We stopped shortly after, pulling into an ordinary parking lot beside a building that looked like someone had worshipped at the altar of Bauhaus. Pure functionalism with clean geometry, no ornamentation—just slabs and angles. The pines surrounding it only emphasized how stark it was.

  As soon as we stepped out, a small welcoming committee of Guild guardians appeared, all of them wrapped in long coats that gave them a uniform, almost monastic silhouette. They didn’t speak. They just moved toward the van I’d ridden in and with help from Marek and Damian, lifted the casket out. Then they carried it toward the building’s double doors with a quiet reverence that made the air feel heavier.

  “Let’s go after them,” Ariana said gently, supporting Bonnie under her arm. The poor woman moved like she was walking her final path—slow and hollow, as if no good thing could ever find its way back to her again. And honestly, with one grandson dead, the other estranged, and her children scattered who-knows-where… it might not be far from the truth.

  “Come, Jess,” Nickolas murmured, giving my back a light pat, with enough force to pull me out of whatever staring trance I had drifted into.

  “Sure,” I said, falling in beside Peter and Zoe. We trailed at the end of the procession, heading toward the open doors of what had to be the Guild’s temple—the one Lebens mentioned. The scent hit me first: resin, fresh wood, leaves. Strange for a building like this.

  Then we stepped inside and everything became clearer and even stranger at the same time.

  Instead of a normal interior, we found ourselves in a contained woodland, a stretch of open space far too large to fit in the modest structure we’d seen from the outside. Magic had folded reality inward, cradling something sacred.

  There was no flooring—just living grass, still beaded with moisture. Hundreds of trees stood in perfect rows, evenly spaced, each trunk rising at least twice Damian’s height. Their branches spread out in deliberate symmetry, forming shapes reminiscent of crosses.

  I stopped in place, breath caught somewhere between awe and disbelief.

  We walked between the rows of trees, each one marked with a wooden plaque bearing the name and age of the mage buried beneath it. Some of those ages stopped me cold.

  “Two hundred thirty-three?” I asked, catching up to Nickolas. “How is that possible?”

  “Some Domains keep the body healthy, slow decay, extend life,” he said. “As long as they’re not fighting for it twenty-four seven, mages can last a long time.”

  As he spoke, I watched a man watering one of the memorial trees. Slender, Korean-looking, quiet in his movements. What caught my eye wasn’t him, but the watering can. He poured steadily, far longer than the tiny container should have held. A gentle, impossible stream.

  “This is fantastic,” Zoe murmured, saying exactly what I was thinking. “I didn’t know there were places like this on Earth.”

  “Hidden from ordinary eyes,” Nickolas replied from ahead of us, “so Reality doesn’t take notice.”

  We followed a narrow path that wound toward the center of the garden, where a tower rose above the canopy. Only then did I look up—really look—and notice the sky above us. Not the muted winter grey outside the building, but a bright and open blue, warm sunlight spilling over us like it was late spring.

  “She’s right. This is incredible,” Sophie said, her voice hushed with wonder. “There is no way all of this fits inside that tiny building.”

  “There are some great builder-mages in the Guild,” Nickolas said as we approached the tower’s base.

  The procession halted, and from the tower ahead—something that looked torn straight from a mage’s folktale, with its pointed red roof, crooked little chimney, and patchwork of red-brown bricks—a man emerged.

  He was tall. Taller than Dam, even with the stoop in his spine that made his long purple-and-silver robe hang in strange, heavy folds. His face was carved with deep creases and old scars; one eye was cloud-white, the other a cold, vivid blue. Only his beard looked well tended, carefully shaped in stark contrast to the rest of him.

  When he spoke, his voice was a bass so deep it vibrated through the air, settling into the bones, like some celestial choir had come down to announce judgment.

  “I welcome you in this time of grief.”

  His gaze swept over each of us before he stepped closer to the casket, placing a massive hand on the wooden lid, then shifting it gently to Bonnie’s trembling shoulder.

  “His stay upon this Earth was brief.”

  Bonnie’s composure cracked, the quiet tears returning.

  “I shall guide him to the other side,” the priest continued, “for this is my calling. Your grief, I’ll abide.”

  Zoe leaned toward me, whispering, “Is he rhyming?”

  “Seems like it. Might be part of the ritual,” I whispered back.

  “Catholic was his faith, I understand?” the priest asked.

  Bonnie nodded, slow, small.

  “Then swift shall be his passage on,” he intoned, “straight to Heaven, and then… all suffering gone.”

  “What’s up with that priest?” I whispered, leaning closer to Nick and hoping he had answers.

  “He’s the Vatican’s magus emissary,” Nick murmured back. “A warrior-priest who serves mage communities.”

  “Warrior?” Sophie echoed, eyebrows lifting.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Vatican has jurisdiction over all Western mages, regardless of their personal faith. Those priests get sent all over the world to enforce the rules.”

  “Explains his look,” Zoe muttered.

  “But not the… uh, demeanor,” Peter added quietly.

  Nick nodded. “They’re not quick to fight, from what I’ve heard. And they’re supposed to be good shepherds, too. So… let him conduct the ceremony, please.”

  We fell silent again, attention drawn back to the priest.

  “The place of rest eternal is prepared already,” he intoned, “let us venture forth with steps held steady.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  With a slow sweep of his arm, he guided us onward.

  The procession began to move—him first, then the men carrying the casket, Caroline and Ariana with Bonnie, and the rest of us trailing behind. We walked between the rows of memorial trees, each trunk occasionally flickering with a faint shadowlight. Thin luminescent lines, like echoes of old power lingering beneath new growth.

  After a few minutes, the grove opened into an empty clearing where the line of trees came to an abrupt end. A single grave waited there, freshly dug, dark earth piled neatly beside it. The bearers carried the casket forward, setting it on a wooden pedestal prepared for the rite.

  I drifted a bit ahead of my friends, curiosity tugging me forward. I wanted to see exactly how a mage’s funeral—this mage’s funeral—would unfold.

  It began quietly, with the lighting of several candles. Their surfaces were uneven, wax hardened in ridges and valleys from long hours of burning. When the flames caught, they didn’t glow red or even the familiar blue I summoned so often, but in shifting hues of purple and green. Their smoke rose in perfect vertical streams, untouched by breeze or breath.

  “This is the fire of life,” the priest intoned, his bass voice vibrating in the air like the deep toll of a bell, “and in its burning, smoke reaches the light.”

  Shadowlight spilled from him then. It drifted like a soft tide toward the candles, brushing against them and at once the wax transformed into wood. The rising smoke thickened, taking on a floral scent before collapsing into vines that curled downward over the pedestal, as if gravity remembered them belatedly. His Domain at work. No question.

  “From the ashes, life will sprout anew,” he continued, “and our faith, it shall renew.”

  He gestured toward us. “Now is the time to say farewells, minutes before the final bells. Come, my sons and daughters, do not remain strangers to the departed. Do not remain just others.”

  Dam took Bonnie’s arm, guiding her gently to the casket as the priest lifted its lid. Malik lay inside.

  He looked small, heartbreakingly so. Smaller than he had ever seemed in life, as though death had folded him inward. And yet, at the same time, something about him felt larger, too, like the gravity of everything he’d been still clung faintly to the shell left behind.

  But the soul was gone. I could feel that much. What lay in the casket was only the echo.

  It was then I noticed the caretaker—the man who tended the grave-trees—standing beside Peter. They were speaking quietly, watching the ceremony with deliberate care. I wondered what tied them together. Was it something simple like a shared affinity for water and the life it nurtured? Or something deeper? With the eyes painted on my nails, I focused on him more closely, half-expecting that his presence wasn’t coincidence at all. I needed to be cautious.

  It was his eyes that stopped me. Dark and steady, they held a depth I couldn’t place. A quiet heaviness. A longing. As though he had lived a hundred lives in parallel and was carrying every memory with him behind those pupils. Was this what happened to someone who tended to others day after day. Tended even to those already gone from the world? Was this what my other self felt when she worked in the nursing home?

  I drifted closer.

  “Hello,” I whispered. The man turned toward me and smiled. A polite smile, but not a natural one. More like something practiced out of obligation.

  “I saw you watering the grave-trees when we arrived,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I was doing that. I usually do, unless there’s a funeral underway.” His voice was firm, deep, and it sent a faint chill running down my spine.

  I wanted to ask what he and Peter had been discussing, but there was no need, not when I could ask Peter himself later.

  Instead, I stepped beside the man and watched as the others lowered the beautifully carved casket into the earth. Bonnie stood close, crying in silence, steady tears slipping down her wrinkled cheeks one after another.

  “It must be tiring,” I murmured, “watching people despair like that.”

  “It gets easier with time, Love,” he replied. There was certainty in his voice, the kind shaped by long familiarity with death and yet the way he said Love sounded almost cheerful. “I should be going now. Death is a sign at a crossroads, and I hope all of you gathered here will choose the right direction. It was lovely talking to you.”

  He looked at me again, then at Peter, then down into the open grave meant for Malik. Sorrow flickered across his face before he stepped away to retrieve the watering can he’d left at one of the trees. Without another word, he walked off.

  “Strange guy, right?” Peter whispered as we watched the gold, purple and blue shadowlight rise like sprouts from the casket.

  “I don’t think anyone who works with the dead can stay normal forever,” I said.

  “True,” Peter answered, just as he sucked in a breath. A living plant unfurled itself upward, following the trail of Malik’s shadowlight.

  “What did you two talk about?” I asked.

  “He just asked if he could stand with me to watch and pay his respects,” Peter said quietly. “And then he said it’s unfair, that some people have to die while others get to live.”

  “Heavy,” I said, watching the tiny sprouts wind together, thickening into a single trunk. Branches pushed outward, forming the familiar cross-shape, just like the hundreds we’d already passed. But this one still glowed, Malik’s shadowlight pulsing through it like beating of a heart.

  “Yeah,” Peter murmured. “It got me thinking. And that crossroads he mentioned? I think… I think I finally need to decide what my life is supposed to look like from here on.”

  “Woah. Peter.” I stared at him. “I never thought I’d hear you say those words.”

  “I know, right?” Zoe added from his other side, half teasing, half amazed.

  “I have to,” he said. “After the ceremony… I want to show you something in my Domain. Zoe, you, Sophie, and Nick. And talk. Really talk. But it needs to be in the evening or at night. Can you make time for me?”

  “Of course, brother,” I said. “For you I’ll always have time. Why does it have to be at night, though?”

  “He wants to show you something we saw inside his world,—” Zoe chimed in, her voice soft and melodious. “—when we’d spent the night there. It’s worth seeing. I promise.”

  “So you just wanted to brag?” I asked as the last moments of the funeral faded around us.

  “Kind of,” Peter admitted with a shrug. “You’ll understand when you see it.”

  “Alright, mysterious guy,” I murmured.

  “My children, it is done,” the priest proclaimed, raising his arms toward the newly planted tree. “Malik is gone, yet will live on. Let this tree remind those who stay to grow old, that a place awaits all when life loses its hold.”

  Bonnie broke again, her grief collapsing out of her in another wail that felt sharp enough to cut bark.

  **********

  I stayed by the tree the longest, lingering until everyone else had drifted away. First the priest and the guildsmen departed; then the rest followed in a slow cluster, heading toward the cars outside. Eventually the clearing emptied, leaving only me and the quiet hum of magic still settling into the roots.

  When I was sure I was alone, I eased down to the ground and let my back rest against the trunk. The bark was surprisingly warm. Warmer than any tree I had ever touched. Maybe it was leftover heat from whatever spell forced it to grow so quickly, or maybe it was something deeper, something tied to Malik’s passage.

  Either way, it was a kind of magic I didn’t want to test or prod, just sit with.

  Just… feel.

  “I’m going to paint some of these trees, Malik,” I said into the quiet. “I’ll try to visit from time to time, you know.”

  My spellbook shimmered into being beside me, along with the battered bag holding my paints. I reached for my watercolor pens and started with the sky, with those soft blues bleeding outward, settling into the paper like breath.

  “I was never a person of faith. Not even when my parents died… okay, maybe for a little while. Maybe back then I believed they went to heaven or something. But it didn’t last. Life corrected my na?ve beliefs pretty fast.”

  Light green for the grass. I wanted this place to really look like it had been cared for by someone who loved it.

  “But honestly? Now I don’t know anymore. There’s magic, and other worlds, and gods in those worlds, and Reality itself sitting here like some cosmic neighbor. We have souls—actual souls—that we twist into magic, that we feel the world with. So who’s to say there isn’t a better place out there? Somewhere real.”

  The trunk came next—soft browns first, then darker strokes to carve in the structure. Watercolors always wanted patience, and today I had plenty.

  “I’m sorry… man.” The word kid hovered behind my teeth, but I swallowed it. He deserved better than being remembered as small.

  “There’s so much I could have done to prevent your death. I feel like shit about it. Like a failure. But I keep it to myself most of the time now. And you know what?” I added shadows to the leaves, letting the greens deepen. “I’m learning that even with all that rot inside, I can still function. I can move forward with the pain still sitting in me.”

  White highlights now with thin strokes. Just enough to make the blades of grass catch imaginary sunlight.

  “The pain of loss or failure… it’s the same as every other kind of pain, Malik. I learned that way younger than anyone ever should. It hits you every day. It hits you when you move, when you breathe, when you think. But eventually there comes a morning when you notice it isn’t there anymore.”

  I added the last touches to the page, letting the colors set, as I let my eyes drift to the sky above.

  “You never catch the moment it eases,” I murmured. “You just realize it’s gone.”