They needed a goodbye. A final one.
Not the kind whispered in passing, not the kind buried beneath guilt and silence—but a real farewell. One that mattered. One that meant something.
But I couldn't bury them.
The waters around me wouldn't allow it. There was no soil to dig into, no land in sight. Just endless waves stretching far beyond reason, far beyond hope. And even if I waited, even if I prayed to find solid ground, their bodies would decay before we ever got there. Their souls would be trapped, stuck in flesh slowly breaking apart under the weight of time and heat. That wouldn't be peace. Not for them. And not for me.
They deserved more than that.
Fire. A pyre, burning high into the sky, flames roaring against the horizon. It was practical. Clean. Final. But no matter how logical it seemed, my heart resisted.
They didn't deserve fire.
Not even if they couldn't feel it. Not even if it was just body, not being. The idea of letting flames consume what little remained of them felt wrong. Fire is rage. Fire is punishment. It devours. It desecrates. And they had already suffered enough. They didn't need to burn—not again. Not like that.
They deserved the warmth of the sun, not the fury of the flames.
Then there was water. The sea stretched endlessly around me, calling to them like it called to everything that no longer belonged to the living world. A watery grave—solemn, quiet. It should have felt fitting.
But it didn't.
I couldn't do it.
They didn't deserve to be dragged into the deep. They didn't deserve to sink into the cold, black belly of the ocean. The sea had already given birth to a demon that feasted on them, tore them apart like they were nothing. I wouldn't let it claim more. I wouldn't let it finish what that monster started. I wouldn't let another mouth feed on them—not fish, not scavengers, not the abyss itself.
They were not offerings.
They were not refuse.
They were not driftwood to be carried off by the tide.
I stood there, helpless, surrounded by sky and sea, with no earth beneath my feet and no fire in my heart. And I realized—what I wanted wasn't a burial.
I wanted rest for them. Not destruction. Not vanishing.
Something gentle. Something real.
But in this cruel expanse of salt and sorrow, I had no rituals, no customs, no sacred rites.
All I had was the sun.
All I had was the silence.
And my promise.
A promise that they would be remembered. That they would not be discarded. That their suffering would not be the end of their story.
"I don't know the rituals on how you bury your dead. I don't know your ways," I spoke.
The words weren't for me. They weren't some dramatic declaration meant to echo into the sky. They were for the seven girls lying before me—girls I never knew in life but felt bound to in death.
"I don't know what prayers you spoke. What gods you believed in, if any. I don't know what your people would have done to give you peace, to send you off with dignity."
"But I will make my own to honor you."
Because someone had to.
There was no priest. No mourners. No flowers, no songs, no rites passed down through generations. Just me. A stranger in a stranger's world. A drifter clinging to a raft, surrounded by death and guilt, trying to hold together the pieces of something already broken beyond repair.
Still—I had my voice. I had my hands. I had my will.
And I had an idea.
A ritual. One of my own making. It would be honest. It would be real. It would be... sickening to some. Maybe even unforgivable if I were still home, still bound by the laws and norms of the world I came from. The kind of act that would make headlines for all the wrong reasons. That would invite judgment, disgust, and legal wrath.
But this wasn't my world.
And I wasn't home.
I was a stranger here. A pariah. An outsider with no roots, no law to protect me or condemn me. Whatever scraps of legality I carried from my old world—they meant nothing now. The paper rules, the courts, the polished codes of right and wrong… they didn't stretch this far across the sea.
Only morality remained.
And morality, unlike law, lives in the soul. It bleeds when it's wounded. It cries when the world is silent. It knows shame. It knows honor.
And mine? Mine wouldn't let them go without being seen. Without being recognized. Without a ritual that meant something—not just to me, but to them. To who they were, even if I would never know their names.
So yes, the ritual I imagined would be seen as wrong by many.
But it wasn't for them.
It was for these girls.
And in my heart, I knew—this act, this final gesture—it had to be as respectful to the dead as it was horrifying to the monsters who had once laid hands on them. A defiance against the filth that had reduced them to meat and silence. A message carved into memory, not just for the world, but for me. So I would never forget. So no one who saw it ever could.
If the scum of this sea reveled in desecration, then this would be the inverse. This would be reverence. One final act of reclamation. An act that said, You are not trophies. You are not forgotten. You are not his.
You were human.
And you still are.
Even now.
Even here.