Graverending: Erevan vs. Kiaransalee

Midwinter, 2566 DR

“I won’t sing.”

Kiira threw back the hood of his jacket, then tugged off Veldrin’s for good measure. “Then can you dance?”

Veldrin yanked his hood back on. “I should’ve stayed inside.”

“Well it’s better than just sitting all day with the shades down.”

“It is?”

“Look, if I’m going to let you in on this arcane ritual chock full of dread forbidden necromantic energy you’ve got to pull your own weight. How about ominous chanting? Can you do ominous chanting?”

Veldrin gave Kiira his tolerant face. “I can do ominous chanting.”

“Good!” Kiira thrust one hand into his pocket, gesturing around the graveyard with the other. “Then let’s start! All righty –” He pulled out a fistful of plastic rings he’d acquired from various candy machines and such over the years; when he got back from the midnight premiere of Graverending it hadn’t taken very long to get together a sizable stash. “Here, you take some of these.”

***

“So tell me, was there really tinsel in the movie?” Veldrin held up a strand, thin and silver.

“Silver’s important.” Kiira nodded firmly. “Focuses mystical energies.”

After some more time spent draping tinsel Veldrin said, “Doesn’t this happen at night?”

“Well, usually,” said Kiira. “But it’s Midwinter night. I’ve things to do. Don’t you? Nameday and all.” Veldrin stared at him. “What?”

“You remembered.”

“Well yeah.” After last year, when Veldrin wouldn’t speak to him until Ches, he didn’t think he would ever forget again. “It’s the done thing, isn’t it? Oh and I got you stuff.” Last year, in a fit of improvisation, he’d taken off his new black coat and given it to Veldrin for a present. Veldrin hadn’t been impressed (though, as far as Kiira knew, he still had the coat). “Wrapped and all. You’ll like it.”

Veldrin fidgeted with the rings. He’d only picked out two for each hand, compared to Kiira’s generous festooning of the remainder, but he did seem to have a much easier time moving his fingers than Kiira so maybe he had something there.

“So what’s the time?”

Veldrin checked his watch. “Quarter to eleven.”

Kiira nodded, pleased. “Then we’ve got a while.”

“Until what?”

“Until noon. See, in Graverending it happened at midnight, and midnight for the day’s midday, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Also the graveyard people aren’t in, because they’ve got lives.”

“Don’t we have lives?”

“Sure we do. Thing is we don’t work here.”

Time passed and Veldrin asked, “Didn’t they card you?”

“Card me?”

“At the theater.”

“I told him the truth.”

“You told them you’re four?”

“Seventeen.” The human at the ticket window had looked a bit doubtful (he looked human-seventeen himself, and Kiira didn’t even if he was born in forty-eight), but there was a big impatient line behind Kiira and he hadn’t argued.

“And that’s the truth?”

“It’s only a little jump from it.” Though sometimes Kiira did think that Veldrin was lucky just to have his nameday on Midwinter when he could’ve had one on Shieldmeet instead, and so only have a proper one every four years. It wasn’t as if Veldrin’s dad used Midwinter as an excuse to skimp on the presents (and speaking of which, sometimes Kiira wished for his coat back. It was a nifty coat).

Veldrin balked again when it came time to do the handprints, eying the undisturbed snow at the base of each headstone. “Why can’t you do them?”

“It’s a drow hand in the movie,” said Kiira.

“It’s a girl’s hand in the movie,” said Veldrin with all the authority of someone who’d seen the trailer. “Why don’t you get a girl to do it?”

Kiira had asked girls, drow and moony and sunny and greenie and human alike, all the girls he knew. They’d mostly laughed at him. “You mean you don’t think you can do same as a girl can?”

“You mean you can’t do same as a drow can?”

“Point.” Kiira opened his own left hand and bent to press it into the snow. When he looked up, Veldrin was standing by another headstone; when their eyes met he turned toward it and started to do the same.

Half an hour later they’d gone over a goodly chunk of graves. Kiira declared it would do, and proceeded to mark the rough perimeter with a scattering of petrified eyeball candies he’d found stashed in his closet, where he’d left them forgotten for Corellon only knew how long, when he was seeking out rings. While he was at it, he put on a bit more of the tinsel and admired how Veldrin, in a fit of creative acrobatics, had wound some of it all the way up one of the massive family monuments.

Kiira had the kitchen knife block at the bottom of the bag. He drew out two decently-sized ones, giving one to Veldrin. “I had them in the freezer an hour,” he said. “They’re supposed to be cold.”

“Are they?”

“Yup. Coldhearts, they’re called. You saw what they did with them in the trailer, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, now we’ve still got the singing to cover. Well, singing for me,” he amended quickly. “Chanting for you. I didn’t forget –”

“What in the name of Kelemvor –”

His head jerked toward the shout. When he looked back to Veldrin, he found a piece of Veldrin-shaped emptiness, Kiira stuck his knife at the ground and fled, wondering as he did if they could get fingerprints from snow.

***

They met up well into High Forest proper. “All right,” said Kiira. “So he didn’t have a life, I guess. Some people have no appreciation for zombie hordes. Where’s your knife?”

Veldrin leaned against a tree. He looked up and got out between gasps, “You know what they say about running with scissors?”

“What do they say about running with scissors?”

Veldrin gave him a long stare before saying, with less gasping, “That explains a lot. So where’s yours?”

“Well, I stuck it in…”

“Like in the trailer.”

“Like in the trailer. So could be this isn’t a total loss. So do you know if they can fingerprint snow?”

Veldrin stared at him. “They wouldn’t go to the trouble over tinsel. And if they did, they’d fingerprint the knives.”

“Oh. See, that’s why I asked you, you’re clever like that.” Veldrin stared at him some more. “And I knew you were going to be bored.”

“No, you knew you would have been bored.”

“But you were bored! Weren’t you? Don’t say you didn’t want to do it.”

“The thing is,” said Veldrin, “we didn’t do it. All we did were decorations.”

Kiira looked around. “We can do it now.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not!” Kiira flailed. “Look – it’s even better than in the graveyard. Because this place is so nice – when was the last time you heard of anyone getting killed around here? A really good zombie has to be out for revenge. But I bet years and years ago, when they killed people, they’d bury them in the forest, see? So if we do it in the forest, now, I bet we’ll have a lot of angry zombies digging their way out from under trees and such. Now lessee…”

Veldrin agreed after another few rounds of badgering. He did the chanting. Kiira did the singing. Absolutely nothing happened.

“Maybe it would’ve worked better,” said Kiira, looking at the conspicuously undisturbed earth, “if we knew her name.”

***

Kiira had been half-scared – well, not scared, but that was the closest word he could think of – that Veldrin would get cranky with him again. But any crankiness was dispelled when Kiira invited him over to his house and presented him with a small pile of wrapped and beribboned presents for both Midwinter and his sixteenth nameday. He did give Kiira a look when Kiira’s parents cornered them, but that look went away when it came out that Kiira’s parents only wanted to praise them for decorating the cemetery. Apparently, thought Kiira, nobody had noticed the eyeball candies. And he hadn’t told them he’d gone out to see Graverending, so it was less likely they’d make the connection. They did want to know why they’d brought the knife block out there.

“Oh, they were for cutting the tinsel,” said Kiira. “It was just that Mr. uh Florenn gave us a start – we meant to be anonymous, you know? Like eladrin come down from Arvandor and popped straight back.” Veldrin, to his credit, managed to keep a ruler-straight face throughout.

Then Kiira’s mom invited Veldrin and his dad to a showing of Graverending the next day – “You won’t mind seeing it again,” she said to Kiira, “will you?”

“'Course not,” he said without thinking. Then, “Again?”

Veldrin looked between them, arms full of presents, and sighed.

***

Years later, he told it all to Seniadra Moonflower. She sighed and said that maybe it was lucky for High Forest neither Vhaeraun nor Erevan Ilesere had ever particularly specialized in the undead.