Commending a soul to Krelene
The funerary course open to anyone who dies in one of Krelene's fire-festivals, in place of a burial
Anyone who dies in the middle of one of Krelene’s fire-festivals may have their soul commended to her instead of being buried. It is an alternative and not an obligation, and it turns on where the death happened rather than on what the dead believed.
Beltran Grayeras went that way, and not by his family’s custom, which is burial in the Grayeras plot. He was killed in the road outside the burning Color Stay, in the middle of a festival got up for Krelene and in a hall dressed for her. His mother wanted the body retrieved and buried. The body was lying in a burning building in a rioting city and could not be carried through those streets by anybody who wanted to live, so Aldo and Mikhail put the other course to her: passion, wrath and love are what Krelene holds, and passionate was the one word for her son that anybody in the room could make fit. Alyphe is not devout. She could see what was coming for her house, and she yielded.