The Grave Mistress
Post-apocalyptic fiction
The heart-shaped locket swings from the chain around her fingertips. It’s almost a dowsing method that she’s constructed, the metal calling to the blood seeping into the earth below her feet. She breathes in the stale air that tastes of fumes and rot, a mixture known only to a dying earth.
“Miss Amalda,” her latest assistant, a boy named Burk, says, “do we need the lantern out?”
Amalda eyes the setting sun just beyond the trees. “Not yet,” she says. “The dead seem quiet tonight.”
Burk doesn’t look so sure, but he listens to her. She’s done the rounds of the nearby graveyards for years, all to ensure that no Risers escape. It was once a lonely job because the Council did not want to spare working bodies to the threat the Risers posed.
She doesn’t blame them for being cautious. The last assistant, a young girl named Mari, had been too quick to go the way of the soil when a hand grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her below. Amalda still remembered the girl’s final screams before she was dragged beneath the earth, never to be seen again.
Amalda said her blessings each night, hoping that Mari found some peace rather than becoming one of the restless dead.
