Days after the funeral, Marroo found his father’s house as empty of his father as it was of his mother, dead now for just over three years. When the bolts turned in the lock and Marroo stepped inside he found everything, what little there was, just the way his father left it. Frying pan on the stove waiting for tea leaves or greasy noodles, practice swords and killing blades left in the spare room’s armory, boxes on boxes of from the noodles stand just down the street filling the trash.

Marroo paused as he entered the combined kitchen and dining room, and just looked at the frozen bits of his father’s life that waited for him there. Memories tugged at him, and he followed old footsteps into a living room stripped of most of what he remembered there, the couch where he’d spent hours reading by the windows, the pictures that once hung on the walls, the corner tables once stacked with his mother’s literature, gone.

His own room remained the same, what little he’d left behind. Unfamiliar blanket were tucked across his old mattress but otherwise there was little left. Even the hiding place behind his shelf was empty after he moved out, though he still peeled it open to look inside.

When he looked at the hallway shelf on his way back to the kitchen, only three books occupied a space once filled by dozens.

Four chairs tucked into the table in the middle of the kitchen/dining room were the only reminder that a family once filled the apartment now occupied by none.

There was little for Marroo to do.

The half eaten box of leftovers in the cold-box, it’s only contents, joined the boxes in the trash before Marroo hauled the can down creaking stairs to the dumpster, just as he’d done a hundred other times when he was younger. The battered frying pan went into a box destined for a junk dealer along with towels, cutlery, a single mug, and bottles of spices. He took his time, but it still took no more than ten minutes to empty the kitchen into a couple of boxes on the floor and move on to the bathroom. It took him far longer to do the same in his parent’s room.

He just stood in their room for a long time when he entered it. He looked around at the memories written into the fabric of that space from his life before. His mother’s books and jewelry were gone, as were most of her clothes but the sheets were the same if neatly folded over the dent left in the bed by its only occupant over these last few years, and he could still remember laying on the mattress with his head hanging off the side while his mother read to him of other lives that were not his own and never could be.

He ran a hand over the sheets until he found a bit of red thread poking from the cloth and sat there, remembering, before he pulled them away and bundled them up to join the pan, and his father’ cultivation manuals, and clothing, and spare shoes and all the utilitarian left overs that remained when Darro vacated this life for whatever waited for him in the next.

He found a box in the bottom of his father’s chest of drawers as he went through them. He’d thought about keeping some of the mundane objects, socks, pants, shirts, things he hadn’t been able to afford while he was paying rent and working at the book-store, but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to wear them and sometimes think of him and so everything went into the box he mentally labeled as junk. Everything except the box from the bottom drawer.

He found a picture of himself, standing with his mother and his father, and the little boy who must have been Eido before whatever accident took his brother before he got a chance to know him. There were other mementos too. A poem written on a scrap of cardboard, “I’ll always love you”, a heart painted onto a piece of paper by pressing two little hands covered in paint on it, a ring he recognized as his mother’s and a low resolution holograph that must have been her, though it was too grainy and faded from age for Marroo to make out the details properly. In a little bag he found two baby teeth and a lock of hair. With a date and his brother’s name scribbled on it, though he never found one of his own.

When he finished spreading the contents of the box onto the bed he didn’t recognize the picture of the family he saw depicted there. He saw his mother and his father and two small boys, but they were smiling in ways that he could never remember smiling, and while a part of him might have recognized the silver eyed boy standing next to his own miniature in the image, it wasn’t a face he could connect with any coherent memories. Just impressions of lights and sounds and perhaps the shape of the apartments they used to call home.

He kept the box. Packed everything away and set it on the table that would eventually follow the boxes of junk when the dealer came to collect it, and moved on to the rest of the house.

---

The reliquary came for his father shortly after he died. The rose acolytes came first, to determine that he was dead and that there was no hope left for him. They left with words of condolence and soft looks that slid from Marroo’s shoulders like rain while he sat beside his father and held his cold hand.

His father could not be dead. Marroo saw the body, heard the heart that no longer beat in his chest, could smell his father’s last moments in the air, but he could still feel his spirit, burning like the bonfire it had always been to Marroo’s mind, if only now at his hip instead of in the man in front of him, in the corpse. It was the reliquary who unclasped Marroo’s hand from his dead father’s, and the reliquary who made him look away.

The reliquary held Marroo’s hands and smiled gently down at him from his alien height. “He is gone.” The beyonder whispered to Marroo. “And we must prepare him for his final resting place, before it is too late. You must let him go so that we can do our work.”

Marroo stepped aside as hospital workers wheeled a coffin into the room, then watched as they transferred the body from bed to box before it was taken away.

“Would you like to accompany him?” The Reliquary asked, “Or would you like to conduct his memorial here?”

Marroo held onto the sword his father gave him and didn’t know what he should say.

“He’ll accompany him, of course.” A suited figure said from the doorway.

The reliquary turned to the man, then back to Marroo who could only stare at him.

“Who is this man to you?” The reliquary asked.

“I’m his lawyer.” The man replied. Then coughed into an open hand. “Was, his lawyer. When his father was alive, though I’m happy to represent the boy. The estate will cover the expenses, and if they won’t then the family will.”

Marroo recognized him, vaguely, from his mother’s funeral. He’d been one of the dozens of dark skinned men who’d shook his hand and told him he was sorry.

“Is that your wish?”, the reliquary asked Marroo.

“Of course it is.” The man in the suit said again. “Didn’t you hear me?”

Marroo nodded without looking at either of them.

“Then it will be done.” The Reliquary finally said. He turned to the Lawyer. “Can I send you the relevant details?”

“Of course.” The lawyer nodded, and the reliquary left with a final “I am sorry for your loss.” Directed at Marroo.

When he was gone Marroo sat in the chair and stared at the dent in the bed where his father had lain only moments before while his spirit ran over and over the sword at his hip that felt so much like the man who was no longer of this life.

The lawyer approached the pale skinned boy and put out a tentative hand, then, when Marroo didn’t chop it off or turn and bite him, he settled it onto the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry boy.” He said. “We’ll take care of the details for you.”

Marroo heard the same repeated, frequently, over the next day as he was updated about the plans for his father’s internment beneath the stars somewhere close to his mother’s tomb. He heard it again when he stood at the head of his father’s reliquary and looked down at the stony face that haunted his every nightmare still, then put his hands on the poles in order to lift with the five other men lined up to do the job of carrying his body onto the train.

He stood next to the coffin as the train dove through the howling darkness that lay between the heavens and the beyond, and carried his father again when they reached the other side, to deposit him in the niche the reliquary directed them to and finally say goodbye.

“I’m sorry.”

A different woman hung from the man’s arm than the one who joined him for his mother’s funeral, even if the setting was the same. The reliquary’s temple was still huge, still echoed with the susurration of distant conversations as the dozen or so guests tried vainly to make the room feel full. The huge windows still showed the bright points of a dozen stars twinkling beyond the invisible shifting veil.

“He was one of us.” The man said, in the kind of voice that said he didn’t care if others disagreed with him, even if no one disagreed with him. “That makes you one of us, and we take care of our own. If you need anything. Anything at all, you let us know. We’ll make sure you get it.”

Marroo only nodded.

His father’s estate was empty.

When the lawyer told him, in the days following the funeral, Marroo thought that it couldn’t be true. According to his father, Adepts were worth a thousand men and got paid appropriately but when he looked at the seven different banks his father had split his wealth between he found the same answer in every corner.

The money was gone, drained to pay the rose adept shortly after he was poisoned. There was even a heavy debt left over to the hospital, owed for the services his father hired in an attempt to forestall his own death, attempts that ultimately only bought him enough time for his son to come and hold his hand while he gave away his last breath.

What was left, after the “family” his father served paid off the debt and told him that they’d have paid for any treatments anyways, was what there was in the house. Only his father’s old training swords were worth anything and Marroo saved them for last in his sweep to empty the apartment before the lease ended.

He found his sword tucked away among the swords his father had once handed out to men who wanted to kill Marroo as he was packing them all away, the sword his father gave him after he touched the icon and meant to be the sword he pressed his spirit into over a lifetime of use. It was a pristine blade, not the junk stamped out in factories for gutter thugs, but hand wrought from hard steel with a hint of the smith’s breath infused by the hammering process, sharpened before it was ever quenched so that it would channel the icon the way a gutter channeled the rain.

It seemed dull beside the sword at Marroo’s hip, as dull as the practice swords he tucked it beside to sell to whoever he could find to take them, empty, despite the infusion of the smith’s breath that would make it worth a fortune to anyone with the senses to know what they were holding. He had no use for it.

He untied his father’s sword from his belt as he finished packing away the last of his father’s old arsenal. He held it in his hands for a long time while he sat cross legged on the training mat as he’d once done during his training. He unsheathed it and felt his father’s spirit fill the room, felt himself transported to this place when he was six years old as his father swung a rubber sword at his son grating “hit me” with every strike.

The icon stirred in Marroo’s spirit at the touch of his father’s breath. He let a finger of breath interface with the icon experimentally and looked at the striking post that still hung in one corner of the room. In a blink the post disintegrated into flying match sticks as he manifested the icon, then felt his entire aura sharpen as his spirit caught fire with the icon’s eagerness to enter the world. He pulled away, shoved the sword back into its sheath and the sheath into the bag at his feet before he buttoned it shut and tried to shut out the sense of his father’s breath that still churned in the room around him.

He rolled up the mats, took down what was left of the striking post, swept up the bits. When he found the agony stone sitting on a shelf, he sat with it for several minutes, burning between his palms, before he crushed it with a burst of strength and listened with his spirit as the touch of breath that powered it sank into the floor before dissipating.

The junk dealer told Marroo to call him when he was ready to see his father’s possessions removed, so Marroo ignored the first knock at his father’s door. He’d yet to make the call, and he’d long ago learned to tune out the noise from neighbors that always filtered through the walls. He only realized that it came from the front door when it came a second time and he opened it to find the Reliquary Adept stooped in the hallway outside his father’s old apartment.

The tall pale man smiled when Marroo looked up at him. “I hoped that I would find you here.” He said. “May I come in?”