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Holding a Candle 
by Donna J. W. Munro 

The candle she lit in his bones was just for show. His ribcage, picked clean a fortnight before, shone bright against the darkness of the sooty chapel walls. So many flames. So many bones.

He’d left her at the beginning of summer. With promises of riches and glory, he’d held the pike he’d never learned to use and wore a shoddy tin helmet looking almost as smart as those who’d prepared and practiced. He was a fool and so was she because she’d believed in him.

“Fool,” she whispered to his bones.

“Longu, finally you honor him. Finally, after all these weeks of dreams.” The priestess whispered from just behind her ear, breath hot and sharp in the cool dark.

What did she know of Longu’s dreams. Her man had been inept as a pikeman, awful as a lover, and didn’t even leave her the pleasure of a child to cement her place in his family home. They’d thrown her out after her month’s blood calling her useless. When he came to her fitful dreams, begging for a flame in his bones she’d laughed at him. He’d have to wander, just as she did night after night. No doorway, no bed, no alley, no tree to call her own. The priestesses made sure that she was chased away soon as she woke.

No rest. No home. Why should he have either when he’d left her this way?

It wasn’t guilt heaped on by his mourning family that finally broke her anger. They didn’t acknowledge her when they passed her begging in the street outside the chapel. They knew what she’d denied him and still wouldn’t lower themselves to help her. It wasn’t his ghost wailing and crying in every quiet moment, in her gut and her sleep. She drank his dream tears and ate every apology he offered like it would fill her emptiness to the top.

What finally drove her into the chapel with a candle to light was an echo. She’d seen a girl like she’d been caught up in her lover’s arms, listening to promises, believing every word because before the shadow of death marks you, when you are young and fresh you are the worst kind of fool. That he and she and they all had these unmarked, untried hearts made them victims of death’s wisdom.

Death was the only lover she wanted anymore.

Lighting the candle honored her dead boy love, but it also gave the burning breath of life back to the one who touches dead eyes and leads the final sleeping songs. The priestesses worshipped the god of light thinking the candles brought his blessings to the dead and living. Let them be fools for a god who stops mattering as soon as breath bubbles up through a mother’s birthing fluid.

“Kindness, Reaper,” she whispered to the dark corners. “Take me into your misty arms.”

In that moment, a sucking breath stole all the lights from the bones lit in the chapel. Worshipers screamed in the sudden dark, stumbling toward the doors. Not Longu. She held her arms up to the swirling darkness. She parted her lips and let all the air press out into the cold mouth of death. It was everything, all at once–man, woman, child to be–and it wanted her.

She lit up with the fire death expelled onto her, licking at her skin, fingers hot and stroking her hair. She screamed in ecstasy as it enfolded her, lighting her edges against the dark.

Longu’s ashes pressed into the ceiling of the chapel, lovely face glittering with a light no water can extinguish. Longu’s bones burn in the dark, an altar to the true god of her chapel. No other bones survive the burning. No other candles will burn inside the hallowed walls. No breath can draw, no stone will crumble.

The ghosts of those who came before bow in front of the altar, call her name along with the reaper, and they infest the dreams of those who have scarless hearts.

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Fiction © Copyright Donna J. W. Munro
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from author Donna J. W. Munro:

Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book One

In a dark future, people with money live in doomed cities and use the recently deceased as
repurposed servants and workers called poppets. Ellie DesLoge is the teen heiress of the
company that makes and distributes poppets–your basic reprogrammed flesh robot complete
with training chips and kill switches. If Ellie does everything her Aunt Cordelia says, she’ll have a
life of wealth and power. If she chooses to be what is planned for her, life will be perfect.
Everything she ever dreamed. But something about her sweet poppet Thom goes against what
Aunt Cordelia and tradition have taught her. Will she choose to believe what everyone knows is
true or will she follow what her heart tells her about Thom? Her choice will change the world.

Available on Amazon!