The Heirs

Chapter 2- Flowers for Skeletons

Nature’s first green is gold,
her hardest hue to hold.
her early leaf’s a flower;
but only so an hour.
then leaf subsides to leaf.
so Eden sank to grief,
so dawn goes down to day.
nothing gold can stay.
-

Funerals in Rihaaya were not like funerals in Narnia.

The latter took place amidst nature, somewhere where there was nothing but greenery, nothing but vibrant life. People could wear whatever they wanted, and more often than not, they would turn into revels to honour the life of the person they were burying. Considering that fauns and dryads were most often the ones present in greatest quantity, this was nothing surprising.

Funerals in Rihaaya were not so. They took place in the homes of the dead, or in the graveyard, and everyone wore white, the colour of purity and the colour of death. The person would be buried, or cremated, and people would stand around, heads bent towards the ground and praying for their souls to find eternal peace.

One celebrated the life which had been lived, and one commiserated the death which had happened.

Jem didn’t know which he preferred.

He remembered his father and uncle and aunts' memorial, and how he’d teared up. He remembered shaking more than once before, and even during, his address to the people. He had wanted to turn over his job of the speech to his mother so many times, and had almost approached her before the funeral to ask her- but he hadn’t. For one, he was doing this for his mother, his Mumma. He wouldn’t let her down. And for two- At the end of the day, they were his people. His father’s people. He’d known them. He’d known the attendees since he was a small child, and they had seen him grow.

It was not so today. He was practically a foreigner here, an unknown King. No one particularly cared that he was the Rihaayan High Queen’s son- and he was forced to realise that people knew that he wasn’t of her blood as well.
No one knew he was a faerie- the story was that his parents had found him wandering alone in the woods and taken pity on him- and it was possibly the one thing he was glad about, as he stood beside his sisters in the Great Hall of the Azraq palace.
He liked being human. He liked being Sanya and Edmund's son. He didn’t want to be Graeme. Being Graeme meant that he didn’t belong here- that he had no right to stand here among people who’d lost their Monarchs or their family- that he didn’t have the right to grieve the deaths of the people in the caskets in front of him. Being Graeme meant he had no one.

As Jem, he’d never felt alone- there were people around him, always, and his mother loved him more than anything else in the world, and his father had doted on him and been with him whenever he’d needed, and his sisters never left his side, at least in spirit- but sometimes, he just wished he had a kin here. Not family- the only family he wanted was his lost and dead ones back, he didn’t want his birth mother to show up or anything- but someone who understood him. Who understood both Graeme and Jem.

But he pushed away these out-of-time thoughts- it was only the melancholy of this day that was causing it, he knew.

His grandparents had been carried out in golden shrouds, and his mother and uncle had stepped up, kissed their death-pale faces and covered them with veils, and his mother had put their favourite flowers on their chests. They’d been gently placed into the oaken caskets by the head of the Royal Guard and the Commander-in-Chief of the Rihaayan Army.
The people would pay their respects and offer their prayers, and when the sun set, they would be buried in the palace graveyard.