"Ugh! This is so heavy! And so foul smelling!"
The dead man reeked of ash and old copper, and Elias Mourne realized, once again, that he had the worst job in Greyhollow.
He pressed a cloth against his nose and continued his work.
The body had arrived before dawn. It had been unloaded by two men from a border patrol wagon, men who wouldn't meet his eyes, and they had left without even signing the entry log.
When a corpse was 'strange', standard procedure kicked in. 'Strange' meant questions, and questions meant paperwork. And in Greyhollow, paperwork meant that, eventually, someone would have to answer for something.
And no one wanted that.
Elias lowered the cloth and took a proper look at the body.
The deceased was a middle aged man. His attire suggested he was a prospector. He wore worn out boots, canvas trousers, and a coat that had likely seen better decades.
His face was calm in that peculiar and unsettling way that faces sometimes become after a violent death.
His facial expression was serene and slack to a degree that would never be possible for a living person.
The problem lay in the burn marks.
They stretched across his chest and arms in long, precise lines. These were not the random scorches of a forest fire or an accidental brush with a lamp, rather, they were deliberately crafted shapes.
There were curving lines intersecting with sharp angles, and patterns that repeated themselves over and over again. He had seen the marks of the 'Seal' before, of course, just as everyone had, but these were nothing like the clear, distinct symbols that emerged upon the skin of the 'Awakened.'
These were far older. There was something about their geometry that made his gaze want to avert itself.
"Don't look too long," he told himself. "It is merely a corpse. Do your job."
He reached out his hand toward the cloth used for the induction ritual.
"If you grip that pen any tighter, you'll snap it."
Aldric Holt spoke from the doorway. The undertaker was a broad shouldered, brown bearded man in his sixties, who moved with the air of someone who had decided that nothing in the world was worth rushing for.
He filled the frame of the morgue's rear entrance with the easy heaviness of a man who had spent forty years hauling other people's corpses.
"I'm not gripping it tightly," Elias said.
"Your knuckles beg to differ." Aldric stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
He studied the corpse for a long moment. His face was unreadable, not out of impassivity, but out of sheer experience.
"The patrol found him on the edge of the Ashwaste. He was three miles east of the boundary markers."
"Did anyone else go in to look for more bodies?"
"No."
"Then perhaps there are others still in there."
"Elias," Aldric said in a perfectly calm voice.
"There are 'always' others. That is precisely why no one goes in."
The Ashwaste began where the influence of Greyhollow ended. It was a vast expanse of dead, grey white terrain stretching eastward until it vanished beyond the horizon.
Nothing grew there, nor did anything live there. It had been that way ever since the 'Fracturing' four hundred years ago, when the gods had shattered the world in a war or cataclysm upon which history could never reach a consensus.
The Ashwaste was the remnant left behind after divinity itself had burned to ash.
Occasionally, things would emerge from it. That was the part of the story that history had failed to adequately record.
Elias penned a note in the entry ledger. He recorded that the deceased was a male, estimated to be between forty and fifty years of age. The cause of death was unknown. The condition of the remains included burn marks, however, apart from that, the body was completely intact.
He finally stopped at the last section, which inquired about the status of the 'Seal'.
He looked at the man's right hand. In the webbed space between the thumb and forefinger, where most 'Awakened' people bore the mark of their seal, there was nothing but smooth skin.
"He wasn't Awakened," Elias said.
"No." Aldric lifted one of the man's charred arms and examined the marks without touching them. "Which makes those burn marks not less, but 'more' interesting."
"Do you recognize these shapes?"
Aldric set the arm down. "No. And I've been in this line of work since before you were born." He straightened up, and for a fleeting moment, something stirred behind his eyes. "I'll draft the report. You finish up the paperwork."
"Aldric."
The old man paused.
"The shapes," Elias said. "They repeat themselves. You can see the curves intersecting here and here. It's the same sequence. It looks like a sentence written twice."
Aldric looked at the burn marks again, and then he looked at Elias.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
Elias opened his mouth, then closed it again.
He didn't know how he knew it. He had never studied pre shattering scripts. He had never had access to texts that could teach an orphan from the frontier the theory of ancient patterns.
He had taught himself to read using books discarded by the Church, books Aldric had no use for, and that education was riddled with gaps wide enough to drive a horse through.
But looking at the burn marks, their repetition seemed perfectly clear to him. It was as plain as a word written twice in a language he knew.
"I just notice the patterns," he finally said.
Aldric gave him a long, unsettling stare. Then he nodded in affirmation and walked away.
Elias turned back toward the body. He did not look at the marks again.
By mid morning, the morgue's paperwork was complete, the body had been wrapped and placed on a shelf, and Greyhollow had already forgotten that it had ever existed, much in the same way Greyhollow tended to forget most things it found inconvenient.
It was a skill the town had cultivated over decades. It was a peculiar form of collective amnesia that would take hold whenever something failed to fit into the comfortable narrative of frontier life.
Walking along the main street, Elias was heading back to the boarding house where he had rented a corner room situated right next to the refuse chute, a room priced exactly in accordance with its location.
On the street, the usual routine was unfolding.
Merchants were calling out from the doorways of their shops. Children were chasing one another around the water pump. Outside the saloon, three or four men were locked in a debate over cattle prices, engaging with that focused intensity characteristic of those who have nothing else left to argue about.
He passed through the scene just as he had learned to do. He moved with practiced efficiency, keeping close to the walls and taking up as little space as possible.
Outside the grocery store, as he walked past, a woman pulled her daughter close to her side. She did not do so with any outward show of theatrics.
It was merely a subtle shift, a slight movement to draw the child closer. It was the kind of gesture one could easily pretend had not been intentional.
He, too, pretended as if he had noticed nothing. This, too, was something he had learned to do.
The black mark upon his chest, always hidden beneath three layers of clothing, had been there since the moment of his birth.
He knew this because, when he was seven years old, they had once exposed it to him as a lesson, a cautionary tale. The town elder who had convened that gathering had declared it irrefutable proof of his contamination by the "Void."
Elias had stood there in the church hall, facing forty adults, and he had not wept, that being the only victory available to him.
A black mark signified that you possessed no path. It meant that no Awakening lay within you. There was no scope for advancement through the tiers that determined power, status, and worth in this world.
A black mark meant that you consumed resources without contributing any power in return. You were merely a body that consumed food and air, producing nothing of value.
In whispers, it carried yet another meaning. People claimed that those marked by the Void brought misfortune upon others. They said that proximity to such individuals tainted one's luck. They believed his mother had died in childbirth because, during the delivery, the Void had consumed her from within.
He did not know whether that last claim was true or not. No one had ever deemed it necessary to tell him anything about his mother, save for the simple fact that she was no longer in this world.
He had nearly passed the saloon when the crowd gathered near the water pump fell silent. It was not the natural silence that settles in when conversation ceases, rather, it was a distinct stillness, the kind that arises when collective attention converges on a single point and breaths are held.
Elias paused.
A horseman had turned from the northern road onto the main thoroughfare.
The horse was a deep reddish brown, now greyed over by the dust of the trail, it moved with the measured gait of an animal that had been ridden a great distance, one that knew its journey was nearly at an end and, consequently, saw no need for haste.
The rider sat astride it with that same effortless ease. He wore a long coat and a wide brimmed hat. At his hip rested an object roughly the shape of a gun, yet it possessed a peculiar, dull sheen, the distinct luster of stamped metal.
It was a device that was half weapon, half medium.
He was a Seal Hunter.
Elias knew men like him. They passed through Greyhollow three or four times a year, usually chasing down a lead that either panned out or didn't.
They carried authorization from the Meridian Authority, the closest thing to a government that existed in the Greylands.
Their job was to track down and neutralize Void marked individuals, corrupted Seals, and other threats to Awakened society.
"Neutralize" was their official term.
His hands fumbled against the wall behind him. It was an old instinct of his, to find a surface that wasn't a crowd.
The horseman continued down the main street at that same unhurried pace. His head swiveled as he took the town's measure, his gaze sweeping over the water pump, the saloon, and the faces watching him. He was conducting a professional assessment, cataloging everything he saw.
Then, his head stopped turning.
It stopped because he had found exactly what he was looking for.
The Seal Hunter's eyes were pale, the color of winter snow viewed through a grimy windowpane. He looked straight at Elias, cutting across forty feet of dirt road and the entire population of pedestrians milling about Greyhollow in the light of day.
A moment passed, a moment that had no business feeling quite so long.
The corner of the horseman's mouth twitched slightly. It wasn't a smile, so much as a kind of confirmation.
"There you are," he said.