Rafe had waited for a little while, terrified to move, listening to the sound of death around him. It shifted across the village, tagged onto the red-robed man like his own shadow and, when Rafe judged it to be sufficiently distant, he ran.

He had tried not to look at his parents. He could smell them as he scrambled from beneath the wooden platform and he could hear the drip, drip of blood as it ran between the boards. He did not want to see them lying there dead. He wanted to remember them as they had been, not as they now were.

But of course, he had looked anyway. Unable to help himself, he saw what was left of the man and woman who had taken him in and brought him up from childhood, and who had died so obviously trying to protect him. And as his eyes alighted on the bloody ruins, flies already finding the wounds, another of the strange voices twisted into his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his hands, desperate to drive it back whence it had come. But he did not know where this was or why it was, so he was all but powerless against the ripple of weird words echoing through his consciousness.

Then a scream had cut through the sound and banished it for a while. Another cry followed, closer this time, so Rafe turned and ran. Guilt pricked at his neck like the gaze of the dead. His parents lay there unburied, open to the world, offering themselves to the scavengers and carrion that would come wandering in from the fields and hillsides soon enough. But there was also something urging him on: the sight of his parents’ deaths seen between rough boards; the sound of the man’s sword as he twisted it from his mother’s cleft ribs; the knowledge that, by returning and offering himself up for the same fate, he would be betraying them in the worst possible way.

A dead thing is just that, his father had once told him. A dead thing is less than a rock in the fields. A rock has seen the past and will see the future; a dead thing will rot to nothing, go back to the earth and perhaps care for the next circle of planting and harvesting. It’s what the dead thing was that matters, not what it is now.

His parents were no longer there. They had gone to wherever the ideas of living things go when they die. Into memory, perhaps, or an afterlife, or simply into the Black to add themselves to history.