On the way in, the village met Baruch with empty lanes and the warm, oily hush of a feast day. Two years are a breath to the forest—one slow inhalation, one slow release—but in a place of men that span can bite. The track he knew by memory had brought him back to a steadier, tidier place: new boards nailed square to old frames, roofs fresh-sealed with pitch, shutters hanging true; pale gravel thick on the paths; the well's crane moving without complaint—only the soft whuff of the bucket and the green smell of wet timber.
At the thresholds, as if posted for guard, stood wreaths of flowers; above, ribbons and little oil-lamps were slung like a low-lit sky. All of it, left masterless, seemed to squint against the fires kindling in its own windows. Doors gaped wide. Candleglow and the last warmth of kitchens drifted out. Light—and the clean sting of wax—ran out of those rooms and pooled at the village's edge, laying a gold seam through the dusk; the houses kept their silence—every voice drawn to the stones and deep-dug pits.
And now, here where houses gave over to graves, the scent thinned to grass and cold stone. From the lane, the graveyard fence stood low and honest; it hid nothing from a patient giant's eye. Men, ringed by stone, drank hot spirits and argued too loudly for this hallowed ground; women traded whispers; children made circles and crosses of pebbles, the way children make anything—by play. No one looked their way.
"El venerado Baruch, ya been scowlin' the whole road like midnight," came Carlos's voice at his elbow. "Somethin' wrong?"
The steward walked with careful awkwardness, cap worrying in his hands, gaze mostly lowered but forever darting up to Baruch.
"All is well, my friend. Only—" Baruch began, and the words went cold on his tongue as the air split with a hollow clang.
Not his doing. Baruch set his feet as if each blade of grass were owed a kindness. Carlos, not watching his steps, caught a heavy bucket left near the path with the toe of his boot; it rang like a shield and toppled, spilling.
"¡Carajo! Which fool put this porquería smack in the road?" Carlos flared, then softer: "Perdón, el venerado…" He rubbed at his shin and winced.
The noise on the burial ground sagged and fell. A polite, tight silence spread, first along the fence and then deeper in. Faces turned. Some bowed too low, some sprang up too fast.
"Sit, stand—don't matter—just stay put!" Carlos barked, throwing his voice wide to open a lane. "Make a lane! Ain't no circo here!"
Baruch tipped him a nod; haste never sat well on him. Instead, he went on at the same unhurried gait. Faces waited, but he let them blur. He counted smaller things instead—the way the candles were strewn into soft constellations, how marigolds and morningstars crowded the stones, how the offering bowls still held warmth from kitchen fires. Cut grass, cold ash, and the one thing the living keep of the dead: memory.
No sooner had he stepped through the little gate than the crowd surged—hands, voices, faces—a tide he had no wish to drown in. Carlos's clumsy bass split the hush.
"One at a time, ya buzzards—uno por uno! Let el venerado catch a breath; he come half the valle on them long legs!"
It worked. They came by ones and twos now, softer: thanks murmured, petitions folded into the tender parts of their voices.
Not only pleas and grievances came. Gratitude came too—plain, unfeigned—the warmest words a tongue shy of ornament could shape, and with them baskets as if conjured: bread still steaming, dirt-sweet roots, a bright spill of berries.
They looked at him with reverence and awe, eyes hungry for a miracle. He saw no miracle-bringer in himself. In his own eyes he was no more than his wife's hands and the forest's voice when the forest chose to speak.
"In the corner with it, ya dunderheads," Carlos growled. "Man got two hands, not ten."
There was care in the bark, the rough sort that lands like a slap and counts as a favor. Baruch's mouth twitched despite himself. Under his breath: "Thank you, my grumpy friend."
The next petitioner was no petitioner at all—beloved, and loving.
At the edge of his sight a familiar shadow fluttered. Leaf half-started to run to him, mouth split in a broad, mischievous grin—a rare guest on the boy's face. A good sign. Yet Baruch met his eye, and the quick feet gave way to patience. Graveyards were for work, not races. Another little shadow struck him in the ribs and wrapped around with no asking. He should have scolded; his hand found the girl's crown instead.
"I missed you," the girl's voice said.
"I missed you as well, Rigel," he answered, low.
Her eyes kindled; the smile she cut in the dark was a thin pale crescent. Another voice followed—cooler, edged.
"At last you show yourself. Tabitha's in the grove. Says she'll come by midnight. Worked up to her horns."
"I see..." Baruch said. He was in no temper for sparring. "My thanks for the word, Raquel."
"And a fine for being late," she added, plucking the berry basket from his palms. Elegant fingers, greedy as hooks. Strawberries vanished into her mouth; her eyes slid sideways to measure him.
"¡Raquel, carajo! That there was for el venerado!" a woman squeaked behind her.
"No," Raquel said around the chew, not unkind. "It's a gift for me. From him."
Baruch let a breath go. "Share with the children and it's yours," he told her. Over his shoulder, gentler: "Thank you, Marisol. Your kindness is noted."
The woman's face brightened, framed by a timid smile.
After her came another—an old one, and Baruch could not recall ever seeing a smile sit on that mouth. One of the few whose years had crept anywhere near his own. He had not thought to find her on her feet after two winters away; his brows lifted a hair.
"Gracias por venir, el venerado," she breathed—small but steady—and pressed a stemless rose into his palm. "Pray for my foolish old man, por favor."
Her thin hand lifted and traced a line through the air from the central slab to the graveyard's far corner, to the stone her eyes would not leave. "Mi viejo terco…"—half curse, half prayer.
Baruch followed the line of her hand, letting his gaze brush row on row. Young stones, too many for a village—grief still warm from the chisel. Thirteen winters on most of them, a number that cinched tight beneath the breastbone. He and Tabitha had come to this place as strangers once, not knowing the names under the grass. To stand beside the unknown dead felt presumptuous; to let them be forgotten would be the greater sin.
"For all," he said, his thumb smoothing the rose's petals. "First the departed, then you who remain."
He walked to the white slab at the center—the empty grave raised for She-Who-Descended, the stone that bore the name most tongues were afraid to speak without blessing.
Even now, thirteen years on, time's trickery remained hard to credit. The candle at the stone's foot burned steadily—the candle of Aelithra the Golden, Aelithra the Celestial, whom many of his kin called the Third Mother, the immortal who found her way to the underworld.
Baruch raised his hands—first the sign of honor, then the old words that found his mouth of their own accord. "Yehé zikhram barúkh… shalom al ha-afar, shalom al ha-lev…"
The tongue was ancient in these fields, yet the sense needed no interpreter: the dead are at peace; it is the living who must bind up their hearts.
He bowed his head—not to her, but for her—and the women stepped forward as if on a cue older than memory, pressing a clay bowl into his hands. Its warmth surprised his palms; resin and green bitter rose from the rim. Baruch set the bowl at the base of the empty stone, a careful offering, and let a twig of myrher fall, then two pale petals of morningstars that took the water like tiny boats and turned there, slow as prayer.
He wet his fingers, touched brow, lips, breast—the way his elders had taught—each point a stitch to draw flesh and memory together. Only then did he loose his sandals. Cold earth received him like an old friend, took his weight and kept it, and the rite, at last, had somewhere firm to stand.
"We will not mourn your passing," he said in the formula of Valoria Del Sol where laughter guarded sorrow. "Instead, we thank you for each day spent, each deed completed."
He placed a heel of bread from the nearest dish at the false grave. Right hand to stone, left hand to earth, he closed the circle. Eyes shut. On the breath in came the heaviness of soil; on the breath out its thick, patient pulse.
Daniel—Leaf to most—stood at his right, holding the cup of temple-soaked water until a thin silver thread ran down the carved name. To the left, Rigel arrayed the wooden birds she had whittled—an odd village custom, harmless as any; the heavens would take love in any shape.
"Siftei yeshenim yedabru," Baruch breathed, barely louder than the moths. Let the lips of the sleeping speak.
He pressed his hands to the turf, set his brow to the damp sod, and whispered the last, a prayer meant only for him. "Barúkh ha-adamá."
The wreath on the slab settled true; water vanished into hairline cracks, and the stone seemed to loose a long-held breath.
"De norte a sur, de este a oeste…" the women took up in a hush that trembled like candleflame.
Silence clung one heartbeat longer, then thinned into gentle motion. From the central stone, people drifted to their dead: a cloth rasped over grit, a small rivulet traced letters, a cross marked here, a whispered thanks there.
Baruch set his hands to what he did best—work. He went to his knees and, with his son far too diligent for his years, scrubbed old black from the face of a marker. In the grass, a lizard uncoiled toward the warmed granite. He lifted it with two fingers and set it by a tuft of thyme.
"Not tonight, little one."
A farmer a few graves off had his tongue between his teeth and blew ash from shallow-chiseled lines as solemn as if the work would move the sun. Farther on, where the stones were newest—grown before his eyes in a bad year that still clawed at ribs—Baruch's gaze sought the names. The ones he had not saved: not enough hands, not enough hours, not enough knowing. The village liked to dress him in a hero's cloak; he felt the tug of failures knotted beneath his breastbone like an old root. Those plaques he would clean the slowest, the surest—when the crowd thinned and the candles burned low.
At the fence, grief and laughter wove themselves into a single cloth. Every dead had some foolish habit, some song they sang too much, some story that ended badly. By the boundary stones a young man—Carlos's boy—let out a choked breath and swiped at his eyes; for a heartbeat he glanced Baruch's way with the look of a child caught in tears. Baruch kept his eyes on the slab. 'Living is work too,' he told the quiet inside him.
The young man did not stand alone for long. A young woman came soft-footed, laid a hand upon his shoulder. María, Baruch marked, half listening. Not far off, Raquel stood without her usual barbs, a shade of sorrow in her mouth, prayers for her people whispering out of her like steam from winter bread.
A breath later, the graveyard hushed of its own accord. Somewhere above the markers a horned raven called—hoarse, as if a pebble lodged in its throat. Between one heartbeat and the next the wind fell still, yet every candle shivered, as if an unseen palm had passed over the flames. Old women paused mid-whisper. Men forgot their cups. An ill sign.
A small tug found his sleeve. "Abba, do you hear?" Leaf asked, eyes lifted to the dark.
"It's nothing, Leaf," Baruch said, evenly. "Work."
The boy bobbed his head and bent to his task. From hump to hump they moved, slow as monks, unhurried as prayer. Perhaps it was the closeness of the stones, perhaps the hour, but the day's strange loss—the burr beneath the skin—stirred again in Baruch, grazing him with a thin chill. Something that had always stood near had stepped a pace away. He closed his eyes and breathed the way the temple far from these fields had drilled into him over many winters: in through the belly, out through the bones.
Nearby, Rigel's little birds clicked on stone, Leaf's tongue poked at the corner of his mouth while he worried a stubborn corner of moss. The world shrank to hands and lichen, to damp cloth on warm stone. The ache answered by growing quiet. Whatever had gone missing, what he needed was within an arm's reach.
When he rose, he rose to work. His palm found the old circle, the cloth whispering over the stone. Again. And again. And again.
So it would be for a while yet. These small, stubborn folk spent their short lives dear, paying years for the chance to warm a cold name by a thumb of fire. They would scrape and polish and set their little offerings, as if a sliver of yesterday might be coaxed back to life. But Baruch knew how nights like this ended: the lamps would gutter, and the grief would loosen; tight mouths would soften into wide smiles; hush-prayers would slip into laughter and song. Without anyone noticing, the vigil would lean toward feast—that was the village way.
But for now his hand kept its patient rhythm across the stone. He did what he did best. He worked. Again. And again.