A Survivor Burns the Dead
A young survivor burns his tribe’s dead in the so they will not come back like the things that killed them. follows thick plumes of black smoke to a barren meadow where a ragged teen throws a half-eaten corpse onto a pyre already stacked high. The thing came without warning in the dead of night, the boy whispers; they all heard a low, creepy hum, and he ran.
The burning corpses are the ones who stayed to fight. It raised its hand real slow, he says, and a stone burst out of the ground bringing walking dead things with it, hungry for their kind. Quibbins had heard hushed whispers of Undying ravaging villages and encampments before, but never found anyone who had lived to tell it.
The boy has to burn his family now, he says, and cannot choke back the sob.
The boy names nothing but the hum, the hand and the stone, and no tale ties this raid to any larger design of the Dead God.
- Undying
