[Can’t Opt Out]

In Emilia’s experience, the nations of their continent were split into a few groups when it came to their beliefs about the afterlife, or whether there actually was one. Granted, she was no expert in myths on life and death and the creation of the universe or planet, or occasionally, even gods—those things were more Baylor’s domain, and even with access to the aethernet, there was little information to be found on it about such things. Baalphorians didn’t care about things like the beliefs of the Free Colonies, didn’t you know!?

It was stupid. Of course, if she pulled out her xphern, she could connect to the transmission network and then pull up one of the nation-specific communication protocols and search their specific databases for myths and legends. Even then, there wouldn’t be a huge amount available because that was the problem with having a communication network that had been adopted by nations that had spent millennia in constant conflict with one another: a lot of them didn’t want to share what they knew with one another.

Some nations had little on their xphern communication protocols in general. Instead, their use of the xphern transmission network was limited to diplomats and other government officials, as well as business people and travellers. Depending on the nation, whatever their normal communication network was might be limited to use within their nation’s borders—unless something had changed, Norvel’s was like that, cutting off the moment anyone left their borders—or it could work outside of their nations, either in a limited or a continent-wide capacity. The Atrium’s communication network worked everywhere, utilizing satellites to connect all of the devices that were housed on the various ships that were used by their traders, as well as those that resided in the flying nation’s rarely used land-based embassies.

Other nations had a lot of on their xphern communication protocols, but everything was hidden behind passwords. Emilia had a few of those passwords, most notably the ones for Dion—obviously—and funnily enough, the one for the Dunnery of Rwun, which she had accidentally gotten from their princess, before the poor girl was shuffled out of the diplomatic scene. They’d never changed the password, and Emilia wasn’t about to tell them she had it. A few more passwords were locked away in her memory, not really used, but still there.

The point was that nation’s hoarded their information, even down to their myths and stories of the world. Still, through what she had seen of those records and heard in whispers from Baylor, as well as things she’d overheard through her years of travelling with her father, Emilia knew the people of their nation tended to fall into a few categories when it came to their beliefs about the afterlife.

In Baalphoria, the majority of people had very few beliefs on such things. Really, they barely even had any mourning rituals—something that she knew horrified virtually all of her Free Colonier friends. According to them, not mourning didn’t allow the energy of grief to move through a person. This was confirmed by a lot of research, which the Baalphorian government—who actively encouraged its citizens to not build up any mourning rituals—ignored.

“Grief,” the Blood Rain General had once said, as they watched one of his oldest friends burn, what felt like the entire nation gathered to watch and remember this person who had died happy and surrounded by their loved ones after a long life of serving Dion, “is like a pond of water. When death comes, the world weeps and the pond fills to bursting. Over time, the water slips into the ground, feeding the world—but that is only if the pond is allowed to exist in a natural state. It is natural to feel and let your emotions overflow into the world. Death is a part of life, but it is an unfairness that those of us left behind abhor. We cry and fill the pond with yet more water. We learn to love again, scooping out handfuls of water, offering that grief for someone else to hold and care for—because, how can we care for someone and not be willing to cradle their love and grief both within ourselves for them?”

“Grief is a shifting of emotions between friends and enemies. It is a natural thing, and that push of emotion to and fro, through people and events and tradition, is what allows the waters of the pond to shift about. It allows other things to grow. It drowns out yet more. It is a cycle that should be allowed to flourish, even when it causes pain or leads those drowning within it to seek revenge. What your own nation’s lack of any mourning tradition—”

It was here that she—small and just having come under his tutelage for that first, too short summer—had piped up, telling him that they did at least have the tradition of hanging photos of the dead up, so that every time their picture was passed, they could be remembered. There was an entire wall at her house, covered in photos of the adoptive grandparents she would never meet, as well as her father’s brother, who had disappeared several decades earlier and was presumed dead. The small version of her had babbled about this for a while, the old non-dev watching her in that kind and careful and sometimes terrifying way of his. Beside her, Hurinren—who had known their lo’lu’s friend much better than she had—had stood silent, staring into the flames ahead, but listening just as intently as he always did. Behind them, everyone had apparently been horrified that she had not only interrupted the Blood Rain General, but was continuing to babble.

It was not the last time she would do either, and despite how nothing bad ever happened to her, everyone continued to look horrified when she interrupted him—or the emperor; she also interrupted him on occasion. As the emperor was slowly losing his grasp on reality, she and Yujao—who could also babble with the best of them—were occasionally brought it to babble over him, in order to keep him from saying something too obviously not quite right.

Regardless, once her babbling was done, the old man had continued on to his point: not having traditions of mourning didn’t force emotions out; instead, in his estimation, that lack of mourning forced retaining walls around the ponds of grief. Baalphorians were often told to let their grief lie—to let it flow out through distraction and work, seeping slowly into the world, as opposed to dumping it out for everyone to see and consume.

There was evidence that not letting grief out could literally kill a person—evidence that showed it could wind its way through a person’s genes, leaving knots in its wake—so Emilia was inclined to believe the Blood Rain General on this one. So, on the occasion when people she knew and cared for died—something that was effectively limited to the clones, a few Black Knot agents, and ‘ariah, even if the last was a bundle of complications—Emilia tried to mourn the Free Colonier way. It wasn’t easy, simply because she didn’t know how to do it, and pulling in traditions from other cultures seemed like… not the best of options—after all, it wasn’t like she wanted to accidentally pervert some important belief! Baalphoria already had a bad reputation for stealing culture from other nations and then denying it had ever done so—they were too good for Free Colonier culture, unless it was something really good. Then, they had to just deny, deny, deny.

No, no, no! Of course we didn’t get this custom or idea from the Free Colonies! Impossible!

So, yeah. Emilia had not wanted to contribute to that. Seriously, though? How does someone pull inspiration on how to mourn out of thin air? Hadn’t she just been contemplating how learning was a dance of inspiration, pulled from a thousand sources and observations?

Annoying, and Emilia still had no idea how she was supposed to mourn, or if the tradition she had created was anything at all reasonable. In the end, the tradition for mourning she had created involved the use of one of the Blood Rain General’s techniques she’d reverse engineered and then further altered, while she had based the idea around what was considered to be the most common Baalphorian belief about what happened after death: that the energy of the person returned to the aether.

Just as all aether existed within the cycle of the universe, so did the aether and energy of a human. When they died, their aether and energy would return to the universe. It would decay and return to the whole of the aether, then, eventually, it would be pulled into whatever the aether thought it should become next.

Into a new human body.

Into plants or animals or drops of rain.

Into skills or fabrications, pulled from the aether by human minds and cores, and occasionally, human-made devices.

That last one was a little disturbing. The idea that, after death, a person’s energy might become a new person eventually was also a little creepy. In Free Colonies with similar beliefs, it was sometimes thought that all the energy of a human soul stayed together and was reborn without memories of their past lives. As someone who knew how much training it had taken even Hurinren to keep his energy from splattering into an abstract mess while learning to use core abilities… Emilia had little confidence in this idea. Instead, it was more likely that whatever energy and aether a human soul consisted of would just splatter into the world once a core was no longer there to keep it all together—and really, what was a core explosion if not exactly that, just on a more visceral and violent scale?

The point was, the skill she had for mourning would reach out and snatch something from the aether, creating a small object from it. Emilia had no proof that whatever she created actually held some amount of the energy of the person she was mourning within it, but in theory, it would—she’d done all the math and calculations, okay? With the right weather and aether tracking, as well as knowledge of exactly when and where the person had died, someone could, in theory, capture a small part of them and form it into something tangible.

The skill was a mix of willbranding theory and a technique created by the Blood Rain General during the last Colonial War, which gathered blood from the battlefield and transformed it into a mass of weapons, which could slam down on enemies and create yet more blood, yet more weapons, yet more blood, and on and on. Mostly, she’d taken part of the willbranding theory that could pull energy into something physical and yet still leave it as part of the aether—this strange middle ground between creating things from the aether using a skill and manipulating energy to enhance an object—and the Blood Rain General’s ability to pinpoint all the energy that lingered within blood, allowing him to know exactly who the blood had belonged to, as long as he was familiar with the feel of their energy.

Creating something from the deceased’s aether wasn’t something she’d heard of any other culture doing, but it wasn’t like she had the broadest of knowledge of the subject—and, when she’d realized it felt weird to potentially steal mourning traditions from other nations and cultures, she’d made a point to not look at their specific traditions. It would be difficult to steal something when she didn’t know about its existence!

So, imagine Emilia’s surprise when she was caught peering at a set of mismatched vases on a shelf on what Rayleen told them was the last nice level—a horrifying thought, as the level was absolutely depressing—and Vern told her they were vases of the dead.

At first, she’d assumed vases of the dead was just the Lüshanian word for sutha, containers where the remains of those burned in Dion’s mourning traditions were stored. Most of the sutha she’d seen were boxes, which would be stored one atop another in their family’s tombs—something about the bones of ancestors bearing the weight of their descendant’s glory so they could feel the fruits of their labour and sacrifices to better their family—but vases would work as well.

Even before Jerrial returned from the bathroom—all that food had finally made his stomach a little upset—and explained what they really were, Emilia had been thinking it was a little odd that the tops of the vases of the dead, which presumably held ashes and any bones that hadn’t burned, were open at the top. Breathing in the ashes of humans could be a health hazard, didn’t the people living here know! Also, gross! Don’t accidentally huff your loved ones!?

They weren’t sutha, though; instead, as they began moving again, faster this time as Rayleen assured them that the only people below them now were people who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—bother them, Jerrial explained that they were remnants of the dead’s souls.

“The remnants are gathered from the bodies themselves,” Jerrial explained, after she had explained her own odd—at least by Baalphorian standards—mourning ritual, his fingers shifting over the chain she had passed over to him.

Usually, the collection of sparkling gems that she created following the deaths of people she knew lived on her favoured travel bag—or occasionally on whatever other bag or purse she was carrying around, although it could also be shifted into a bracelet. Usually, Emilia deemed that a little too morbid, however, and tended to just leave the thing at home when she didn’t have something to attach it onto.

“You can gather aether from that far away?” Vern asked, after she’d explained that no, she hadn’t seen most of their bodies after they died. The man was glaring at the chain a little to intensely for Emilia’s liking, resulting in her snatching it back from Jerrial before Vern could do something weird.

“Kinda? I mean… the aether it both vast and singular?” she tried to explain, sighing when everyone gave her a curious look—everyone except Rayleen, quietly leading their group down to what was apparently the last of two normal levels, which sounded super ominous and Emilia just wasn’t going to think about where they were doing until she had to. “So… I really like the aether and love talking about it. I’ll answer those confused looks if you want, but just know, I could talk about this forever.”

“I could listen to you talk forever,” Clemence immediately piped up, snuggling closer to Emilia.

Vern looked concerned—which, fair—while Jerrial actually perked up, encouraging her to talk about it all she wanted. Perhaps that wasn’t too surprising, given the man had basically had to take in knowledge from anywhere he could find it, trying to learn to use his abilities.

Well… talking about the aether and all the facts and theories that surrounded it was one of her favourite topics. Hopefully, Vern wouldn’t crack and ask her to stop talking part way through her rambling—it wouldn’t be the first time someone had given in and screamed at her to just stop, after all.