Introduction

It's only fair to bury bodies in the darkness of night. The reasons are as clear as their correlation with the day and the night; pertaining to the fact that life belongs in the daylight, whereas death resides in the nighttime, simply.
This is why the Watch sets into motion after dusk, as people die during the day.
There are torches towering fifty feet high and stand like sentinels every hundred feet to provide the gravediggers flaming fury to see by as they dig graves by darkness of night. Correct rituals are performed as the body lowered into the ground. By dawn, the cadaver's concerned family would come to see the face of their loved one for the last time. At noon the earth would be put back in its place, and a tombstone erected by nightfall.
Enter Wysterdom. Wysterdom is a famed region of the land that harbors Enfalm, a city home to millions. People here live with little magic, though much more of it is popular save for their town. The year is the dragon, three hundred and one. A terrible plague has encased this city. The Watch is now very busy.

The Watchers see dozens of bodies come in each week. The numbers climb ever higher. The graves accumulate. More land is cleared for the masses of graves. They keep on moving inland and clear trees that would come to serve as their torches. If one were to step in their shoes, they would be overwhelmed by the deadening routine of their way of putting dead bodies to rest. One would begin to believe that the Watchers were zombies themselves.
Even though the peoples did not know it, the Watch used a substantial amount of magic in their grave-digging. One, though part of a crew of thirty, can not be expected to dig a respectable grave in one night. After sanitizing, inspecting, and cataloguing bodies by day, the hard toil of uncasing the earth by night would overwhelm them. They used magic to shovel dirt to create a deep grave. They cast serious anti-resurrection spells to prevent the rise of zombies, of course. Exorcist-like charms too were wielded to protect the bodies.
Though the soul, the spirit, had flown away, leftover bodies were at risk. Even as they were decaying or reduced to mere skeletons, rouge necromancers could always raise them to his will. People of Enfalm were wary of magic and this somehow caused them to believe the burning of bodies despicable. Thus, bodies were lowered to the ground, which gave the Watchers their jobs, the duty of guarding them, and hence their name.
Such was the life of a Watcher.

One

Lacey was pacing, her shovel draped across her shoulders. She tried not to breathe as her pace quickened, as her anxiety boiled, and thus inevitably as her breathing grew more rapid. She eyed the child's body with distaste. One, children always moved her fellow female Watchers to tears - not her however - and she despised seeing her fellow Watchers in their weakest states. Two, a horrendous blue-black mold had grow splat across the infant's face. It was like a growth of mushrooms, tiny black mushrooms with furry blue mold, spawning upon the child's visage, feasting into the nooks of her eyes and crannies of her nostrils.
"Amblam mortershuk, amisa balaimea." those of the watch by the name of feeders, those of the watch that performed all necessary rituals.
Lacey drew the back of her hand across her nose and mouth. It came back dry.
She wondered why, after all these weeks of handling the hundreds of dead bodies supplicated by the plague, she hadn't contracted the disease. She wore no protection, and had knowingly exposed herself countless of times. It was said to be highly contagious. Ten of their Watchers had fallen ill, and three more already had themselves lowered into the ground. This was the plague numora, 'plague by the numbers'. Originally, she had a good estimate of how many died by each disease, but by this plague she had soon lost count. Her hands had come across too many of the dead.
As a matter of fact, she was supposed to have contracted the disease right in the beginning. She had been, without protection, examining a corpse's mouth for cause of death when she saw the growth of black spores in the corner of his mouth. She had reached in and poked it with her finger to see if it was a common mouth sore, but instead to her dismay, later in reading some medical texts, it was identified as a colony of fatal spores. The plague numora was illustrated with a woman's nose encased and disfigured by the disease. This was how the official alert of the plague began, but it was already too late.
Lacey believed that she hadn't even fully cleansed that finger before her breakfast.
So now she knew that she was fully immune for some strange reason. But with people dying left and right like flies, she fully expected to be any one of those unfortunates destined for an unpleasant end, and yet she refused to take precautions nevertheless.
The feeders closed their books, and touched their foreheads in respect. Lacey and the other Watchers moved to pile in the dirt.
Angstaban held out his arm, stopping them. "No," said the chief, "this one has a family."
They desisted. Being the last of thirty three bodies that night, they decided to retire. Tomorrow they would act as guides to lead various families to their deceased kin.
The plague was no longer taking its toll just on the homeless classes.
Lacey took the time to peer down into the dim grave. The hole was four feet deep for this child, this child who lay in the simple wooden coffin, dressed in a simple white dress. The plague upon her face was putrid. It was wrong to see that mass of black and furry blue feasting upon her face, like a giant hand had left a hat there.
Without saying a word, Lacey stood up, and walked to a different open grave. Again she bent down to peer into the hole. It was an old man - a kind-looking man. The body was freshly dead, but with all the typical graveyard mist and faint light from the distant torches, it resembled a good corpse. The skin was not flesh now, but meat. Meat for the carrion, she thought to herself.
A jewel. A bright red jewel, a sparkling jewel no larger than a single globule on a blackberry, was imbedded in the fetid mass at the base of the old man's neck. How curious.
Lacey reached out to touch it, and then remembered that this was a man infected with and died of the plague. No, she reminded herself of her immunity - it would not harm her. She continued to reach for that tiny sparkling spot. What a strange object, especially to be found here out of all places, she thought. Her hand hovered an inch above. She believed she could feel the spores floating up and latching onto the sweaty pads of her fingers.
Then she touched it.
A moment later a hand was clamped on her wrist. She had a split second to stare in horror its face, the open eyes of a corpse alive - "Come with me".
She was pulled away; she was literally sucked out like some vacuum was sucking her out of the world of life, complete with an otherworldly roar in her head. Blackness.
For time eternity all she could sense was not visual, not feeling, not odor or taste, but all auditory. The otherworldly roar that had erupted when she was pulled in by the dead hand on her wrist, was climaxing. It whistled like the wind, pounded her head like a tornado, and lacerated into her mind like an icy blizzard. The pain and the intensity of it were killing her, and yet she felt like she was observing from far away.
She wanted to ram her fists into her ears - no matter how far she must push - to block out the sound. In the back of her mind, she knew it would be impossible to even attempt mute this sound. Impossible. Her absence of sight didn't matter; her disorientation of where she was didn't matter - all she could experience was the whorl of sound. Time was nothing. All that mattered was the deadening sound.
The sound grew and fell like a song. Finally, within an instant it began to cease, slowly. As the sound went away leaving her behind, it was like a veil was being lifted from her mind; she could dimly see steel gray shadows shifting from her eyelids. At last, the roar was far away, settling to a place thousands of miles above her. It still existed, like a fly buzzing in the back of her head, but it was gone for now.
She was standing in a pool of water, gray leaden water up to her knees. Whitish mist intoxicated the air. It was unreal to her mind, like a cloudy veil was draped over each of her senses. It was like watching from someone else's eyes; it felt like a chilly dream.
She was singular, but not alone.
And where was that hand on her wrist just a moment ago?
Her answer came soon enough. From among the passing blurs of. spirits, she assumed. one man came clear in her vision. He approached, and she saw that he was that corpse that had pulled her under.
He was actually a kind-looking old man, benevolent for one who was supposed to be dead and dragged her to this deathly place. His features were haunted, perhaps by the last expression he wore before he died. His legs caused no ripples in the gray water as he approached her.
"I am Marketh," he whispered.
"What do you want from me?" Lacey whispered as well, but she had a clue that Marketh could do nothing but whisper.
"I'm sorry to have frightened you so," he said. "I meant you no harm - you will return safely in no time, don't worry."
She asked the second of the dozens of questions that'd popped into her mind. "Then why am I here?"
"Darling, this is a precinct of death."
"I'm - am I dead?" she uttered.
"No dear. Move your legs, you'll see."
Lacey did as she was told, and was half-surprised and half-relieved that the water at her knees bent to the laws of physics. So she mustn't be dead, not like Marketh, she thought. The spirits must be unable to disturb the water, while the living could. Knowing the water here was rarely moved perturbed her.
"I know that you are an innocent - and you never ask for trouble. You don't deserve any sort of burden that you never wish for. But my last mission in life was a failure, and I must take someone to complete it."
Lacey's mouth dropped. She didn't understand.
"I realize now, now that I am dead, the true purpose of my mission. Before, I only thought that I was running away from an evil witch. Witches were after me, and I had been fleeing for my life for months. I came to Enfalm, but caught the plague and died. That's how you met me, you see. When I came here, the true purpose of my death was revealed to me, as it should be. I learned that I must take someone to play part as the Giver. I had to abduct someone here into death in order to make him, or her, the Giver.
"Child, I do not know what a Giver is. I do not know what your role in future will be. Spirits bless me, but I had to choose as soon as possible before the winds blew me too far in--"
Lacey indeed noticed that the shadowy forms were moving toward a uniform direction, clearly to a pull of wind that she could not feel.
"I have done my task. I was told to retrieve someone. I chose you first. I have done that. My mission is done."
"What?" said Lacey, slightly panicked. "Now what? What's going to happen to me?"
"You're going back to the real world, darlin'. The world of the living."
"Then? You're supposed to tell me if I'm supposed to stop an apocalypse."
"I'm glad a you, a Watcher - I didn't know what they were until now, and I'm glad I chose one of the Watch. Resourceful people. That's what you'll be."
Now that his purpose was finished, Marketh began to float sideways, ever so slowly.
Lacey moved to block him. "Can't you tell me anything? Just anything, please, don't just leave me out."
With surprising speed, Marketh's ghostly form blew into her body. The result was totally unexpected. Upon impact, her body rocked like a skeleton sacked against the wall. Her bones felt like they were made with rocks and were being chiseled by a hammer.
Her soul had found her anchor in the living world. With one last jolt, she clashed jarringly into her own body.
Lacey remembered touching the fungus on the man's neck. She looked at her finger. The particles squirmed on her skin, fighting to break and infest her skin. She stared at them. A few moments later, they turned to dust, and fell of her finger.
She got to her feet. She looked one last time at the old man's body, faintly recalling that she had an encounter with him. not too long ago. but it was ghostly and fleeting quickly in her mind. It was rushing away. She clawed to recover those memories, but it slipped out of her grasp like a picture melting into its paints. When the memory slipped away completely like a boat beyond a waterfall, she peered desperately into its mist but the water had washed it all away. She could not recover what she had lost.

The memory was gone. She could not remember what had just happened. She could not recall what was so. significant about that dead person. It was. it had vanished from her knowledge.
A longing feeling now plagued her as she delivered one last glance at the open grave. She set the shovel on her shoulder, and set off on the trail back to camp. Caution was now fringing in her mind.

Two

Thousands of times she had tread this path. This narrow hard-dirt path, two of them paralleling in opposite directions, lead them to and away from the mass graves. The paths lead straight into a sparse line of woods where one could not see clearly to the other end if he were standing at the entrance. Trees here were sparsely placed, bare of leaves, and very thin - typical graveyard trees, and providing a canopy of naked twigs and branches above, only allowing so much light to light their way. Naturally, no debris carpeted the forest floor. Complete with a quilt of never-dying mist above their heads, the entire expanse had a gloomy haunted-woods kind of atmosphere. There was plenty of pale light. It was an empty sort of woods. For this is what it was.
Of course, they never called it a mass grave for what it actually was, but in formality and so not to apprehend the living, it was called the cemetery. Lacey was leading three family members to the cemetery. They were here to see that girl they had buried last night. They all wore kerchiefs around their noses.
Lacey didn't know it, but the family was slightly intimidated by her, if not the cemetery. Here they were a expecting a kindly gentleman, dressed in mourning clothes and a pitying smile upon his face, to lead to their graves. They expected a few words of respect to be exchanged. They expected the Watch to be a kindly cult of people.
But when Lacey showed up they were daunted by this hard-faced girl with piercing eyes and thin lips, her colorless and unkempt hair, and her raggedy clothes. At least she had to decency to put on a dress and uniform black robes - there were enough hoodlum girls on the streets who wore anything but dresses.
The boy of the group, about thirteen years old, seemed taken with her. She treated him with indifference as she would with anyone else. He was actually fascinated by her eyes, it seemed. They were rather intense, but it was the deadened shroud that captivated him. Like many of the Watchers, this girl seemed .past living.
She had just thrown on the black satin robe and dislodged a lantern from the rack, when she saw the family waiting in line and said, "Who be it you wishing to bury?" A lantern would be absolutely unnecessary in this light of morning.
"Saret Landahn," the father said meekly.
Five minutes later, they were all standing at the grave of Saret Landahn. The father was on his knees and whispering a tearful prayer, while the mother was sobbing through the kerchief on her mouth. The brother was staring silently at her sister's dead corpse, tears coursing down his cheeks.
Lacey showed no sorrow for the dead girl. After all, in her lifetime she had seen thousands of people pass through her hands. This was no different. It may be from a disastrous plague; a plague which meant more work for her, but was still no different. The dead were dead.