‘Awake?’ he asked his mother. The mother who adopted him, but mother all the same. ‘She was the only one that wanted me,’ he said, when he was older, and people would remark on how he must’ve been a bastard, or a changeling she found after too many nights in the hay with the devil himself.
‘Yes. Awake,’ she repeated. ‘The stones that circle overhead - they collect the dead from the cairns.’ His eyes widened at that. ‘Not their remains,’ she continued. ‘Them. Their essence. Their souls. Their spirit, their breath.’ He looked at the wind. ‘Yes, like that,’ she continued. ‘When the wind feels different, the stones are circling in the sky. They collect the ones we lay to rest here.’ She looked at him again. ‘One day you’ll lay me to rest here, as well. And one day you and your wife and your children will be laid to rest here. And they’ll come for us, too.’