Ahura Mazda, Lord of Wisdom, keeper of Asha, I commend to You this servant of the flame.
He stood the wall when the armies came from Arabia with their swords and their new god. He did not bow. He is Yours. He was always Yours.
I cannot build a dakhma for him here. There is no Tower of Silence left standing in all of Persia. There are no birds of the dead to carry his flesh to the sky. The temple is broken. The walls are broken. I have only my voice and the prayers You taught the prophet Zarathustra at the beginning of all things. They will have to be enough.
I recite the Ahunvar over him. I speak the words that guard the soul on its three-day journey to the Chinvat Bridge. I ask that Sraosha walk beside him through the crossing. He was true. You know he was true.
They call us fire-worshippers, Lord. As if we do not know what the flame is. As if You did not teach us. The flame is the presence of Asha in this world — truth made visible. And it is guttering in the dark. The fire that has burned in this temple since Persia was young is dying because there is no fuel left and no one left to tend it. If it goes out, the connection goes with it.
His hand is warm.
It should not be warm. I washed the body. I know what the dead do. The heat leaves. But the fingers are warm and they are closing around my wrist.
Ahura Mazda. If this is You. If Asha moves through him still. If You have seen his devotion and You are returning breath so that he may defend this temple one final time—
No.
I know what this is. I was trained for this. Every prayer I speak over the dead exists because of this. The Vendidad teaches that the Nasu descends upon the newly dead — the druj of contamination, the lie that wears the body when the soul has gone. My prayers were the wall against it.
It was not enough.
His eyes open. They are not his eyes. Something old looks through them, old as Angra Mainyu. The mouth is moving. The mouth is smiling. He never smiled. Not in prayer. Not in battle. Not when we were boys together at the fire, when he would feed the flame so carefully with both hands as if it were a living thing he was afraid to hurt.
This is the Nasu. This is the Druj. It has taken the body I was consecrating and it wears him in front of me and it wants me to see my brother in the thing that moves his jaw.
I see my brother.
Ahura Mazda, hear me. The Vendidad forbids the destruction of the dead. The body is sacred in its passage. To break it is to break the crossing. I know this law. I know it because I wrote it on copper sheets with my own hands in the years before the war.
But the Vendidad also teaches that no vessel of the Druj may stand. That the lie must be broken wherever it is found. That Asha demands it. You made these laws. Both of them. You put this gurz in my hand and You taught me what it is for.
Forgive me, brother.
…
There. Again. Again.
Asha. Asha. Asha.
…
Done.
Blood from the lie. Blood from the truth. I cannot tell them apart.
Nothing beneath me that can be worn. Nothing that can smile. The prayers I was speaking cannot be completed. The crossing I was guarding is shattered. What I was giving to You I have unmade with my own hands.
The fire is almost out.
Ahura Mazda.
Where were You?
…
…
Ahura Mazda, Lord of Wisdom, keeper of Asha, I commend to You this servant of the—
The fire endures.