Warnings, disclaimers, the usual.

A/N's -

- the Japanese cremate their dead. But I got to thinking, and that just plain wouldn't work for Koorime. But I couldn't imagine them burying their dead, either, so...

Like Glass

When Hina died, she was still worth a proper burial.

Not that anybody except Rui, the infant she'd named Yukina, and the undertakers had attended. But Hina was Koorime, and even the most admirably cold-hearted of the Elders couldn't simply throw her remains after her... son's. (The word was alien, something Rui had needed to look up in a foreign dictionary. It still didn't come easily to her.) The drop had to be done properly.

The undertakers had rinsed the body in private, but it was Rui who'd dressed Hina in her bloodstained labor kimono, crossing the flaps the wrong way out as was only correct for the dead. Then she'd allowed the undertakers to place the body on a bier, tote it from the room with the ruined tatami, and carry it without ceremony through the emptied streets.

She'd taken the baby girl and followed, feeling eyes from the shadowed doorways until they left town. Through the snow fields they walked, a faintly-glowing cluster of stoic women holding Hina, and Rui following with a baby. Up the mountain, and how horrible was it that this was the same road, the same path...?

It wasn't, Rui decided, barely hesitating when the procession took the left fork instead of the right. If Hina's death was going to ape her child's birth, then so be it. Perhaps it would appease her soul slightly, to come so close to the baby's fate. Or rile it up; the Koorime would deserve a ghost's wrath.

Up the mountain, and the air began to stick to Hina's body, under the power of the pallbearers. Up the mountain, until a tower came into view. Then into the tower, a staircase spiraling up around the outside to the roof. Up and up, the air starting to thin... not from altitude, but from liquifying around the body.

The tower's roof was a balcony, no railing surrounding the view into the hollow core. When the undertakers tipped Hina's body up, it came in a single piece, hair and fabric as stiff as stone. And when they let it drop, it fell as every other Koorime's had: as if it were a statue.

And when it hit, it shattered.