They came at night.
Of course they did.
Not with torches.
Not with weapons.
Not with prayers.
They came in silence.
And they came for me.
A hundred of them.
Maybe more.
The forgotten.
The hanged.
The buried without names.
Their eyes were empty.
But not blind.
They saw me.
Truly saw me.
And they knelt.
Some were missing limbs.
Others had no skin.
One had a rusted bell in place of a tongue.
Still, they chanted—without mouths, without breath.
"We heard you," their voices said inside my skull.
"We remember you."
The wind didn't blow.
But the trees bowed.
The candles at the gravedigger's altar had all gone out.
He was gone, too.
He had seen enough.
And still… I waited.
Waited for the last one.
The one with the deer skull.
The one who had once whispered to me beneath the soil.
She emerged from the darkness like smoke.
Not walking—sliding.
She did not kneel.
She did not bow.
She opened her arms.
"I never died," she said.
"I only slept inside you."
Her voice was my voice.
Or what my voice used to be.
I stepped toward her.
And she stepped into me.
We didn't merge.
We didn't fight.
We became.
One scream,
a thousand voices.
One step,
a hundred years.
The dead rose.
Not to walk.
To follow.
Not as an army.
As a procession.
They carried no banners.
Only silence and dust.
And me at the front.
Crowned in roots.
Wrapped in feathers.
Dripping the blood of a heart no longer mine.
We didn't go to the village.
The village would come to us.
We walked toward the crack—
Or what used to be the crack.
Now, it was only a scar.
A memory.
A heartbeat.
Mine.
And I felt it again.
The hunger.
The warmth.
The terrible, perfect knowing:
I was not born.
I was remembered.