The two young apprentices who abandoned their duties during the day didn’t get away without consequences. Heiro checked everyone’s reports thoroughly when he returned from the town council and sent the two straight to work without dinner. By the time the rest of the group retired to their rooms for the night, Kan still saw no sign of the young apprentices returning.

At least Heiro and Luya were alike in this way, Kan thought. Luya was enthusiastic in her responsibilities as a discipline enforcer, and Heiro was a ruthless leader. Kan was growing more convinced that the brother and sister were of warlord lineage.

He opened the window in his room and looked out into the darkness. The stars were few, and the moon was shrouded behind thick clouds.

Will you visit them, child? They haven’t met any new friends in four hundred years.

A chilly wind whistled past. Kan shivered, uncertain if it was because of the cold or the eerie words lingering in his mind. He knew the conversation was irrelevant to his task, but something about the old man made Kan think that there was truth behind those strange remarks. A hidden answer to a question he hadn’t yet learned how to ask.

I buried them at the graveyard by the big oak tree.

The thought of paying them a visit grew on him. Most of the group members were already asleep. Kan’s room was on the first floor, and he could easily sneak out through the window without a sound. No one would notice.

Kan considered. Then he hopped over the sill and landed quietly on the grass below.

Crows cawed in the distance. A fluttering of wings followed Kan as he crossed the moonless town, heading straight for the big oak tree. He had seen it from a distance earlier in the day. The enormous trunk and the sheer expanse of its outstretched limbs were impossible to miss.

Silence filled the deep night, hushing everything except Kan’s light footsteps. Yet the further he trekked, the more he felt a sense of unease spreading in the back of his mind. He paused when he rounded a corner with wavering candlelight spilling out a tall window. “Show yourself,” he said and turned.

There was a moment of stillness in the air. Then boots clicked against the stone pavement, and a figure appeared in the slanted candlelight. Broad-shouldered, tall as Kan, about a year or two older.

“Very few can hear me behind them,” the figure said.

“I didn’t hear you, Heiro,” Kan replied. He hadn’t expected the inimical presence to be from his group leader, though considering the circumstances of the night excursion, Heiro had every right to be disapproving.

“Where are you going?”

“The graveyard.”

Heiro found Kan’s responses less than satisfying. He had anticipated a few possible reactions from his runaway group member caught in action: surprise, fear, shame, eagerness to explain or defend himself. But he saw none of it in Kan, who spoke as if hopping out of a window in the dead of night to visit a graveyard was the most natural thing to do.

“What for at the graveyard?” Heiro pressed on.

“A resident told me today that he buried his family by the big oak tree four hundred years ago, and he wished me to visit them.”

Heiro wasn’t sure if he should believe such nonsense. They stood still for a while, and when the silence started becoming uncomfortable, Heiro said at last, “I will come with you.”

Kan nodded, and the two slid back into the shadows of the night.

A crescent moon was peeking out of the clouds when the two arrived at the oak tree. About a hundred graves spread under its twisted limbs, forming an elliptical pattern around the heavily knotted trunk. Pale silver light dappled through the canopy, illuminating the dark moss and vines sprawling over the weather-worn gravestones.

Kan walked up cautiously to the first one in their path, kneeling to take a closer look at the engravings.

It was unmarked. The top of the plaque had already crumbled from age, but Kan could tell from the layout of the etchings that no text had ever been written on it. The only engraving was a symbol of an eye, with a slit pupil like that of a snake. Despite the decay of the stone, the lines tracing the symbol were sharp and clear as if freshly drawn the day before.

“How will you find the townsman's family?” Heiro asked. His voice was barely a whisper, though it sounded loud in the quietness. “Did he give you names?”

Kan didn’t answer. He moved to the next grave and parted the grass overgrowing its surface. Also unmarked, bearing the same symbol.

A light wind sighed through the yard. The grass stirred under Kan’s hand like tiny tapping fingers, and the oak leaves above him rustled in a mourning murmur. “What does the eye of a snake mean?” he asked.

Heiro frowned when he joined Kan and made out what was on the gravestones. Many customs were different across the Continent’s various regions, but one thing hadn’t changed in centuries: the dead were never buried without a name or an epitaph. Those were their guides to the afterlife, and not having the engravings meant their souls would be forever lost in the underworld.

They checked three more plaques further away. All of them followed the exact same pattern, indistinguishable from each other.

“How could this be?” Heiro mumbled as he crouched before one of the graves. The moon was moving behind a cloud again, and a black shadow loomed over them. For a moment, Heiro thought he saw the crawling vines on the plaque darken, shifting and twisting into rivulets of blood dripping through the stone’s crumbling cracks.

The eye is weeping. It seeks solace in me. He didn’t know how the thought came to his mind, though it felt right, and he reached out a thumb to brush off the tears of blood.

“Don’t!” Kan’s voice snapped Heiro out of his trance. His hand sprang back, but it was too late.

The symbol blackened under Heiro’s thumb the instant he touched it. Not all of it, only the center of the pupil, a stygian hollowness against the outer contour. It was as if the eye suddenly opened and stared at him with the ferocious excitement of a predator leaping for its prey.

Heiro stood up and took a step back, staggering in shock. In the dim light, the symbol seemed alive, its stare following him as he moved. “Look around you, Heiro,” he heard Kan say. He looked. As if connected through an invisible force, all the eyes on the rest of the gravestones had opened around them, their dark pupils fixed on the two men under their watch.

A gust of wind howled through the graveyard, sending fallen leaves swirling in the air, whistling like indistinct laughter.