Elven funerals are not sentimental ceremonies.
Every Elf born beneath the canopy of World Tree Mintherenia enters existence already resonated to it. When they die, that resonance does not simply fade. It must be guided back.
Unlike the Spheraphasians whose souls ascend to Naranq, Elven souls do not. They return to Mintherenia. Their souls are cleaned and reincarnated without memory. Without the ritual, the soul lingers near its corpse. The responsibility of ensuring acceptance falls to the High Priestess of Mintherenia and the priestesses she personally chooses. For singular deaths, a circle of priestesses suffices.
For a massacre, only the High Priestess may stand at the center.
It was raining on the morning of the forty-third day since the Second Epoch Cycle began, also the seventh day since Edarea attacked the elven city. The storm had not relented since.
The city no longer resembled a city. There was now only barren expanse, which provided space for the dead.
Hundreds of thousands of the survivors gathered. Their clothing was soaked through by rain. No one spoke loudly. Even grief seemed to be silence. They could not all see the ritual ground since the crowd extended too far. So I intervened.
I cast thousands of projections suspended in the air, capturing the ritual center from every angle and replicating it across the gathered masses. If Mintheris was to mourn, it would not do so blindly.
Below me, the bodies stretched in rows. Hundreds of thousands of Elves were arranged in meticulous columns. The infected were separated from the uninfected. Burn scars were visible even from my vantage point.
Children were placed side by side.
That was when Elyonari appeared. She did not enter alone though. Veylonar walked at her right. The Nine Elven Elders followed in formation. Veneri walked just behind her.
Elyonari wore black and not ceremonial white like I was had to seeing. It was a priestess garment stripped of ornamentation. A veil concealed her face. In her hand she held her Divine Weapon. It had morphed into a white staff now.
She walked into the heart of the dead. She walked between the rows of past fallen Divines, mothers curled protectively around children who could not be protected, past elders whose hands were still folded in positions of final prayer and...
She saw the children who died gruesomely.
Rain ran down her robes. It soaked the hem until it darkened further.
At the center of the arranged bodies, she stopped. Slowly, she lifted her hands and removed the veil.
The holographic projections carried her image across the barren city. To the survivors watching, she appeared untouched by serene. When she turned, she saw children Veneri had once helped fly during the second day of Etdramira.
Now those same bodies lay still.
For a moment, her composure broke. Tears spilled down her pale cheeks. They did not distort her expression. They did not twist her face into anguish. They simply fell.
Every survivor saw it. The High Priestess was grieving but she did not fall under grief.
She lifted her hand and wiped the tears away. She then exhaled and strengthened her resolve. To the Elves, that single gesture meant everything. She was in despair and they could see it. But, she would not allow it to paralyze her.
Then she began to speak. The incantation emerged in ancient Elvish. As the final phrase of invocation left her lips, the sky answered.
Emerald light gathered above the ruined city.
Lines of pure Nature Energy carved themselves into the air, intersecting and spiraling into geometry too intricate for mortal replication. A massive Mystic Circle unfurled across the dark sky. It spanned for kilometers. The clouds glowed green beneath it.
From every corpse laid in rows upon the ruined earth, faint emerald particles began to rise. The particles drifted upward, gathering into brighter clusters as they ascended. The rain passed through them.
Before long, the particles took the form of translucent silhouettes. Then so many appeared that the sky seemed crowded with the memory of a people.
When Elyonari lifted her staff, a beam of concentrated Nature Energy erupted from its tip. It struck the heart of the Mystic Circle and anchored itself there. The souls turned toward it instinctively The beam became a pathway and soon the pathway became a river. Blue, white and golden souls moved upward in numbers too vast to count. The devastation below stood in violent contrast to the spectacle above. It was unbearable and breathtaking at once. Even in ruin, the Elves were beautiful.
But Elyonari was breaking.
At first it was only a fissure along her wrist. Another crawled up her forearm. A faint, splintering crack was heard even over the rain. Her body began to fracture. Even a Fourth Enlightenment Divine was not meant to channel that volume of departure, especially three hundred thousand souls.
Steam rose from her skin. Green light leaked from the cracks. Her veins glowed with violent green radiance as the World Tree Mintherenia accepted what she offered. The beam intensified and with it, the strain. Each soul that crossed the threshold seemed to take a fragment of her strength with it.
The people saw it.
"High Priestess, stop!"
"You will die!"
"Please, enough!"
They could feel it. They knew what it meant to touch the World Tree directly. Mintherenia was a Supreme Entity. To open oneself so completely to that current and act as conduit for an entire city's worth of souls was to gamble one's own existence.
I turned to Veneri and sent a telepathic message to him.
"Can you use Body Reconstruction on her?"
His gaze never left Elyonari.
"She forbade it. No matter what, I can't interfere."
He looked composed and calm but through the Sapphire Bond, I felt fear.
Above us, the sky was nearly consumed by ascending souls. The rain passed through them, refracting the emerald beam into fractured halos. It looked like the heavens had split open to receive a fallen civilization.
Elyonari's body cracked further.
A fracture tore across her collarbone. Another split down her cheek. Blood seeped from the seams of her skin, mingling with rainwater and mud. Her hands trembled violently around the staff yet her grip did not loosen.
When the final wave of souls reached the beam, the Mystic Circle shimmered one final time before it dimmed. The beam, flickered and vanished. Elyonari collapsed to her knees.
The mud swallowed the hem of her black robes. She coughed once and blood spilled from her mouth in heavy streams. It stained the earth that had already taken too much. Steam poured from her body as the fractures across her skin glowed before it began to seal.
The cracks faded one by one but the damage remained written in her trembling body. She pressed the staff into the mud and tried to rise. For a moment, it seemed she would fall face-first into the blood-soaked ground.
Veylonar moved before anyone else.
He caught her mid-collapse with one arm wrapping around her shoulders and the other steadying her waist. Mud splashed up around them. When her eyes found his, she smiled.
I looked back at Veneri.
To anyone watching, he stood as he always did but through the Bond, his terror was suffocating.
She had connected herself directly to a Supreme Entity that could swallow Divines without notice. For those few minutes, she had placed her life on the scale against four hundred thousand departed souls and if the World Tree had rejected her or the flow had surged beyond her capacity, he would have felt her die.
Elyonari did not speak. She did not give a eulogy. She did not offer promises of vengeance or comfort. The rain continued to fall, washing away the last traces of emerald light from the sky. Her actions had already spoken.
She had taken their dead into herself. She had cracked her own body open to ensure their souls reached Mintherenia. She had endured the terror of annihilation so that no Elf would wander like a lost soul.