Peace upon you every day that you honor your ancestors. Prosperity to the village that carries out their destined lineage.

That’s what Sellaa tells herself as she treks again through freezing winter pines and fields of prickling death. If this were not the way of her people, she would much rather remain home by the fireside warm and alone.

Instead, she continues to approach the clearing up ahead as a rolling mist nestles the ground. The cloak she adorns sweeps the earth and from her gown she pulls out a bone. No smaller than a fickle twig fallen from the peeling trees. As it belongs to the broken body of yet another missing child.

Why she has it? To please the ancestors and tend to the village. As she always does.

Falling to the ground, she stakes the bone into the earth and bites at her arm with teeth. Drawing blood, she salts the earth with her own fluid and stands once more.

As she closes her eyes, a prayer slips from her mouth as easy as breath. From the staken bone a bud emerges from the ground. A new violet leaf, followed by a more ominious purple fog emerging from the pores of the plant.

“Asè” she speaks as she approaches the fog preparing for her duties.

It’s so close now that she feels the mystical air in her lung, feeling that it’s much less magical than the first time she completed the ritual. Thoughts aside, she continues on allowing herself to be swallowed in the fog.

Her body drops and her soul is pulled through the ground through the physical manifestation of the bone of life stuck in the field. Consciousness without the body or the brain, a force beyond the wretched things her body must do to come here.

The collective consciousness of the ancestor, living in the underground and fueling the earth that the village sits on.

In the instant she is there, through no words of the mouth she feels what she must know. To fuel their Earth and to keep crop emerging the ancestors require still three bodies. More specifically, three more village children to willingly sacrifice themselves of pure heart and care for others for the sake of the village. Easier said than done, as a child with imagination has the most purpose to live. To dream before they are groomed by reality.

As her soul returns to her vessel, she lies in the field knowing that only she has been entrusted with this special task. Not that the village would thank her if they knew what really sustained the land.