving.
lajon: a stretch of saltwater separated from the sea by structures such as sandbars and reefs.
momboo: a high-growth woody reed that grows extensively in tropical areas on Kahje.
songahr: a pile dwelling built over water or wet land, usually with a low roof, anterior porch, doors and windows.
srapia: a shawl or long cloth worn as a cloak.
umo: one's mother in Kahjic Drell language.
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