“We don’t,” Astrid says after a moment, considering. “At least not the way you think of it.”
Their own practices had seemed so normal and everyday to her, until as children she and Kristoffer had accompanied their mother on a trading trip down the mountain, and happened to be present while the town conducted a cremation. The death of some village elder, the townsfolk out to pay their respects at the funerary pyre. Some Chantry brother overseeing the burning, that awful meaty smell, all that potential going up in ash, and Astrid as a horrified young girl not understanding: but how will the birds find them? They’re just gone.
She tilts her glass all the way back to catch some of the last drops from the bottom, and considers whether or not to refill it. “Our… I s’pose you’d call them priests? Our Sky Watchers, they use ritual weapons to separate a body. They lay the pieces out on the mountaintop for Our Lady of the Skies, as high as possible, where the birds can come to retrieve the pieces. You’ll feed the animals; your body returned to the cycle. Your soul’s carried up to the sky and you’ll be reunited with your kin on the other side.”
She sounds wistful; she hadn’t realised it meant so much to her until she was apart from it.
Then: “‘Yours’?” she asks, echoing him earlier. She painted the outside world in such a broad brush: Cedric wasn’t Tevene, and otherwise all Andrastians seemed much the same to her; she hasn’t known a Nevarran before.
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Their own practices had seemed so normal and everyday to her, until as children she and Kristoffer had accompanied their mother on a trading trip down the mountain, and happened to be present while the town conducted a cremation. The death of some village elder, the townsfolk out to pay their respects at the funerary pyre. Some Chantry brother overseeing the burning, that awful meaty smell, all that potential going up in ash, and Astrid as a horrified young girl not understanding: but how will the birds find them? They’re just gone.
She tilts her glass all the way back to catch some of the last drops from the bottom, and considers whether or not to refill it. “Our… I s’pose you’d call them priests? Our Sky Watchers, they use ritual weapons to separate a body. They lay the pieces out on the mountaintop for Our Lady of the Skies, as high as possible, where the birds can come to retrieve the pieces. You’ll feed the animals; your body returned to the cycle. Your soul’s carried up to the sky and you’ll be reunited with your kin on the other side.”
She sounds wistful; she hadn’t realised it meant so much to her until she was apart from it.
Then: “‘Yours’?” she asks, echoing him earlier. She painted the outside world in such a broad brush: Cedric wasn’t Tevene, and otherwise all Andrastians seemed much the same to her; she hasn’t known a Nevarran before.