Chapter 1- Episode 4 - The Four Graves

The figure had his back turned.
Straw-colored hair fell long and untidy over his broad shoulders.
He wore a light burlap shirt and leather trousers.
A sword was strapped to his back, secured by a belt tied across his chest.
He was kneeling.
Bent over Lisey's body.

When Finde saw him, he thought he was dreaming.
He had the same features as Finde.
But his skin…
A color that did not belong to his world.
Brown, with purplish undertones.
Like the dawn emerging from darkness.

Finde ran toward him, determined to drive him away.
Then he saw the stranger raise a hand and close Lisey's eyes,
which had remained open at the moment of her death.

He slowed down.
Stopped a few steps away.
“Who are you?”

The stranger slowly rose to his feet.
His gaze was deep.
He placed his hands on Finde's shoulders.
His touch was warm.
Gentle.
“I'm sorry about what happened, kid…
I'm sorry about your loved ones.”

Finde stared at him in confusion.

“You were very brave.
Not many inhabitants of the White Planets survive an encounter with the Gozhul.”

Finde shook his head.
“I don't understand...”

“It doesn't matter.”
The stranger's voice was calm.
“It's over now.”

He pointed toward the boy's face.
“Let me see that cut.”
He opened a satchel and took out a small tin.
He dipped two fingers into a greenish paste and gently spread it over the wound.

The burning sensation made Finde flinch.
Then came relief.
Cool.
Strange.

“What is it?”
the boy asked.

“A plant that grows… somewhere.”
A faint smile appeared on the stranger's face.
“I've never been good at botany. But it works!”
The stranger turned and headed toward the broken-down front door.

Only then did Finde truly see the house.
Broken tables.
Destroyed furniture.
Blood on the walls.

His mother.
His siblings.
Everything that had once been love…was now silence.

Finde felt faint and was forced to step outside.
The warm wind struck his face, carrying the smell of burning and ash.
His father's body lay in the garden.
Finde approached him, tears in his eyes, and collapsed to his knees.

He embraced him.
“I'm sorry, Dad…
I couldn't do what you asked me to.”

Tears streamed silently down his cheeks.
Then, in the distance, voices.
Screams.
Muffled sobs.

Finde ran toward Meridia Street.
Greentowne was devastated.
Nothing but flames, ruins, and bodies.
Among the corpses of his fellow townspeople lay those of the Gozhul.

Who killed them? he wondered.
He ran back home.

He opened his father's tool shed.
Took a shovel.
And headed beneath a large tree standing in the field behind the house.

He began to dig.
One grave.
Then another.
By the time the sun turned orange and pink, the fourth grave was ready.

His hands were covered in blisters.
His breathing was shallow.
The wound on his face throbbed.
He wrapped his family members' bodies in white sheets.

Four figures on the porch.
One by one, he carried them beneath the tree's weeping branches.
When he laid his father in the first grave, the tears returned.

Silent.

Like the branches of that tree, brushing against the ground.
He knelt on the earth, devastated, his spirit torn apart.

A hand touched his shoulder.

He looked up.
The stranger who had saved him was there again, by his side.
“Let me help you.”

Finde nodded.
The stranger took Nuelle and Miky.
He laid them in their graves.
Then he lifted Lisey.

Finde watched him fill the four graves in silence.
When the last shovelful of earth had been laid, he stopped.
He lit a cigarette.

“Why did you help me?”
Finde asked.

“When it happened to me, I couldn't do the same..."
He exhaled slowly.
Thick, bluish smoke escaped from his nostrils.
“…and it haunts me every night.”

They remained like that: silent, before the four graves, as the sky took on ever darker shades.
And Finde's soul drifted among the memories of a happy life that had ended far too soon.