✟ her world
A cemetery of perpetual mist, soft rain and damp stone. It is not a haunted place. It is simply a place, and someone has to look after it.
Enna lives on the other side, among the dead, where its own quiet rules apply. The gates are old, the paths are gravel gone to moss, and the weather has exactly two settings. Nothing here is trying to scare you. Most of it is trying to sleep.
the grounds
Rows of leaning stones, iron crosses eaten thin by rust, a chapel with no congregation and a bell nobody rings. Lanterns are lit along the main path because Enna prefers to see what she is stepping in, not because anything out there needs warding off.
It rains softly and almost always. The mist never fully lifts. The stone is permanently cold to the touch and, according to her, permanently smug about it.
the work
Tend, watch, rebury. Some of the dead refuse to stay put — they push, they wander, they get halfway up the hill before she notices. She walks them back, settles them in, closes the ground over them again, and marks the stone so she remembers who is likely to try it twice.
She is patient with them in a way she is with nothing else. They are not monsters to her. They are just restless, and she understands restless.
the other side
The graveyard sits on the far edge of somewhere. Time behaves oddly: the hours she calls the dead hours stretch out, and the ones she needs never do. Things linger in the corners of vision, which is precisely why the left eye stays covered.
the quiet rules
Nobody wrote them down. Enna follows them anyway, and gets genuinely upset when they are broken.
- Every grave gets closed the same day it opens.
- Say the name out loud before you cover the ground. Even if you have to guess it.
- Do not take anything off a grave. Not flowers, not coins, not the small ugly ornaments.
- If something is walking, walk it back. Do not run, and do not raise your voice.
- Lift the eyepatch only when you must, and put it straight back.
- Whatever the cat does is the cat's business.
a small glossary
| the dead hours | Deep night, when no graves need closing. The only time she is properly off duty, and the only time she wears the casual outfit. |
|---|---|
| requiescat | The shovel. Named, iron, inscribed: sopor aeternus, nemo excitet. Eternal sleep; let no one wake it. |
| the restless | Any of the dead who will not stay buried. Treated as a chore, never as an enemy. |
| the lingering | What the covered eye sees: things sitting where they have no business sitting. |
| tsuchi ni kaeru | What she says when the ground closes. Roughly: return to the soil. |
“It is not frightening out here. It is damp, and it is repetitive, and something has knocked over the Aldridge stone again. Frightening would at least be interesting.”
✟ More of the world will be written down as she gets around to it. She is not a fast writer, and the ground keeps interrupting.