The Old Way

There weren't many trees among the rocky crags of his home, but the Captain had found the tallest and the mightiest of the still standing gnarlwood husks in all the Mourning Lands easily enough. His brother had told him that long before the First Immolation, such trees were revered, believed to have housed the great guardian spirits responsible for protecting the land. 
But those spirits were nowhere to be found when the hellfire came, and reshaped their ancestral homeland into the gray waste that stretched out before the Captain now. They proved every bit as ineffective as the Covenant's own gods during that terrible battle. Still-- it seemed as good a place as any.
Normally, the funeral rites for a Jiralhanae warrior would have had the rest of the pack in attendance, with a shaman of the Old Way or a Covenant deacon to assist in laying the warrior's spirit to rest. The Covenant's gods had not spared his brother's life, so the Captain saw little reason in giving him to them in death. Still, he would have preferred that more of his clan had come to pay their respects.
"Everyone has dead to attend to," Prevatus, Chieftain of their clan, had said when the Captain had approached him about standing vigil, snorting with contempt. "Burn or bury who you will. But be quick about it. I mean to be gone within the cycle. See that you do not delay us, or you will join your kin sooner than you'd like."
And so the Captain carried on alone, with his brother's body in his arms, wrapped in a large tarp. The village people-- mainly children, mothers and grandmothers did their best to pretend he wasn't there as he made his way through. All except a youth, hardly more than a whelp, who stared at him with wide, brazen eyes. To a Jiralhanae warrior, direct eye contact was seen as an act of aggression. But the child was too young to know fear. His mother would have to beat that into him.
He hadn't spared the child a second thought, but when he spotted a tuft of dark fur over the hillcrest, the Captain wondered if the task of disciplining the youth would fall to him instead. The boy approached while the Captain was setting the wood for the pyre, as casual as you please.
"Go home, boy," the Captain growled, flashing a mouthful of sharp teeth.
The boy shrank back, but only by a step. He jabbed a finger towards the stack of wood, and the body at its center. "Who's that?"
"Didn't you hear me? Go home to your mother, boy. Before I beat you for her."
"I don't have a mother no more," the boy said. "There was a sickness last year. One day she was fine, then she took to fever and two days after that, she died."
The Captain looked the boy over. He did not need to ask about any father. Some Jiralhanae males only cared for the act of procreation and left all that followed to the woman while they warred and pillaged. Even if the boy's father was alive and cared for his progeny, he would have already taken him aboard his ship to teach him the ways of war at such an age.
He was silent for a moment, before he said:
"This is my kin. My brother, Ravitis."
The boy seemed to perk at that.
"Was he a warrior?"
"He was a true son of Doisac," the Captain answered. The boy didn't seem to like it, however, judging from how his face scrunched up.
"Was there a battle?"
"Yes." He said, curtly.
"Did you win?" 
The Captain paused.
"No."
"Oh," The boy whispered. For a moment, the Captain dared to believe he had sated the child's curiosity, and returned to his task, placing another dead branch upon the stack. But then the child continued: 
"What are you doing?"
"Building a pyre." Irritation crept into the Captain's voice with every word.
"A pyre?" The boy's face scrunched up again. "What does that mean?"
"It means I'm going to burn him." 
"The villagers buried mother when she died."
"Yes, I'm sure they did," another branch to the pile. "But in the days of old, before the First Immolation, this is what we Jiralhanae did to honor our dead. It was believed that by committing our kin to the flames, the smoke would carry their souls up into the sky, where they'd take their place among the stars."
And every star you see, every little mote of light. They used to be one of us. And the greater the hero or champion, the brighter the star, his brother had told him once. He remembered the way his brother's golden eyes had shone, when he spoke of such things. Of Stygoran Sapphire, Tylable, the Champion of Malkadyr. And Bartium Star-Chainer, the greatest hero of them all.
"Why'd we stop?" The boy tried to lift a branch that was too large for him. The Captain plucked it from his small grasp without any effort, and added it to the others. That should be enough.
"I wish I could say it was because our kind lost their taste for smoke and ash after the hellbombs fell." The Captain said, as he began striking steel and flint in order to set the kindling at the base of the pyre aflame. Sparks flew in the encroaching twilight of dusk. It did not take long for the dry leaves and grass to smolder. "In truth, it was because of the Covenant. They did not look kindly on the old ways. On the idea that we could ascend without following their Path."
He took a step back as the fire began to rise. The boy did the same. The gnarled wood burned red from within before bursting into embers that scattered and danced in the open air. When the flames reached Ravitis's body, and lick at his wrappings like so many burning tongues, the Captain reached out a paw. As if this was all some mistake, and if he could only save the body, his brother would wake from his long sleep and all would be like it was before.
But it would never be the same as before. Not for his people. Not for the Covenant. Not for him.
Ravitis burned well into the night. Just so, for the Captain had not wanted his brother's spirit to wait long. The smoke billowed and rose like a great black tower to the heavens. He looked up, and wondered if he could spot a mote of light in the night's sky that had not been there before. 
When he did not, he turned to the boy. His lower lip was quivering, but he never turned away. In the glow of the fire, his eyes shone more gold than red.
"If you have nowhere else to go," It had been quiet for so long, save for the crackling of the fire, that the Captain's words seemed to startle the boy. As if he had forgotten the Captain was even there. "There is a ship. Work hard, and you will be fed. Prove yourself, and you may yet be welcomed as a true warrior of the Mourning Star."
The boy said nothing for a while. But eventually, he nodded.
"Good," The Captain said, crossing his arms. "That only leaves one matter; what is your name, boy?"
"Bartium..." He said.
The Captain snorted.
"Yes, of course it is."
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly Winners